Do you think it’s possible to make a movie or television show about people who go to work every day and just … work? I don’t mean watching them type at computers or whatever, but I mean the lives of office-worker-ish people in general.
If you’re an aristocrat, or rich, or a detective, or a super hero, you can get up to all manner of things, have any number of noble or foolhardy ambitions and act on them, then deal with the consequences, but if you’re just an office worker, a programmer or an HR assistant, what is it about your life that is movie/series worthy? I suppose you can turn thirty, but there’s nothing dramatic about that from the outside beyond what has become cliché. Or have kids, but while that’s personally eventful, I don’t know how that could be turned into something interesting for a viewer outside of a difficult pregnancy or an alien baby.
In fiction, all those daily, non-dramatic grinds become interesting because we spend enough time with the characters that we care in the same way that we care about ourselves or our friends. Modern fiction has found heroism in the quotidian, after all. But even in fiction, you establish the status quo so you can then subvert or divert it. The main character loses her job, or loses his leg, or is rejected by his friends or spouse, or some other thing that starts that character down a path far from the one you’ve established for the character. The difference between your initial expectation and where the character actually ends up (or what you come to understand about her) is plot. The story is over when there’s a new status quo.
What I’m getting at, awkwardly, is that when we watch movies or TV series, we’re watching what happens when things get extraordinary and if we watch a lot of it, we start to think that life is not life until it’s dramatic like it is in stories. A fun story on screen is a crisis in real life. We long for the kind of job that takes us out of the fixed hours world, out of the thousands of tiny humiliations and micro-aggressions of office-politics and into the world where we have—what?
Efficacy?
I don’t know how others survive the office job. I’m not good at it. I suspect the path forward is to realize that the office job is a daily chore, not actual life. The micro-aggressions (those you suffer and those you author) must be overwhelmed by what you experience outside the job. When the work day is over, forget it in the same way you forget most TV episodes after watching them and get on to the next thing … a snack!
Find where you have efficacy in your life, and live there. Right? Is that it?
