What to read if you don’t want to return to the office but have to.
Explain to us again why this is a good idea
I can’t think of a more apt moment—as many of us are being asked to relinquish the ease, family time, extra sleep, and saved money we’ve enjoyed over the last year-plus—to quote this immortal line about not wanting to do pointless shit on the job:
Who would disagree? Our epidemiologic future remains a volatile mystery, and our present is already pretty bad: unvaccinated kids sit in class breathing each other’s breath at lunch time as dunces guzzle de-wormer instead of doing their part to protect them. The only sensical position is that now isn’t the moment. We would prefer not to return to the office because it’s dangerous, and also because it’s needless. We don’t need commuter pollution, or to strain our spit-and-glue public transit systems. We don’t need to chain workers to urban centers, spiking their cost of living solely to emboss a prestige zip code on company letterhead. We don’t need to normalize seeing our kids only as we put them to bed—if we’re lucky, if the train is on time or traffic is light—until the weekend, which we largely spend dreading the week. We don’t need to pretend that some idyll of crackling, invigorating collaboration will result from our presence in the office, especially since a) it rarely did before, and b) in many companies, close collaboration is all but prohibited by COVID protocols, which frequently cap conference room seating at…two.
If that last part sounds extra absurd—like something out of Borges, maybe, or the Coen brothers—it’s only because we’re living in a satire. Yes, the deadly virus rages, but this is how it’s always been done, and also we have this massive lease and we’d feel dumb about spending all that money if every floor sat empty. The illogic has infected many industries. A psychologist friend has been ordered to conduct sessions from her office—remotely, via the same telehealth app she’s used at home for a year. A friend in finance works closely with a French bank, six hours ahead; because he’s now commuting instead of working from his house, every morning he loses an hour of precious real-time collaboration with his Parisian counterparts. Another friend in finance who returned over the summer has too little work to fill eight hours. At home, he could use the extra time for life admin or to simply recharge, but these days his job is to work for two hours then look busy for six more. “I feel like I’m rotting my life away,” he told me.
And in which scenario do you suppose he’s most productive? The one in which he’s trusted to manage his time like an adult, or the one in which his resentment festers with every molasses-slow tick of the clock? And in which scenario do you suppose parents of small children would be at their best? One in which we rest easy knowing we won’t barf a mega-variant onto our kids because we aren’t riding the bus or eating maskless at our desks—or the one in which we worry every time a colleague coughs that this is it, the fatal moment of transmission, the triggering of the macabre Rube Goldberg machine that ends with our child on a ventilator?
Truth be told, there is no going back to the office, not really. Our numb asses might once again be in chairs, but our souls will never return. There’s been an awakening. The frantic desire to wow this or that boss has grown tissue-thin, the restless ambition fading as people have awakened to the stuff of life: family, friends, interests, time to just be. They’ve seen through the bullshit—traveling from one patch of carpet to another in order to work was never necessary, just as making a job into one’s life was never advisable. It was all a big lie. Why did so many believe it? And why do employers believe that if they snatch the WFH life from their employees, they’ll come back just as willing and motivated as before?
Last year, infinite think pieces declared that this collective epiphany would birth a fresh way forward, a brave new world in which no one had to waste ten hours a week in traffic. But a convenient amnesia has since taken hold, and workers are being asked to re-embrace a model that appears to benefit no one. Don’t give me malarkey about offices boosting camaraderie, increasing facetime with superiors, or inspiring stronger accountability to one’s team; for every study claiming these things are true, there’s another that shows the opposite. Actually, don’t tell me anything about how going back to the office benefits employers, because why are the metrics of an office’s value always centered solely on the upsides for them, never us?
Join me in my rage, won’t you? This is a safe place to find solace in our time of seething. In the meantime, may these works ease and aid your journey—and, ugh, your commute.
1.
Author: David Graeber
Book; Nonfiction (2018)
Let’s back up and ask a potentially painful question: Does your job even need doing? The author of this bracing manifesto—a late anthropologist and activist who first discussed this theory in a 2013 essay—might say no. To be clear, his book isn’t about shitty jobs, the kind that exploit, injure, pay badly, or come with a side of verbal abuse. Bullshit jobs are roles that make exactly zero difference in the world or company, yet pay well, possess a veneer of importance, and can often be sustained for the duration of one’s entire ineffectual career. Or, as Graeber wrote, “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.” Graeber’s ultimate question is why the grand ideal of automation—if most work is performed by a robot or line of code, humans can finally relax—hasn’t materialized. “It’s as if,” he writes, “someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”
How to know if a job is bullshit? For starters, if its title is suspiciously abstract—Digital Consultant, Development Strategist—it’s a good bet that the job is pointless. If you write reports no one reads or develop projects that never come to fruition, serve as liaison between this entity and that though they’re perfectly capable of conversing, oversee people who can manage themselves, or otherwise fill a need that doesn’t exist (one of Graeber’s best examples: the PR team at Oxford, whose job is to make sure people know that Oxford is a very good school), your work is probably bullshit.
Here’s how this theory applies to our present predicament. In July, The Atlantic published a startling paragraph in a piece called “Why Managers Fear a Remote Work Future”:
Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.
One could hazard a guess that a year-plus of remote work has revealed which jobs are bullshittiest, showing those in charge, many of whom are bullshit themselves, that they’ve allowed said bullshit to proliferate in their organization. Viewed through this lens, the demand that workers return to the office begins to feel less like stodginess and distrust of workers’ dedication and more like fear of exposure, or an unwillingness to address inefficiencies and redundancies because doing so would be, well, a lot of work. Guess who pays the price.
2.
Author: Helen Phillips
Book; Fiction (2015)
In this disquieting novel by the author of the bonkers breakout hit The Need, desperately broke Josephine takes a cryptic data entry job at an enormous, anonymous building full of identical hallways. Almost no other people seem to work there—except for creepily chipper Trishiffany, who seems to know everything about Josephine without asking, and Josephine’s boss, The Person with Bad Breath, so nondescript that their gender can’t be discerned. Entering baffling digits into a database all day, Josephine grows curious about the precise nature of her job. Too curious, in fact, because when she figures out what she’s been doing, the consequences are swift and horrific. Enjoy this devilishly creepy, superbly written book as a bit of unnerving fun—or, if you wish, as a metaphor. For workplace evils we fail to investigate (ever check the specific stocks in your 401k? Ever Google your company’s name + “lawsuit”?). Or for the pervasive threat of getting “in trouble” at work, a chief motivator for many. Or for all workers’ essential disposability, should they become inconvenient. Take your pick, really.
3.
Director: Mike Judge
Film; Comedy (1999)
This choice may seem obvious—but have you watched it since you slumped into the midcareer doldrums? Because boy does it look different at 39 than it did at 19. I revisited it the other night—the day my husband’s company scrapped its return-to-office plan six days before it would’ve taken effect—and found that what once seemed like comedic exaggeration now felt chillingly familiar: the simmering rage among the proletariat; the plague of upward-failing white men; the condescending tone particular to bosses; the Chicken Little employee eternally doomsdaying about layoffs; the flattening of people into numbers; the arbitrary rules that decide who’s in favor and who gets banished to the basement without their red Swingline.
Listen, I’ve been lucky, workwise. I baked scones at my favorite café, helped run a bookstore, nabbed a desk job out of college, and fell ass backwards into a career right out of grad school, one that made my parents proud to tell people what I did (and for whom, because the whom was Oprah). Said career has often been thrilling. Currently, I have sane, kind bosses (it’s not their decision to go back—the bummer of parent companies is that they don’t know you but still decide your life), and colleagues who do their work cheerfully and well. I’m grateful for the privilege to work, and that I still have a lucrative job in an industry that’s been death-rattling for most of my adult life.
But I ask you: Why are our days filled with someone else’s concerns instead of our own? Why does someone else get to decide how we spend our lives? Why must living mean working?
I don’t know why the re-watch of this doofy movie hit me so hard. Maybe it’s because, nearing forty, I grow ever more aware of my impending death. Maybe it’s because I spent last year worrying that said death could come any day, a feeling that rendered email-answering and punny captions hilariously irrelevant. Maybe it’s because as a parent you’re ceaselessly reminded that time is a goddamn bullet train. Whatever it is, I teared up while watching this ‘90s comedy I’ve seen a billion times, specifically when Ron Livingston said, “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth. We weren’t meant to spend it this way.” Fuckin’ A.
Sadly, American capitalism is unlikely to collapse in my lifetime, so, to keep my kid in Pirate’s Booty and myself in used books, I’ll have to go on devoting my prime to some guy’s bottom line. (In the words of Ferris Bueller, who also resisted wasting time under someone’s thumb: “How’s that for being born under a bad sign?”) Barring a financial deus ex machina, work is my destiny, and because I am a dependable person who takes pride in doing things well, I will continue to do an excellent job at it—even as I wonder why I have to.
The least they can do is let me serve out the sentence from my couch.
Extra Credit: A Stick-It-to-the-Man Reading List
Here you’ll find 29 books that ask useful questions about, or just entertainingly lampoon, the nature of work, mostly the bullshit variety; might I suggest reading them during those long hours of looking busy? (Here are several strategies to disguise what you’re up to on your computer—buy these reads as e-books, employ those sneaky desktop tricks, and baby, you got yourself an afternoon goin’.)
Fiction:
· Personal Days, by Ed Park (2008): Peerlessly brilliant, moving, witty tale of work friendships, hardships—with hefty dose of eeriness, satire, existential dread.
· Days of Distraction, by Alexandra Chang (2020): Woman overlooked at work flees job in search of good life, realizes she’s ignored everywhere else, too.
· The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson (1955): Guy returns from war, becomes middling midcentury salaryman, wonders if that’s all there is.
· Company, by Max Barry (2007): Funny tour of corporate insanity, ensuing soul-death.
· Kings of Infinite Space, by James Hynes (2005): Former professor turned lowly temp suspects supernatural forces at work in office, investigates with comic-creepy results.
· Severance, by Ling Ma (2018): Apocalypse arrives, office drone drones on.
· King of the Mississippi, by Mike Freedman (2019): Would-be titans of industry battle for managerial supremacy, embody wildly opposing visions of manhood.
· Darlingtonia, by Alba Roja (2017): Novel of suspicious death, race, gentrification, eyepopping salaries set in surreal simulacrum of San Francisco’s tech sector.
· Das Kapital, by Viken Berberian (2007): Short-selling trader profits from misery; falls in love via email; evinces modern tangle of tech, money, alienation.
· There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura (2016): Girl walks into temp agency, requests jobs that require no thinking, finds vast sea of sexism instead.
· The Subsidiary, by Mattias Celedon (2016): Office suddenly traps workers at desks. One surreptitiously chronicles resulting drama—using his stamps for certifying documents.
· How I Became Stupid, by Martin Page (2004): Pathologically cerebral man, tortured by intellect, decides to become dumber. His chosen path to idiocy: Get job in finance.
· Lightning Rods, by Helen DeWitt (2011): To avoid harassment lawsuits, companies give male employees pornographic perk: female workers to service them in office bathroom. Batshit, hilarious satire.
· The Assistants, by Camille Perri (2017): Student loan-burdened media company peon (c’est moi!) pockets huge, errant expense report reimbursement, effectively embezzling from rich boss. Fellow minions figure out scam, want in, wind up staging rebellion.
Nonfiction:
· Remote, by Jason Fried (2013): Why WFH is more productive, human, equitable (people of all regions get access to best companies). Note to self: Send copy to corporate HQ.
· Private Government, by Elizabeth Anderson (2017): Subtitled How Employers Rule Our Lives, digs into impact work has on our decisions, from where to live to when to breed.
· Working, by Studs Terkel (1974): Laborers of all stripes, from farmhand to film critic, speak candidly about jobs and their feelings about them.
· Lab Rats, by Dan Lyons (2018): On bogus, counterproductive “management science.”
· No Hard Feelings, by Liz Fosslien (2019): Why we should bring emotions to work—go ahead, cry in boss’s office instead of bathroom stall.
· Weird in a World That’s Not, by Jennifer Romolini (2018): How to climb career ladder without selling out, becoming someone else, losing mind.
· The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton (2010): Pop philosopher explores qualities that make jobs fulfilling—or foul.
· The Tyranny of Email, by John Freeman (2009): Toward a saner, non-exhausting, less obtrusive means of digital communication.
· Culture Crash, by Scott Timberg (2016): How America’s creatives—artists, writers, musicians, etc.—stopped being able to earn a living, and why we all pay price.
· The Stupidity Paradox, by Mats Alvesson (2017): Small doses of stupidity actually help companies; macro-stupidity kills them. Where to draw line?
· The Org, by Ray Fisman (2015): Curious look at systemic causes of office inefficiency, managerial uselessness—and why current approach may still be best option.
· The Job, by Ellen Ruppel Shell (2018): What happens when job market bears little resemblance to deeply ingrained cultural ideas about work? Hint: We’re living it.
· The Worst Jobs in History, by Sir Tony Robinson (2004): Baldrick from Blackadder offers tour of icky roles through ages. Many involve poop. May put things in perspective?
· Cubed, by Nikil Saval (2015): Fascinating, poetic history of office design, from Dickensian counting-houses to Dilbertian cubicles.
· The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen (2012): Profile of guy who lives off land, earns nothing, models living as you choose instead of existing by default.
Next time: What to read when you’re in love with someone who doesn’t love you back…