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When I was a teenager, I thought Office Space was representative of real life. Yeah, you'd have to show up to a job you hate, but at least you could openly hate it and call out its bullshit brainwashing culture to your friends and coworkers. You could all be united in a "this is fucking stupid, no one actually enjoys this, and all the weird office mannerisms, politics, and minutia are only bought into by the tools who no one likes."
20 years later, that wasn't really true. People seem to buy into the BS, or at least keep plausible deniability about it, such that you never really know. You can't openly call this out to your acquaintances, because you need rely on them for job referrals.
I don't know if this is a real difference between the 90s and 2010s/2020s, or maybe it's just the way it's always been. But it would seem the honesty and rebellious "fuck the man" attitude of the 90s has given way to the "live the hustle" attitude of the 2010s.
Maybe our economic situation being such shit has enforced this, since people don't have the ability to stick it to the man by even pretending they can opt out anymore. Unemployment in the late 90s was around 4%. It's possible that major economic shocks like the 2008 crisis or recent inflation changed how people think about job security.
Maybe also social media caused this, the same way it (in my opinion) caused the major ramp up in politics in the past 15 years. LinkedIn has turned everyone into their own personal brand. In the 90s - or at least in the Office Space/Fight Club version of the 90s - you clocked in and clocked out. Now you're expected to be passionate about quarterly earnings, and if you want to be secure in getting that next job after you're laid off from your current one, you better make sure you have a passionate public image, too. Note also, globalization may have something to do with this as well, since you're competing in a global market now, so you need to be better than more than just the local competition.
I posit that maybe being in a world where everyone seems to believe and live the BS has similar negative effects as social media does for causing people depression due to the highlight reel effect. The plausible deniability of "everyone seems to buy into this crap" makes others pretend to buy in too. This has obvious political parallels as well.
Uh, you can in my experience roll your eyes at the up the chain authorities when they're being unreasonable or making bad choices. I think some people take the office space metaphor too literally, in reality your boss himself can be in the same circle of people rolling their eyes at people up the chain. There is a balance of contempt you should have for the "When I wake up in the morning, I first think of how I can best generate shareholder value" mindset but there is also an understanding you have to have to have that, whatever dumb stuff they want you to do, they are paying you and you need to give like at least a 60% effort. People who get this balance wrong mostly make their coworkers miserable more than any "the man" that they rage against then their coworkers don't really want to share in their laughing at the higher ups circles. Also the 90s era boss hatred bred a generation of "cool bosses who are on your side" that were lame but then found synthesis in a "we're all in this together" attitude that is usually actually pretty decent. Of course this depends a lot on where exactly you end up.
A friend of mine has told me many stories of their medium sized wholesaling product supplier:
It sounds like a hellscape. I've worked in thankless jobs and understand doing the bare minimum, but her stories reminds me of my time in government where I would lose respect for myself if I forced myself to work at the level of some of my coworkers. In places like this you can be a 'rising star' by coasting.
And funnily enough I can imagine almost any of the antagonists in that story thinking they're the Peter Gibbons of the office story.
We recently had a guy come through that we had to terminate. It started off with him pushing back in a way that we actually mostly appreciated. We got flagged because one of our functional accounts that manages our ssrs data source used a non rotating password and we needed to vault it. Turns out there is no firm approved way to integrate ssrs directly with our password vaults. The solution that came down and he was asked to implement was to write a program that would run in the server, pilfer the key and cycle them manually. He rightly pointed out that this violated the whole purpose of a password vault, and we were on his side pushing for an exception. But when the powers that be declined to give us that exception he couldn't just shrug with us and do what needed to be done. He started getting into arguments with higher ups and in general bad mouthing our department. I don't know the exact thing that pushed it over the line but I heard actual threats might have been involved and eventually his credentials were apprupted deactivated.
He too probably identified with Peter Gibbons and thought those of us who just went along were hapless automatons because we were willing to degrade ourselves by implementing bad practices to get off a corporate naughty list.
In real life your office is full of real people living real lives. They're not one dimensional characters from a 90s movie about atomization. Some of them probably do suck to work with, some even in the ways lampooned in office space or the office. If you get too caught up in role playing Peter Gibbons you probably can succeed but it's not likely to make you any happier than he was in the movie.
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