Facebook role play groups offer a mundane escape from the pandemic

As social distancing stretches on, isolated people are turning to humorous Facebook roleplay groups to pretend they're still at work. 

The pandemic has devastated the American economy; as of Thursday, a staggering 38.6 million Americans filed for unemployment in just nine weeks. Essential workers are putting their lives on the line to keep society running, and many nonessential workers who did keep their jobs are working from home. With stay-at-home orders for some states are being extended well into the summer, everyone is struggling to adjust to the new reality. 

But in "A group where we all pretend to work at the same office," thousands of employees are still clocking in. 

"Very simple," the group's description reads. "We all work in the same office and we all hate this fucking dead end job so complain about our fake shitty job as much as you can." 

Members agree to commit to only posting and engaging in the character of the typical office employee. Whether role playing as a disgruntled IT expert, a lost temp, or a bored accountant, the group’s mundanity is a relieving slice of pre-quarantine life in otherwise unprecedented times. It’s normcore at its finest. 

"People miss the normality of it all," group founder Rey Reyes told Mashable in a video call. “We didn’t think that we would miss these small things that bothered us, we didn’t think we were going to miss our supervisors and those little annoyances that our managers tell us and stuff like that. I think people kind of miss complaining about them in some degree.” 

The 29-year-old stand up comic noted that before most states enacted stay-at-home orders, the group’s membership hovered around 100,000. In the two months since, the virtual "office" now has nearly 150,000 employees.

Fellow admin Tara Lee Cavanaugh, a 35-year-old caterer and comedian, credits the spike in group membership to a universal desire for stability, as boring as it might be. Just like most of America’s had the experience of working under “washed out fluorescent lighting,” she said, so do they share this new experience of living through a pandemic. 

"Now, everyone in America can share this experience of going through this unprecedented pandemic," Cavanaugh said in the video call with Reyes. "There’s nothing more frustrating or stress-inducing than uncertainty, you know. I think it’s so much easier to deal with when you log into these groups."

It isn’t the only workplace-inspired roleplay group, either. One, called "A group where we all pretend to work at the same bar,"has roughly 5,000 members. Another called "A group where we all pretend to work in a hospital" is about 2,900 "healthcare workers" strong. There’s even a White House themed one, predictably named "A group where we all pretend to work at the White House," which was recently brigaded by "A group where all pretend to be ants in an ant colony."

Aside from the welcome escape from being barraged with difficult news every day, the groups imagine an alternate universe where the pandemic didn’t interfere with beloved plans. With social distancing measures in place well throughout the summer, nearly every major music festival this season has been either postponed or canceled entirely. In "A group where we all pretend to all work at the same music festival," exasperated security, bartenders, and production assistants collaborate to deal with tripping festival attendees and high-maintenance headliners. In this version of 2020, music festivals are still happening, and employees hate it. 

The group’s founder Ben Lin was inspired by "A group where we all pretend to work at the same office." Disappointed that festivals like Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival had canceled or postponed their summer events, Lin founded "A group where we all pretend to work at the same music festival." He originally intended the group to be a community for fellow festival employees to commiserate about the "worst nightmares" they’ve had while on the job, but it’s since grown to about 29,000 role players. 

"You create this bond with the people you work with because you got through it together," Lin said in a Facebook message. "Or some scenarios are just universal no matter what festival you work, it’s like the nature of the beast... We would all rather be dealing with these situations that we 'hate' than being stuck at home over the pandemic."

The group inspired its own spin-off, "A group where we all pretend to attend the same music festival," where attendees role play helping their high friends, struggle to get cell signal, and try to meet up with each other in the sticky crowds we all took for granted pre-pandemic. 

"The quarantine also happened right at the beginning of festival season," Lin added. "And for people who work festivals that was a part of the year that we look forward to after every winter. I don’t think anyone ever thought something would be able to cancel so many events globally."

Some more tongue-in-cheek groups transport members not just to a different timeline, but to a different time period. In "A group where we all pretend to work at Chernobyl," members pretend to, well, work at Chernobyl just at the start of the doomed nuclear power plant’s meltdown in the '80s. In this group, members don’t seek normality, but escapism entirely. 

Referring to each other as “comrade,” members post and comment as if they were residents of Pripyat, the now-abandoned Ukrainian city near the Chernobyl power plant. They complain about their extra limbs glowing in the dark, post memes of HBO's Chernobyl, and most importantly, praise the Soviet Union. In this corner of Facebook, “working from home” is as foreign as a concept as Western exceptionalism. The group even incited a "Cold War" against members of "A group where we all pretend to work at the White House." The pandemic isn’t a concern when there’s a nuclear reactor on the verge of collapse. 

"Do we must go to work even in the pandemic situation?" one poster asked the group in mid-March. Other members dismissed the coronavirus as "capitalist propaganda" and assured him that "radiation kills" the virus. 

"Drink vodka if feel bad," another member replied, in character.

Brandon Reese, the group’s founder, has always been fascinated by the Chernobyl disaster. The 19-year-old DoorDash driver read several books about the accident and its long-term effects on nearby Pripyat, and was inspired to create the group after seeing a TikTok about the ant colony group in February. Since it started, the group grew to more than 88,000 comrades. 

"People love the vibe that is given off," Reese said in a Facebook message. "This group also gets people researching the event and learning [about] what actually went down that fateful day." 

Admin Neil Stephen Clark finds the dark humor comforting during an especially dark year. In a Facebook message, the 36-year-old restaurant manager explained that since we’re already living through a "major tragedy," morbidly joking about another disaster offsets the panic. Like the COVID-19 pandemic, Clark said, Chernobyl threatened a massive part of the global population. 

"We are all going through the same thing around the world and 'comrade' seems to bring all nationalities together as one unit," Clark continued. "You don’t have to be political to be a comrade, just be accepting of others and help each other to escape what we are going through in real life." 

While engaging with a comedy-driven Facebook group won’t negate the bleak reality we’re facing, it is a breath of fresh air. The camaraderie, for lack of a better word, is a buffer against an otherwise lonely experience. And in a time of ongoing isolation, it’s welcomed — especially if it comes with a touch of dark humor.