We’re living in a period some have called The Great Resignation. Or are we quiet quitting now? After America’s employees were jerked around for nearly a year–are still being jerked around–because of Covid-19, It feels like there’s finally vociferous acceptance of the fact that simply, work sucks. While this hostility toward work feels radical, we’ve been here before. We hated work in 1999, too.

Several movies of 1999 follow almost the same character with the same problem: A mid-level, white-collar, white man is bored and dissatisfied with his corporate life; only a radical jolt to his system can force him to wake up and see everything with new eyes.

In "Fight Club," that shock comes in the form of a soap-selling maniac named Tyler Durden. For "American Beauty’s" middle-aged, married protagonist, it’s feeling sexual desire for his teenage daughter’s best friend. And in "The Matrix," a programmer-by-day, hacker-by-night named Thomas Anderson takes a little red pill.

1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss

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Sources:

• Alan Ball, American Beauty, 1999.
• Eula Biss, Having and Being Had, 2020.
• Anne Helen Peterson, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, 2020.
• Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, 2019.
• Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, 2015.
• Vauhini Vara, “Amazon Has Transformed the Geography of Wealth and Power,” The Atlantic, 2021.