For a brief moment back in 2016, the internet’s obsession was the physical and mental well-being of an English YouTuber named Marina Joyce. Joyce was girlish and princesslike, with long blond ringlets and huge blue eyes, who uploaded innocent videos where she tried on pastel-colored clothes, opened gifts sent to her by different brands, or ate sweets she thought were exotic because they came from Asia. And because the internet’s blurring of boundaries often means you can’t discern whether you are viewing erotic content or family content (or, perhaps, both at the same time), a widely disparate community followed her—from little girls who wanted to wear the same pink dresses to bald men in their fifties who probably masturbated to videos of her eating ice cream.
But after a while, her followers began detecting subtle changes in her behavior. In one of her videos, Marina Joyce was at a party, smiling at the camera and showing off her outfit, but something in the way she walked around (languid and listless) or the way she responded to questions (taking about three seconds too long to grasp them) set off all the alarms. This gave rise to a conspiracy theory, according to which Joyce had been kidnapped by her boyfriend or by a cult (it was unclear which) and was being abused and forced to upload videos against her will.
The evidence shown by these internet detectives consisted of short video clips where, if you paid attention, you could hear a subtle and whispered “help me” that, apparently, she would have added in the editing. There were also videos of Joyce seemingly looking at the back of the room, somewhere behind her camera, in order to get the approval of her captor while she answered questions from her followers. Fans also showed screenshots where her limbs appeared to have bruises, scratches, or small wounds. This was irrefutable evidence. Marina Joyce continued to act friendly and cheerful, but behind the smiles, she often looked sleepy, dazed, or drugged. Some screenshots, which ended up on forums or posted to Twitter accounts dedicated exclusively to the exciting case, showed subliminal messages she was supposedly using to draw people’s attention. These messages were hidden among the beautiful white lacquered shelves covered in brand gifts that were always in the background of her videos. Her followers, and those who had followed the trending hashtag #SaveMarinaJoyce, ended up calling the Metropolitan Police to rescue her. The Met went to her house but found nothing suspicious and left.
I’m thinking about Marina Joyce in the cold meeting room I’ve reserved for a call with the accounts team to talk about the Christmas campaign. I’m also thinking that, if the police were alerted by a loved one and arrived here right now, they wouldn’t find anything suspicious either—just a woman in an office, like Marina was just a woman in a room. Only my true fans would notice unsettling changes in my behavior meeting after meeting, day after day, video after video. They would discuss it online in forums and post long explanatory threads on Twitter. Perhaps I’d even be a trending topic for a few hours. The same woman who used to have fun behind her camera now seems sleepy, dazed, and even drugged.
And none of their assumptions would be wrong. It’s the end of August, and I only come into the office to lower my air-conditioning bill. It’s Monday again and I haven’t made progress on any Christmas projects, but I know I’ve logged enough videocall time to convince the accounts team I’ve got several things underway. I set my laptop, a cup of water, and a notebook on a large table that I’ve strategically positioned so natural light illuminates my face. If I’ve learned anything from YouTubers, it’s how to direct the camera in a meeting. I like to reserve this room because it has a neutral background. After this meeting, I could record my reaction to videos of cats gagging when they smell broccoli or a tutorial on the perfect makeup for both a job interview and a first date. Before logging in, I try to imagine how I would greet my followers, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t make me sound like an idiot.
The accounts team logs in right on time, and the stupid dance of platitudes that precedes every meeting at every company around the world begins. “How are you girls?” “Are you in Madrid or . . . ?” “Working from the beach isn’t really working.” “Super busy, can’t complain.” “Life is good.” “Tons of work, which is great.” “You can already see my tan.” “I’m available for you guys 24/7.” “Are your kids there? Tell them I say hi, they’re so cute!” I smile, I participate, I make up stuff. I talk about summer plans I don’t have with people who don’t exist. A few days in Marbella at my friend Pitu’s house. A quick trip to San Sebastián with my man. Although I don’t know if it’s too early to call him “my man,” I declare mysteriously. Yes, I tell them, he’s Basque, I’ve always liked guys who could be lumberjacks. And they all laugh. Simple jokes, clichés served up as a refreshing alcohol-free aperitif to prolong meetings without really getting to work.
Someone takes the lead—“OK, girls, let’s get started”—and the meeting officially begins. They talk about deadlines, brainstorming, giving this or that a try, WOW factor, making a story go viral, and some even mention the word “disruption.” They talk about what the client is expecting from us this year—always “a lot” but never anything specific—and how this Christmas campaign is more important than ever. In each of the four years I’ve been at this office, I’ve been told that this Christmas campaign is more important than ever. I nod with my brow furrowed and say, “Can you repeat that, Monica?” while I doodle a penis with little arms in my Moleskine. “Do we have any more briefings on the lipstick?” I ask, then let them fight among themselves for ten more minutes over who will call the client to request information I don’t really need.
We’ve been clowning around for forty minutes. Work is just a role you play and I’ve mastered it perfectly. I know the jokes that always break the ice. I know what to ask to seem attentive and interested. And I know what to say to make the time flow faster, without actually doing anything, until I can go home at six.
While they talk to each other, I open Twitter and watch a video of a pet raccoon eating a birthday cake. The cake has three candles, but the raccoon seems afraid of the flame, so a human helps blow them out for him; then the raccoon starts eating the cake with his tiny hands. I retweet it. I google if it’s possible to have a raccoon in an apartment in Madrid. Then I google how long raccoons live. When I read that a wild raccoon can live between two and three years, I feel unexpectedly disappointed.
“When do you think you could show us something, Marisa?” asks one of them.
I close the raccoon tab and look at the meeting again. Specifically, I look at myself in the little square on the right side of the screen and confirm that, indeed, this light would be great for recording a video on my beauty routine.
“In four weeks,” I say.
“Four weeks? In three weeks it’ll be late September already, and the client wants to see something now so they can close their budgets,” replies another.
I feel like answering that I couldn’t care less, as would any human being lucky enough to live off their ancestors’ earnings; instead, I turn the pages of my notebook with great ceremony. I mumble, “Let me check a few things.” I draw another tiny penis. “Give me two weeks,” I finally say, and everyone is happy. The trick is to always offer a decoy date and then give them the one you had prepared in advance, like someone running a shell game or the way vendors at the Rastro flea market make you think you’re getting a bargain.
We say goodbye with smiles and many thanks and a few calls of “Keep up the great work!” I log out of Zoom. My throat is so dry I can barely swallow. When I see my lonely reflection on the screen, I think again of Marina Joyce. If someone had turned up the volume during our call, they too would’ve heard a little voice saying “help me” and would’ve called the police.
I’m thirty-two, and I’ve been working in advertising for eight years, the last four at this agency. I started out as an intern, then they hired me as a copywriter, and now I’m in a middle management position with employees working under me and an absurd English diploma that allows me to show off on LinkedIn and make small talk on Tinder. The truth is I don’t know how to do anything and I don’t know how I got here. I suppose it was by perfecting the office game until everybody believed I was a great professional.
My job is to be nice and sell snake oil. I read the brief for a shitty product that’s just like every other shitty product—a red lipstick; a perfume with floral notes; a vacuum cleaner with a tiny, triangular add-on that you can use on the corners of your house. Then I think about the nonsense that worries ordinary people, no matter how much they think they’re the smartest sheep in the flock—being ugly, smelling bad at the end of the day, having a dirty house. The market generates needs, and it’s my job to translate them into the language of ordinary mortals. I’m selling not red lipstick, but the idea of making an impact, of being beautiful, of leaving a mark on the collar of a handsome man’s shirt. I’m not selling a perfume, but the idea of being remembered for your smell, of leaving an impression, of not being a gray, boring person who spends two hours of their life every day getting to and from work. I sell the possibility that today, yes, today, with the help of that floral perfume, something extraordinary will happen to you. I’m not selling the umpteenth vacuum cleaner that no one needs; I’m selling the idea of having a nice, clean house, of being able to take a photo of that cute little corner you decorated Pinterest-style, uploading it on Instagram, and getting a lot of likes. Then I pitch a creative idea that’s like all the other creative ideas, the ones that came before and the ones that will come afterward. The lipstick effect. The smell of memories. Your dream house. They buy my idea, they pay us, I get congratulated, and we start all over again.
I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years, and I know it doesn’t help anyone. I know the world would be a better place if jobs like mine didn’t exist. I know I take advantage of people’s insecurities and their desire to thrive in a society where no one can improve. And I know this because even I, after an eight-hour day full of elevator conversations that drive me to low-stakes suicidal ideation (like stapling my hand to get out of a meeting that makes me understand the true meaning of the word “infinite,” or pouring boiling water from the office kettle onto myself so I can spend five to ten days at home with my feet up), still believe that the solution to all my problems will be a floral Zara dress made in Bangladesh that has followed me on every website I’ve visited today, and that, in all certainty, will be worn by millions of women on the street next season. I still believe that dress will turn me into a different woman, a happy, carefree, springtime version of myself. I know that when you buy something, what you’re paying for is the promise of a better life. I know I’m also taking advantage of and accepting money from mediocre clients who think the greatest act of creativity is adding one more row to an Excel spreadsheet.
My work is measured by something as vague as its “impact.” “Impact” can mean making something go viral. Or creating a catchy tune. Or winning one of those prestigious advertising awards that only matter to advertisers and the client who spent a fortune on some ad with a model who just really wants a hamburger and a hug. OK, if you’re in every metro station in the city, it might be more likely that people will ask for your product at the perfume counters in the Corte Inglés department stores, but I don’t think “The scent of memories” has a greater impact on their purchasing decisions than “A scent to remember.” I’m good at selling ideas to clients. I make them believe they’re unique, their product is wonderful, and this campaign will make a difference. I suck up to them, laugh at their jokes, flirt with them. My clients work for brands that don’t want to take risks because they don’t have to. When they take a stance on something, it’s because everyone else already has, and therefore they feel it’s safe to do so. Feminism, sustainability, inclusion, diversity . . . bullshit. Some brand hawking anti-cellulite and anti-aging creams wants to get away from the negativity associated with its product and empower women. So the campaign’s approach will no longer be to make women think they’re old or fat and they need a cream, but that they deserve that cream no matter how they look.
I turn the air-conditioning on full blast in the meeting room and write an email to the advertising students I’ll have that fall in the master’s program at a private university that hired me thanks to the English diploma I listed on LinkedIn.
Dear future students:
In order to establish some organizational parameters for the course we’ll begin in September, I would like to give you an experimental assignment intended to gauge the skills of the class and establish our teamwork methodology.
The assignment is as follows: Think about how you would organize a large cosmetics company’s Christmas campaign. I want you to think about both strategy (campaign launch times, deadlines, timing, calendar approach, etc.) and specific creative ideas for four types of products: perfume, lipstick, skin care product for 40+ women, and an eye shadow kit. The deadline for this exercise is three days from now.
Thank you all.
I walk to the water tank, fill up one of the tiny cups, and drink as I look out on the Gran Vía. I imagine the students happily believing this “assignment” will give them an opportunity to make an impression. They are fresh out of college and full of enthusiasm and joie de vivre. Their parents have the money to pay for a master’s degree that will get them an unpaid internship at an agency where they’ll end up staying. They have the money to buy their children employment, to give them access to prospective jobs others can’t reach. In less than a week, they will send me their ideas; I’ll choose the best ones and bring them to my team so they can develop them and put together a presentation. In the years I’ve been in advertising, I have also mastered the art of working as little as possible. Offices are like hunting—the more you move, the less chance you have of being shot.
I fill up another little cup before leaving the meeting room. My office is full of plastic cups. I often throw them in the bin at night and then take the bag out myself, to make sure no one thinks I hate dolphins. There are so many little cups that I could build a fort with them. I vaguely remember that not long ago, perhaps last Christmas, the company gave us a reusable water bottle out of their “commitment to sustainability.” Right now, it’s 62 degrees inside the office, while the street thermometer reads 100.
The office is almost empty in August. With those on vacation and those working remotely from nicer places, sometimes I feel like the only person left in Madrid. But I like that feeling. I enjoy August in the city because there’s no one outside.
I stop at Natalia’s desk before entering my office. Natalia—perfect blond hair in a long bob, polka-dot Zara dress, marked-up notepad, pens and highlighters in all the colors of the rainbow. Efficient, neat, always available as a means of compensating for her (completely justified) fear of not being a brilliant enough copywriter. One hundred percent company person. Natalia always wants to impress and be liked by me, and every time I stand in front of her, she looks up at me with her little eyes full of light and hope. She is always waiting for her big break, and I’m always willing to give it to her. She sends me emails at eight in the evening that I almost never respond to. She is here when I arrive in the morning and stays “a little bit longer” after I leave.
“Do you have five minutes?” I ask, knowing she’s going to say yes. Natalia would give me the rest of her life if I asked her to.
“Of course.”
“I need a few things for the Christmas campaign. Some market insights—how consumers will behave this Christmas, who has the most purchasing power, what products will generate the most interest.” I’m already bored by what I’m saying.
Natalia writes everything down. I know she’ll tell her friends how much she’s learning and how much she loves her job. She’s one of those people who will never consider whether spending countless hours a day at work is a waste of time and energy. She will continue enjoying her days at the office, the company culture, the after-work drinks on Thursdays and the beers on Fridays. She will take to heart all those “Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work again” slogans. Her best friend will end up being Sonsoles from HR. She will get married, have children, buy a small apartment in a residential development on the outskirts, perhaps close to the airport, with a swimming pool. She will get together on weekends with friends who will also have children and live in residential developments with swimming pools, perhaps even in the same one, and she will feel like the special one at every dinner because she has a creative job. I know she will be immensely happy with that kind of life, and that gives me mixed feelings—pity, a pang of envy, and an almost uncontrollable desire to slap her.
“OK,” she says as she writes.
“I also need you to start putting together the presentation. When is everybody back from vacation?”
“Luis and Claudio will be back next week, Marta in two weeks.”
“Well, can you do it all?”
“I think so.”
“Thank you, Natalia. That way I can focus on other stuff,” I say vaguely, and turn on my heel toward my office.
My office is a glass cubicle with views of the entire floor. It looks like every advertising manager’s office—a wooden table with a Day-Glo-painted Greek sculpture on it, a Nordic-style chair, two plants in a corner (a bird-of-paradise and a monstera), and an imitation fifties locker. Now it’s fashionable for middle managers and bosses not to have their own office; for them to be outside, with the rabble, as if we’re all equal, although some are on minimum wage while others are making up to 100,000 euros a year. Open spaces, huge rooms, and an absolute lack of privacy are all the rage. I rejected the restructuring of my floor by voting against it in an email survey, claiming that having an enclosed private space helped the creative process, “as Virginia Woolf already pointed out in A Room of One’s Own,” subtly introducing the idea that being out in the open was somehow misogynistic, when the truth was that a separate office gave me the privacy to watch my YouTube videos.
I just love YouTube. I love every corner of it. I can start watching videos of dogs that say words when they bark and end up watching a video about how George Soros finances entire global media conglomerates. I love conspiracy theories, beefs between YouTubers, cultural wars. I love philosophical or sociological explanations of the world. I love BookTubers. I love twenty-minute-long compilations of children falling, people who sing badly in singing competitions, or women who try to follow makeup tutorials but somehow end up without eyebrows. I love YouTubers who explain why we must free Britney Spears from the clutches of her father. Or funny montages where the latest stupid thing a politician said is played against techno music. I love tutorials. I can spend hours watching videos about how to apply crazy makeup that I will never try myself, or recipes I’ll never cook, or ways to organize small spaces in the house I’ll never own, or pelvic floor exercises you can do while working, even though I’ll never do them while I work. I explore the catacombs of YouTube, searching for videos of people smashing their faces into bread, or eating live octopuses in Japan and choking on them, or claiming they found Hitler in Fuerteventura. But, without a doubt, my favorite videos, the ones that transport me, are the ones about how things are made. And I don’t mean practical things like how to make a table or a chair, but rather how candy is made, how a potato chip factory works, how screws are made, or how pieces of marble are cut into compact blocks. YouTube is my window into a world I wish I could never leave.
I log into my account, and YouTube shows a series of videos that might interest me. I’m interested in all of them. Just as I’m about to click on one that will send me right into the modern world’s rabbit hole, my office phone rings. I pick it up while still staring at the screen. Work wants to intrude on my window into the world. One of the girls in charge of the client’s account forgot to tell me that the client also wanted ideas for an eyelash curler, although it’s not the most important campaign item. “Think PARTY,” she tells me. I say I’ll work on it, but that I need more information about the product, as if I had spent my entire life underground, living in the sewers. I hang up.
I play a video of a failed proposal: An American guy wants to ask his girlfriend to marry him, but he’s looking to do something special. The guy, whose girlfriend apparently “loves musicals,” decides to orchestrate a flash mob in a mall on a random afternoon. Come D-Day, while he and his girl are walking around looking for something uninspiring, the boyfriend, the customers, and some of the workers begin to dance in the concourse around a mock-Renaissance-style fountain. The song is that horror titled “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams. The woman, who can’t understand what’s happening, is stunned when he kneels on the ground and takes a ring out of his pocket. She rejects him in front of the fountain and a hundred people. The guy ends up crying and explains that he couldn’t imagine she would turn him down in front of a crowd, but that he’s decided to upload the video anyway in case he can “help other people.” Protected by the internet’s anonymity, I go to the comments section and write from one of my three accounts: “Hello? Is this 911? Please send this man a boo-hoombulance.” I stay a few minutes to watch the likes increase and emojis of faces crying with laughter appear under my comment. The number quickly reaches twelve. I feel the slight rush I imagine addicts feel after a good fix.
I look away with a victorious smile that disappears as soon as I see my reflection in the windowpane. I’m wondering if I should spend the rest of the morning leaving rabid comments on YouTube videos, or if maybe I should do something with my life. I check my calendar and realize I don’t have any more meetings today. Blessed August. It’s too nice outside to spend the entire day watching YouTube. I tell Natalia I’m going to a meeting with some clients, and if she needs me she should send an email and only call if it’s an emergency. But I know she won’t call me for the rest of the day because she’s terrified of bothering me with something stupid, and she’s terrified of bothering me with something stupid because, every time she writes to me outside of working hours, I make an effort to respond in a laconic and curt way, so little by little I have been training her as if she were a Pavlovian dog that I only allow to drool on my shoes when we’re in this glass cage we call “office.”
I go out and take a taxi to the Prado Museum.
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From Discontent by Beatriz Serrano. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Beatriz Serrano. English translation copyright © 2025 by Mara Faye Lethem.
