Hiding Behind Alf: Masks, Work, and the Death of the Real Self

You are not your real self at work—you’re a character version of yourself with all the edges sanded down.

Last week, my niece and her boyfriend came to Chicago. Her boyfriend had only seen me at family gatherings and wondered aloud to her what I might be like in a corporate setting. If I was more domesticated at work than at home. My niece laughed. “He’s exactly like he is at home.”

This is only funny is contrast to how most of us behave at work, the masks we put on, the code-switching we feel is required in order to keep getting paid.

Let me tell you a story. Not the tidy kind with a hero’s journey and a life lesson tied up in a corporate-approved TED Talk. No, I mean the kind of story that happens on a Tuesday morning, in a fluorescent-lit office, where Jeff from accounting just asked you—again—how your weekend was, and you gave him the same line you always do: “Good! Relaxing! Watched some Netflix.” Jeff nods. You both smile. And then you go back to pretending to work while slowly disassociating from your real personality.

This is the real American sitcom—a workplace full of characters playing themselves badly.

Why do we do it? Why do we slip into this neutered, buttoned-down version of ourselves the moment we badge into the office? What is it about the workplace that turns wild, complex, deeply flawed, wildly interesting human beings into glorified versions of Alex P. Keaton—all ambition, no soul?

Let’s talk about masks. Let’s talk about identity. I’m a Gen X dude who learned much about life from the boob tube. If I learned anything from growing up in the ‘80s, it’s that life lessons are best delivered by puppets, talking cars, or a guy in a Hawaiian shirt with a mustache.

In Knight Rider, David Hasselhoff is a man with a talking car. The car, KITT, is smarter, smoother, and far more socially capable than he is. At work, we are all trying to be KITT. Cool, collected, monotone. We suppress the screaming David Hasselhoff inside—the one who wants to yell, drink beer at lunch, and say what he really thinks about quarterly metrics.

We do this because somewhere along the way, we were told that our value is in how efficient, reliable, and unoffensive we are. So we become our own machines.

You want to know why we hide our personalities? Because being a human at work is a liability. Feelings get you flagged by HR. Opinions get you side-eyed in meetings. Passion makes you “difficult.” Better to play the car than risk being the man.

And the tragedy is, we start believing the lie. We forget we’re not the damn car—we’re just driving it.