Mike Judge, when asked how it was that his 1999 cult-comedy Office Space flopped in theaters only to become mega-popular in video rental and cable, chalked it up to poor marketing. The studios simply didn’t know how to sell it, because they didn’t understand it in the first place. As he tells the story, the studio execs—largely all old-money nepo-babies themselves—were utterly baffled by a plot wherein the hero hates his job but doesn’t quit. Why didn’t he just leave, they asked? So removed were they from the lived experiences of the working and middle classes, that it was beyond their meager imaginations to understand how most human beings work crappy jobs because they have to, not because they want to. Jennifer Aston’s simple line late in the film, “Peter, most people don’t like their jobs,” was beyond their comprehension. (So much of modern Hollywood makes sense once you understand that).
Of course, the suits might’ve understood the film better if, say, protagonist Peter Gibbons had quit his job to go on a vengeful shooting spree á la Michael Douglas in Falling Down, or in order to start a movement and blow up Wall Street like Tyler Dryden in Fight Club, or to messianically join the resistance against a literal machine like Neo in The Matrix, or what have you. They at least would’ve understood the genre. No, what perhaps threw off these slow-witted execs more than anything was that Peter simply quits caring about any sort of work entirely!
The key moment in the film is this: After his hypnotherapist dies of a sudden heart attack before he had a chance to snap him out of his trance, Peter genuinely loses all his ambition, his drive, his motivation, his work ethic—and in the most deliciously subversive touch of all, Office Space presents this moment not as a descent into depression, but as liberation! In the film’s most popular montage, Peter casually blows off his bosses’ insistence that he work weekends, the office dress code, his TPS reports, his fear, his anxiety, even his front cubicle wall, all to the dulcet tones of the Geto Boys’ “Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta.” Its “quiet quitting” 20 years before it was even called that!
(Seriously, so many people downloaded this song in the Napster era due to this scene!)
As Nibley might argue, Peter’s thinking has become eschatological, wherein a near-death encounter (in this case, his hypnotherapist dying right in front of him) causes him to suddenly and radically reevaluate his priorities and recognize how few things in this life truly matter. One can imagine how studio execs—who, if utterly lacking in imagination themselves, at least still valued hustle and grind and working ceaselessly to take advantage of each other—would be utterly baffled by this character who refuses to participate in our dehumanizing economic system entirely. Like the rest of corporate America, they probably just assumed: what else could one possibly desire than to become rich and powerful? If you are not constantly working to maximize productivity and streamline efficiencies, then what on earth are you even doing here? And why would a film straight-up celebrate someone not constantly trying to get rich and famous—someone who in fact actively chooses the exact opposite? Office Space must’ve been utterly alien to them.
Yet as the film’s massive cult popularity reminds us, the vast majority of people understand Peter’s motivations just fine—indeed, we all intuitively understand, on a very primal, spiritual level, that hustle and grind is not what we were put on this earth to do!
As do the scriptures, for that matter.
Consider, for example, how Christ Himself declares “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”; or how the Book of Mormon tells us “let us not be slothful because of the easiness of the way”; or how Brigham Young himself said, “Work less, wear less, eat less, and we will be a much wiser, healthier and wealthier people.” Overworking yourself to get ahead is the path of the wicked one; the gospel at all points is supposed to be the easy way out, ironically!
That is because the primary reason we all feel so driven to work ourselves to death is because we somehow feel like we have to prove our right to exist. Someone not obviously engaged in maximizing wealth and productivity clearly doesn’t deserve their daily bread, goes the thinking. It’s why we hate the poor and despise the homeless, and “suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish,” rationalizing that “The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—“
And don’t get me wrong, we all have to contribute our fair share, in one way or another (albeit nowhere close to the level that our global economy currently demands); but the reason why we have “great cause to repent” when we treat the poor this way (per King Benjamin) is because our innate worth is emphatically rooted not in our work, not in our so-called “contributions,” but in our sheer existence: “Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God,” reads one of our most beloved scriptures, clearly establishing that we are to live for each other not because of what we can do for each other, but simply for who we are. Our simple, miraculous existence, our status as children of God, is enough; we do not need to prove our worth to anyone else.
After all, there is absolutely nothing we can do to help out God—we are all “unprofitable servants,” said King Benjamin—but He loves us anyways. So too must we love each other. For as Mormon and Moroni remind us, when we love not each other, when we “have not charity,” we are nothing. And when we treat each other as disposable assets—as “Human Resources”, per corporate lingo—we are indeed nothing. The inhumane nothingness of the corporate workplace is why we also all intuitively feel that Initech deserved to burn down at the end of Office Space—as does the entire present world order itself—and as the film also understands, this burning is not cause for mourning, but celebration.