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

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.

Remember Family Ties? Michael J. Fox played Alex Keaton, a Republican wunderkind in a house full of aging hippies. He wore ties to high school, loved Reagan, and had a calculator for a heart. That’s us. That’s the office.

We learn early that to survive in the capitalist sitcom, we need to be the golden child. No dirty jokes. No controversial opinions. No visible existential dread. You wear khakis, you ask about the weather, you pretend to give a shit about the annual “All-Hands” meeting even though it’s just the same six people talking in slightly more expensive shirts.

We play the role of the reliable, competent employee because that’s what gets you through the day. The workplace doesn’t want your messy inner world. It wants your LinkedIn profile. It wants Alex Keaton, not the actual person who binge-watches Love is Blind while crying into a microwave burrito at 2:00am.

Every episode of The A-Team was the same. The crew rolls into town, pretends to be someone else (mechanics, bartenders, snake charmers, whatever), fixes a problem, blows something up, and vanishes without a trace. No one gets too close. No one sees who they really are.

This is your office persona.

You are not your real self at work—you’re a character version of yourself with all the edges sanded down. You’re the competent version. The agreeable version. The one who makes just enough jokes to seem “fun,” but never enough to offend.

You hide because you know that being real is dangerous. You’ve seen what happens to the guy who says what he actually thinks in a Slack thread. He becomes that guy. Suddenly his ideas are “confrontational” and his energy is “disruptive.” HR starts using words like “tone.”

So you pretend. Like the A-Team. You show up, solve problems, and disappear. You never let them see the real you.

The workplace wants you to believe that it can be Cheers. That it can be the place “where everybody knows your name.” But let’s be honest. The only reason Cheers worked is because they were all drunk. Constantly. You think Norm would’ve been that loveable if he was stone sober and trying to hit a deadline for Q3 reporting? Hell no.

We hide our personalities because the workplace doesn’t want you—it wants a curated version that fits the brand. You’re not a person. You’re an “employee experience.”

And even if your company says they want authenticity, what they really want is the right kind of authenticity. The kind they can use in a promotional video. “Look how diverse we are! We let Kyle wear a polo shirt!”

What they don’t want is real realness. Real like “I don’t believe in the mission statement.” Real like “I think our CEO is a sociopath in a Patagonia vest.” Real like “I’m clinically depressed and this job is killing my soul.”

That kind of realness? Doesn’t look good in the annual shareholder report.

ALF was a wisecracking alien who crash-landed into a suburban family and spent most of his time hiding from the government and trying to eat the cat. He was smart, weird, hilarious, and absolutely not allowed to be seen by the neighbors.

That’s your inner self at work.

We’ve all got an ALF inside us. The sarcastic, slightly inappropriate, deeply strange version of ourselves that says what we’re actually thinking. But we keep him locked in the attic, away from the team meetings and corporate picnics.

Because if people at work really saw your ALF, they’d freak out. You’d be labeled unprofessional. Unstable. Uncooperative. All the “un” words that get you demoted, side-lined, or gently escorted out of the building with a severance check and a “Good luck on your journey” email.

So ALF stays hidden. He only comes out after hours, at the bar, or when you rage-text your friend during a soul-deadening Zoom call.

Here’s the ugly truth: the fact that we all hide ourselves at work isn’t just a personal problem. It’s a societal rot.

We live in a culture that treats vulnerability as weakness, truth as liability, and authenticity as a branding tool. Your mask at work is a reflection of a system that values conformity over character, optics over honesty.

This is a world where corporate mission statements talk about “human connection” while making you clock in with facial recognition software. A world where your boss sends you emails about mental health awareness while ignoring your PTO requests.

The mask we wear at work? It’s not just about survival. It’s about shame. We’ve been taught to be ashamed of who we really are. Too loud. Too quiet. Too intense. Too awkward. Too emotional. Too opinionated.

So we shrink. We dim. We vanish.

And society claps its hands and calls it “professionalism.”

Taking Off the Mask (But Maybe Just a Bit)

I’m not saying you should show up to your next board meeting in a Hawaiian shirt yelling “Book ‘em, Danno!” (wrong decade, but still). But maybe—maybe—there’s room to be a little more real.

Say what you think. Once in a while. In the right room.

Admit when you’re struggling. Laugh too loud. Push back on the nonsense. Let your ALF out of the attic, even if just for a second.

Not because it’s safe. But because the alternative is a slow, silent erosion of your soul.

You don’t owe your job your identity. You don’t owe the company your personality. And you sure as hell don’t owe Jeff from accounting a fake smile when he asks about your weekend for the fiftieth time.

You owe yourself the dignity of being human. Flawed, funny, weird, complex, human.

At the end of the day, your life is not The Facts of Life, Family Ties, or Hill Street Blues. It’s more like Cop Rock or Twin Peaks. Your life is your own damn show, and you should get to write the script. Maybe not the whole script—this is still capitalism, and you still need dental insurance—but at least a few lines.

So take off the mask, even if it’s just a crack. Let your coworkers see that you’re not KITT, not ALF, not even Alex Keaton. You’re just you.

And that should be enough.

Me? After decades of New Kid energy that has been my training ground, I realized the masks are stifling. The people who hire me tend to be looking for that guy who disrupts the status quo and I’m happy to play along because it provides me the chance to refuse to play a part except for the one I write myself. My current GM tends to comically mutter each week at some point, “You’re gonna get me fired…” Unlikely but I definitely push the edges. I get to be Mork, Reverend Jim, and Latka. Way more fun, gang.

Roll credits.