The Mythic Hero Is Not An Individual Contributor
The Quiet Despair of Office Work And Men's Need For The Heroic Journey
On my short drives to work, some years ago, I began to muse about insurance fraud—specifically life insurance fraud, and more specifically how my family might get a payout even if my end weren’t entirely accidental. This was a strange thing to muse upon, since I had no active desire to kill myself. But the thought of how it could be done kept bubbling up on the way to work. And the way home from work. Ah, work: A lonely, pointless email job that paid good money. Growing concerned for myself, I left that job, against all financial good sense. I have not thought about insurance fraud since.
I say this not to garner sympathy. Many people have probably had similar experiences. There is something uniquely inhuman about office work; perhaps digital office-work in particular. In this piece I want to explore why this is, because it’s difficult to pin down.
An initial hurdle to tackling this problem is my reticence to be a whiner. It seems positively shameful to complain about the “good job” I had, or about work that’s just so damn easy, and so damn safe. A full-time emailer doesn’t take on physical risks: on the arduous journey from office chair to water bubbler he will never fall from a great height, be electrocuted, cut his leg with a chainsaw, inhale glass particulate, or wrench his back by lifting a sheet of plywood. If he does any of these things, it’s on his own time—he has to take danger up a s a hobby.
An email jobber also works well below his supposed intellect and degrees. I well know this. Every job I’ve worked was (mildly) interesting for about three months, until everything worthwhile was figured out, automated, and written down in a Standard Operating Procedure. What remains then is the tedium: to follow the same script for the next 10 years. Now, I’m not naive: All jobs have tedium, and often quite a lot of it. But an email job requires no physical effort to accomplish the base tasks—no precise skill, hand-eye coordination, or subtle reflex is needed. The doing of office work is trivial. Supposedly what matters is the deciding. But deciding gets reduced to mere task management quite quickly: deciding which emails to send, to whom, and whom else to inform about it.
I observe these things to classify office jobs, not whine about my own. But it still may seem ungrateful. A third-world teenager in a pit mine, scraping lithium to build my laptop, would (I assume) be happy to trade jobs with me: to sit in a comfortable chair pushing bits around, instead of poisoning himself. He’d happily give up any deftness with his rusty pick for clicking a mouse button repetitively. Nonetheless, while humans will opt for ease, that doesn’t make it a good employment of our faculties. And the extreme examples of literally deadly work do not make the reverse of total ease a good ideal either. Humans left with nothing to do are miserable. We can can see this from the old folks in modern Western societies: we isolate them, take away their daily jobs, and don’t even let them hold babies by the fire (they live too far away!). Nor do we want their stories or knowledge—the world has already moved on. They are useless and they know it. Making people useless is even more shameful than complaint.
Indeed, the shame of wasted humanity may be the very center at office immiseration: the shame of wasted skill and potential, of having ease when you could be pursuing noble goals. The deepest problem with office work, then, is nothing about what office work is: it’s about what it isn’t. What you forego by doing it. Who you give up being.
Young men, in particular, seem afflicted by tech jobs, even as they excel in them. Men can lose themselves in false worlds, whether it’s video games, pornography, internet rabbit holes—or work. The problem isn’t that men become so single-minded, so immersed in esoteric tasks. No, it’s that the single-mindedness can be directed to such fruitless ends. What is sports, after all, but extreme dedication to quite arbitrary ends? But “arbitrary” can still be “real.” Office work is increasingly not even that: it shares more with video games and porn in that it removes men from the physical world and spends their energy moving round digital resources. We see this in gamer language bleeding over into LinkedIn posts, e.g. “leveling up” by learning to code.
The corporate office is not good for women but I hazard is suits women better than men, in that it better resembles tasks women have done for eons: running a home. Home management consists of innumerable small tasks, none central but all crucial. This is not very far off from office administration. Add in office politics (mostly avoiding direct conflict), and many women will find themselves a comfortable role, e.g. in HR. Obviously, many women wouldn’t enjoy HR, but even fewer men do. Men are primed to take risks, challenge themselves, and accomplish something big. Men would rather make one big contribution than a thousand small ones. They want personal glory if they succeed, and will accept the risk of not succeeding. If their tasks are physical at the same time, so much the better—though they may also require cunning, skill, planning, charisma, and so forth. Men, in other words, want to go on a hunt, on a quest, or into battle—or the nearest equivalent they can get.
The office cannot not offer the worthy risk of a hunt or an adventure—despite a thousand Forbes articles assuring CEOs they are the great warriors of their dreams. No, the office is a place of safety, especially for those below CEO level: no matter how many new product lines are launched, or how many marketing campaigns fail, no office decision will get you killed or maimed, and none will shower you with glory either—certainly not to your wider community. You cannot, like Joseph Campbell’s universal hero, accept the call of adventure, test yourself, and then return home with the treasure: you cannot save your community, or enrich it, while working an office job. All you can do is collect a paycheck and hope for a raise. A business owner is perhaps a different story, but an “individual contributor” or a “manager” job does not satisfy the need for adventure, for risk, for reward, for glory, that men need. By accepting office work, men close themselves off from that cycle, that mythos: they enter into a fundamentally more feminine world instead.
The office is a muted, bloodless world. It’s run as a machine, and imagines the rest of the world as a machine. Businesses operate very natively in the modern techno-managerial operating system: They like predictability, knowledge, and control. They like interchangeable, fungible units to manipulate—whether those units are raw materials, debts, widgets, or “human resources” (and that last part got worse in the 90s, when jobs became standardized). All decision-making in an office is done on spreadsheets, dealing with abstractions. There are no physical objects that office workers come to know, understand, and make judgments about. None of that matters. Thus intuition, tradition, and experience do not matter either: only meticulous accounting. And can anything be less heroic than accounting? Woah there, Achilles, your marginal rate of return is estimated to be less than the expected return with 90% confidence; the board thinks you should reconsider. Have you tried investing in plastics?
Like all modern work, office work also deracinates us by blocking the streams of knowledge between generations. Apprenticeship, hereditary jobs, and the cultivation of young men by their elders—none of this exists in modern, corporate environment. Each person is an island, striving “meritocratically” for their own unique place. I even feel this loss, despite following in the family footsteps: I work with data and computers, my father did early computing work, and both my grandfathers did accounting, more or less. Yet none of them could teach me their trade. None could include me in a family business. None could guide me to join the ranks of a profession. Men are thus cut off from myth, outside of time, and their immediate forebears, i.e. historical memory. If being a man is difficult as it is, it’s even harder with no proper examplars or tutors.
Good and proper work aligns itself with human needs and abilities, and aligns what we do with larger purpose. It is therefore the inverse of office work. More specifically, proper work situates us in a place and time. Its learned from fathers and grandfathers. It benefits not just the individual (or his family) but provides for the community too. It deals with material reality, that can be shared and built upon over time. It is not ephemeral. Mens’ work in particular entails danger but also the possibility of great rewards or great loss. Men take those kinds of risks in part because they desire the reward but also because they must: it is who they are. Nothing about office work is acutely terrible—except that it robs men of this option. It prevents them from embarking on hero’s journeys; blocks even the idea of them.
America and Western countries did a grave disservice when they told a generation of men to go to college, aiming for high-pay at white-collar jobs. It’s also true that factory work was dehumanizing in its own ways (as well as emasculating), and the trades are not perfect either. We’ve gradually built a whole economy based on men not doing things—at least on doing as little as possible in the real world. The goal of life is not, however, to sit it out. Men in particular, must engage with world they find around themselves, wrestle with it, and make something of themselves—difficult and dangerous though it may be. If you know young men, try to impress this upon them: If they go down the road of office work, it’s hard to recover. There are other paths, and all can be temporary, whether it’s the military, trades, or being a ski instructor. Don’t consign them to the email mines—at least not without a heroic quest or two first.
