It is credited to academic Arlie Russell Hochschild who coined the term “emotional labour” in a 1983 book The Managed Heart^[1] to, as I understand it, describe the work done by people to sell an emotional state to a customer as part of their job.

The easy example of this is a front line “cast member” at Disneyland who no matter their mood needs to come to work each day with a smile on their face and convey the corporate face of joy and wonder, a performance demanded by each and every ticket holding asshole who walks through the turnstiles. 

Emotional labour is a core of facet of generic customer service, an act put on by a person that is meant to extend the brand of the business that employs them as part of the experience for paying customers. 

And it is so expected of every front line worker in 2026 that to see it falter is the stuff of memes and viral internet content. 

We have been training ourselves by habit and corporate re-enforcement to expect a performance along with each and every transaction, so much so that if one walks into a restaurant or a cafe, pushes a cart through a grocery store, or pulls up to have a vehicle service we expect that part of the transaction will include a human pretending to be happy to see us, happy to help us, and happy to accept our bull-headed ignorance with a smile and good humour.

This is emotional labour, and like all terrible inhuman inventions pushed by technology, corporations, and algorithms it is evolving and turning into darker and more entrenched expectations: in fact, I would argue that we’ve baked this expectation so thoroughly into the modern algorithms that prop up the digital social experience most of us barely realize that we have, many of us, become emotional labour volunteers.

We dutifully “brand” ourselves for strangers. 

We censor our speech to make it algorithm “friendly.” 

We become online actors, even with the subtleties of performative commenting, reposting, liking, messaging, and engaging with others.

We voluntarily play a part that is friendly not to other people, but as it is expected from the companies that own and shape the internet, and the algorithms they have in place to police it all.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, eh?