If 'Office Space' Was a Dystopia, What Are We Living in Now?

Whose nightmare?

I rewatched Mike Judge’s Office Space last night. It’s an often-repeated observation which I won’t bother belaboring here, but there’s something almost quaint about the sincerity with which it depicts Peter’s life as a meaningless spiritual wasteland. Many gig and service workers of today would envy his roommate-less one-bedroom apartment, his salaried income, and the work environment in which not one but multiple no-call no-shows don’t result in instant termination. Many full-time employees who suffered a decade of the ‘open’ office design trend would envy his cubicle and moderate amount of privacy.

Of course, his boss sucks, his coworkers (mostly) suck, his girlfriend doesn’t respect him, and on and on. He’s spiritually and intellectually unsatisfied. But looking back, it’s hard take Peter’s malaise as seriously as the movie wants us to take it. As with many other films that came out in a post-USSR but pre-9/11 United States, the concerns of the film are fundamentally spiritual. History is over, we won, but we’re still not happy. One could see Office Space and The Matrix—both of which came out within less than 2 months of each other—as companion pieces, offering two fundamentally similar interpretations of the existential anxiety at the core of the zeitgeist: the world is fake and the only way to find authenticity is to unplug yourself, whether metaphorically or literally.

What was happening in 1999?

The context in which the movie was released illustrates what I mean. 1999 saw the lowest rate of unemployment since the late 1960s as the U.S. enjoyed its longest boom cycle until the current one. Of course astute readers might counter that we are in fact at the height of the longest boom cycle in history right now and things still don’t feel good. A key factor in what made 1999 much better than now is the fact that real median income growth was multiple times higher than it is now. Between 1998 and 1999, real median household income rose by 2.7 percent, the fifth consecutive year of growth Contrast that with 2022, where even with a record high of 65.6% of working women working full-time year-round, real median household income fell 2.3 percent from the year prior. Even with more members of the household working than ever before, the average household’s income is not even keeping pace with inflation.

By 1999, growing inequality and wage stagnation were already apparent, but their magnitudes were fractions of their present size. In retrospect, the 90s was clearly a time of growth that benefited most Americans. If so many cultural products of the mid to late 90s were sounding the alarm about the growing gulf between labor and capital, we’ve long since grown numb to the howling of the chasm that has grown in its place.

People still find the parts about passive-aggressive managers, malfunctioning printers, and general drudgery highly relatable, but it’s far harder to see the existential risk posed by Peter’s job and lifestyle now in 2024 than it was 25 years ago. We could write it off as classic Gen X apathy, but it should be clear that there is more to the story than that.

Why isn’t Peter happy?

I want to turn for a moment to the end of the film to offer an alternative reading of Peter’s psychic exhaustion. After Initech is burned down by Milton, erasing all evidence of the main trio’s crimes, Peter takes up construction and demolition work with his neighbor, Lawrence. Michael and Samir show up to catch up and offer him a job at their new software company with a name remarkably similar to the last one. Peter politely rejects their offer, making it clear that he’s happy where he is. He goes back to work with Lawrence, observing how lucky they are to work outside with their hands. The movie ends, leaving Peter forever suspended in the amber of his satisfaction with manual labor.

As an adult now the same age as Ron Livingston at the time of the film’s production, I can only see a certain irony in this ending. Peter assumes that by reducing his most apparent feelings of alienation (that is, by replacing abstract numbers on a computer screen with sweat and a shovel), he’s found a way to make his life meaningful.

This ending has rightfully been identified as cheap. As Tracy Moore writes in the now defunct Mel Magazine,

Basically, Peter goes from working for Lumbergh to building some other Lumbergh’s house. If a construction job is the path of least resistance compared to the rat race, we’re still fucked.

I think this reading of the movie is true to the film’s own logic, but I think there may be a better—and more contemporary—way to view Peter’s vocationally-challenged psyche.

Lifestylism

Lifestylism is a term associated with Murray Bookchin’s 1995 essay Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. It identifies the tendency for certain kinds of anarchists to conflate lifestyle choices—which in a market economy ultimately boil down to consumer choices—with political action. The crustpunk who never showers, lives in a squat, and believes those two things constitute politics would be a lifestyle anarchist by Bookchin’s definition. While it’s hard to take anyone over the age of 22 who calls themselves an anarchist seriously, the term is powerful because of how neatly it identifies the conflation of consumer choice and political action in the minds of most people.

In the special feature An ‘Office Space’ Retrospective with Mike Judge (YouTube link), Ron Livingston says about his character Peter:

Here’s a guy that’s constantly searching for answers. Every time he finds one, he’s sure that he’s found the key to nirvana, and he throws himself into it wholeheartedly. And then when it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t deter him from throwing himself into the next one. Where all of the sudden being a construction worker is gonna be, you know—

It’s clear that Livingston doesn’t see Peter’s final career choice as final either, and that at some point reality of “building some other Lumbergh’s house” will come around to haunt him just like his last job. Instead, we get a glimpse of Peter’s problem in a different light.

You are what you eat

The movie isn’t so much about the alienation of white-color work and the authenticity of manual labor, and it’s not about the deep-seated apathy of Gen X in the face of their parents’ insistence that work makes them free. It’s about the mirage of lifestyle as an expression of will. Lifestyle marketing has been one of the most prominent forms of advertisement for over a decade. I’m going to avoid pointing out any of the numerous examples from recent years where corporations insert themselves into popular political issues. Choices about your clothes, food, beer choice, love life, and transportation are all potential synecdoches for larger political orientations, which are themselves often treated essentially like an outfit that can bought off the shelf and worn.

For your work and hobbies, things which help make life meaningful for many, there are subreddits and forums dedicated to optimizing and discussing the purchase of everything from golf clubs to ergonomic split mechanical keyboards. If you aren’t doing things in the most optimal way with the most optimal equipment, why even do them at all?

Peter has determined that if he can simply find the correct way to live, he will be happy. He is dissatisfied with the world around him, but in a bizarre subject-object distinction mix-up, he looks to change himself as a way to change his world. The reason this probably won’t alleviate his psychic tension in the long term is the same reason that buying all the right products and having all the right opinions for your in-group probably won’t alleviate yours.

The force of this way of thinking is far greater than any generational peculiarity or economic boom-bust iteration, and it’s beyond my grasp to try to chart it here. If I had to spitball a guess, it probably has a lot to do with the total replacement of culture and subculture by mass and consumer culture, which happened first and most forcefully in America, over the last 100 years. With these changes, mass culture has become ever more profoundly visual, with its current peak being the absolute dominance of images and short-form video.

Whatever the explanation may be, I think this reading of Peter’s problem is a lot more relatable than the one where he just wanted to work with his hands the whole time. Office Space is still just as relatable as it was 25 years ago, just maybe not in the way we thought.