Four Million Witnesses to One Perfect Exit

At some point before dawn, Marina Shifrin set up cameras in the empty offices of Next Media Animation and danced her resignation. Not metaphorically—literally danced it, to Kanye West, alone in the fluorescent dark, with text overlays counting out her grievances. The whole thing runs under two minutes. By the time most people heard about it, four million had already watched.

Next Media Animation is a Taiwanese company that turns news stories into animated videos for the internet. It sounds like a strange, interesting job. According to Marina, it was neither. Her boss cared about quantity and view counts, not quality or impact. The creative ceiling was the floor. So she quit—but not before making something better than anything she’d made on the clock.

She wrote afterward that journalism had died for her. When a mass shooting or a natural disaster happened, she could feel the excitement in the office—and the disappointment when the death toll came in lower than expected. She asked a colleague once how he dealt with the constant coverage of misery. His answer: Why do you think so many people drink here?

I’ve had the "I quit" fantasy more times than I can count. Everyone has. You’re on the subway at 7am, already dreading the inbox, and you spend the whole commute scripting the speech you’ll never give. Marina actually gave it—and filmed it, and made it funny, and posted it before anyone could talk her out of it. That’s not impulsiveness. That’s a different kind of discipline.

The video works because she’s clearly a good writer who got hired somewhere that didn’t want good writing. The dancing is the joke, but the joke lands because the frustration underneath it is completely real. Four million people felt that too. She won’t have trouble finding something better.