Serious people

Office anthropology™ Go Premium You know it. The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

I love you, but you are not serious people.
Logan Roy, Succession.

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the great delamination, it seems, quietly, that the epic shortage of “serious people” that characterised its first decade seems — somewhat? — to be fading out.

The appearance of endemic unseriousness may have just been the process of the JC aging, reaching age-parity with the sorts of people who get to run the world, and realising they were — well, jerks, mainly — but it feels a bit more significant than that.

I know, I know: a smartarse who makes up cod Shakespeare and bellyaches about the I.S.D.A. is hardly one to be throwing stones about a lack of gravitas — but nor does he ostend to be serious. There is a role for someone to be the clown: it just isn’t the same as Prime Minister.

You need someone, after all, to blow raspberries and debag those insufficiently serious people that grift their way to the upper echelons of international finance.

See also

• Large language model