Reel Freedom: Office Space and the freedom to stop working

Welcome to the third iteration in my ‘Reel Freedom’ FIRE-related film series. It’s been a while since my previous ones but I'm back with a corker! Previously I explored consumerism in Fight Club and money vs meaning in A Christmas Carol.

This time round I'm looking at what is probably the most obvious of FIRE-related films... 'Office Space'. This is a 90s cult classic that strangely I acutally only got round to seeing a few years ago. If you've not seen the movie I've no doubt that will have at least seen a few memes based on the film.

This film tackles a number of topics associated with the FIRE movement, most notably: what would you do if you didn’t have to work for money? Peter, the main protagonist, is the relatable everyman, wrestling with that age-old exchange of time for money, especially when the money comes from a job he hates!

As before, disclaimer here is that this will probably contain spoilers. All set? Let’s have a look!

"It's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care."

The film opens with Peter stuck in traffic, stuck in a commute to his halogen-lit, beige-boxed dream-factory. It’s highly relatable to most modern-day office workers, and arguably ahead of its time given when it came out as well as the technological advances that have occurred since the late 90s.

One of my favourite things about Peter is that he isn't particularly ambitious. He doesn't hate Initech because someone else got the promotion he wanted. He isn't plotting his route into senior management. He doesn't want a bigger office or a better company car. He simply doesn't give a shit.

And there's an important distinction here that I think sometimes gets lost when people talk about FIRE to the uninitiated. Not wanting to work isn't necessarily the same as not wanting to do anything.

We're conditioned to associate productivity with employment. If someone works 50 hours a week, they're hardworking. If someone retires at 45 and spends their Tuesday morning walking, gardening, volunteering, exercising, reading or playing with their kids, somehow they're doing nothing. This is the paradox of the typical social event opening question: “Hi, I’m John Doe and I’m a xxxx.” One of the first things we tend to tell complete strangers is what we do for a living, as though our day job is who we are. I've never really understood that.

My own motivation for FIRE has increasingly become less about retiring and more about control over my time. I don't have some fantasy about reaching my FIRE number, ceremonially throwing my laptop into a skip and then spending the next 40 years watching daytime television. I want the ability to decide what my days look like.

"What Would You Do If You Had a Million Dollars?"

There's a conversation in Office Space that could almost have been written specifically for a FIRE blog. Peter asks his neighbour Lawrence what he'd do if he had a million dollars. Lawrence's answer is memorable, although perhaps not particularly useful for the purposes of this blog! Peter's answer is much simpler: he'd do nothing.

What's interesting is that the hypothetical million dollars isn't really about being rich. Peter doesn't immediately start listing the things he'd buy. The money simply represents enough financial security that he wouldn't have to go to Initech anymore.

I actually think there's a useful exercise in this for anyone pursuing FIRE. Forget the exact number for a minute and imagine that tomorrow morning you woke up with enough invested that you genuinely never needed to earn another penny. Once the novelty had worn off, what would your average Tuesday actually look like?

For me, I don't think it would involve sitting around doing nothing. I already optimise family time well, but I would probably spend more time exercising, volunteering, writing more blog articles, and finally working through the backlog of model aircraft in my loft! I might still work as well. The difference is that I wouldn't necessarily need to do it five days a week, 47-ish weeks of the year, because that's the standard arrangement society somehow settled on.

I've already had a little taste of this through taking Unpaid Parental Leave during the school holidays. Financially it's obviously a terrible decision compared with working those weeks and investing the money. But if the whole point of building financial security is eventually being able to buy back my time, it seems slightly daft to refuse to buy any of it until some arbitrary date in the future.

Perhaps a better question than "When can I afford to retire?" is therefore "What would I choose to do if earning money became optional?" If you're going to spend 15 or 20 years working towards FIRE, it's probably worth having some idea what you're actually working towards. It always amazes me how many people spend years obsessing over the “how” of FIRE without really thinking about the “why”.

The TPS Report: The Hidden Cost of Bullshit Work

One of the things I love about Office Space is that Peter's job isn't obviously awful. He's not badly paid, he's not doing dangerous work and he's sitting in a climate-controlled office rather than digging holes in the rain. His misery comes from the accumulation of all the little bits of corporate nonsense that make up his working day.

There are the pointless processes, meetings, office politics, corporate jargon and multiple layers of management Peter explains that when he makes a mistake, he has eight different bosses coming by to tell him about it. It's deliberately ridiculous, but anyone who's spent enough time in corporate life has probably experienced at least a watered-down version of it.

It also highlights something I think gets overlooked when we talk about salaries. A £70k job isn't automatically better than a £50k job if that extra £20k requires another ten hours a week, a miserable commute, constant stress and checking emails while you're supposed to be spending time with your family. Money is only one side of the transaction; you're exchanging part of your finite amount of time for it.

That's not to say work is inherently bad. I've had jobs I've enjoyed, worked with people I genuinely like and learnt things through work that I wouldn't have learnt otherwise. I suspect even after reaching FIRE I'll probably still do something that could reasonably be described as work. But Office Space does a brilliant job of showing how strange it is that we can spend such a huge percentage of our adult lives doing things we don't particularly care about simply because that's the default.

The Promotion Paradox

One of my favourite (and funniest) bits of the film is that as soon as Peter stops caring about his job, his career starts going brilliantly.

He turns up when he feels like it, ignores his bosses, dismantles part of his cubicle and then tells the consultants brought in to assess the workforce that on an average week he probably only does about 15 minutes of real, actual work. Their response is basically to conclude that he's management material.

Obviously the main joke is at the expense of corporate management, but I think there's a nice parallel here with the FIRE concept of FU money. Peter suddenly isn't frightened of losing his job, so most of the power Initech had over him disappears. This resonated with me a lot. A few years after setting off on my FIRE journey I had enough of a safety net behind me that I started being a bit more… let’s say, forward(!) at work. I was surrounded by people who were “yes men”, wage slaves to their mortgages and ridiculous PCP contracts. I was the only person at my level who felt confident enough to call out the COO/CEO on another one of his crazy bullshit ideas. To this day, I don’t know if these ideas were ‘shit tests’ to see who would actually challenge him, or genuinely idiotic ideas. Either way, I spoke my mind and backed it up with plenty of reasons why. A few months later I went for a promotion to Director and got it. Utterly bizarre.

You don't need to be fully financially independent to experience this bizarre side effect. I was only a few years into FIRE and it was already changing my attitude to work. A few years later I had ramped it up to 11 and had told my boss to “go fuck himself” as I jumped to a job paying £20k less, but which was infinitely more flexible and less stressful. Having six months, a year or several years of expenses available means losing your job goes from potentially catastrophic to extremely annoying. You can say no to things. You can turn down a promotion if the extra money isn't worth the extra hassle. You can leave a terrible employer without desperately needing another job lined up for Monday morning.

Currently, being able to take a couple of months of unpaid leave each year to cover chunks of the school holidays is probably the clearest example of that. I'm voluntarily giving up salary and therefore also giving up money that could be invested and compounded. The spreadsheet definitely doesn't approve. Clippy ain't happy either, but I’ve always suspected he was a corporate stooge anyway.I've got two children who are only going to be this age once, and I have enough financial breathing room to make that choice.

That's why I increasingly think financial independence starts giving you freedom long before you actually reach your FIRE number. The first £50k or £100k you build might change your life in ways that aren't immediately visible on a compound-interest calculator.

Lifestyle Inflation and the American Dream

There's also a nice link here with the first film I wrote about in this series, Fight Club. Interestingly, both films came out in 1999 and both feature white-collar men who have broadly followed the path society laid out for them before suddenly realising they're not particularly happy with where it's taken them.

The basic formula is familiar enough: get educated, get a respectable job, earn more, buy nicer stuff, get promoted, earn more, upgrade the stuff and repeat until you're eventually allowed to retire.

Fight Club's response to this is fairly extreme. Tyler Durden essentially wants to tear the whole system down. Peter Gibbons just wants to go fishing! I sometimes find myself bouncing between those two extremes: having a bit of a “saviour complex” and wanting to change the world, before smelling the coffee and deciding I'd rather just focus on myself and the people closest to me.

FIRE offers an even less cinematic third option. You don't have to destroy capitalism or smash up the office. You can just spend less than you earn, avoid automatically upgrading your lifestyle every time your salary increases, invest the difference and keep doing it for a surprisingly long time. Eventually you reach the point where work becomes optional.

FIRE Doesn't Solve Everything

This is where I think Office Space becomes more interesting than simply being a film about how rubbish office jobs can be.

Peter spends much of the film dreaming about doing absolutely nothing, but that's not actually where he ends up. By the end he's working again, this time doing manual labour outdoors, and he seems far happier. He hasn't escaped work. He's escaped work he hates.

I think that's an important distinction for FIRE because I've never particularly liked the idea that the ultimate objective is to eliminate anything resembling productive work from your life. Most of us need something to do. We need challenge, purpose, social interaction and probably a bit of structure. There are only so many Tuesday afternoons you can spend watching Netflix before that starts feeling pretty empty as well.

What financial independence changes is that salary no longer has to be the deciding factor. You could carry on doing exactly the same job because you enjoy it. You could go down to three days a week. You could volunteer, retrain, start a little business that makes sod all money, spend a few years looking after your kids or, like Peter, decide that digging holes outside is preferable to sitting in an office discussing TPS reports. It doesn't really matter, the important bit is that you chose it.

Final Thoughts

It's very easy for FIRE to become all about the numbers. Savings rates, ISA allowances, pension contributions, withdrawal rates, investment returns and, of course, the magical number that you need (typically 25x outgoings). I'm as guilty of that as anyone; I've spent an embarrassing amount of my life looking at spreadsheets telling me when I might theoretically be able to stop looking at spreadsheets.

But Office Space is a useful reminder of why we're accumulating all this money in the first place. We're effectively trying to buy something, and it isn't a bigger house, a nicer car or even retirement itself.

 

We're trying to buy control over our time.

So perhaps the question Office Space leaves us with isn't simply "How much money do I need to retire?" It's the question Peter asks in the film: what would you actually do if you had enough money that you didn't need to work? The 'Why' needs to be considered before 'How' starts, and reassessed at regular periods throughout as life, priorities, interests and circumstances change.

If your answer is "pretty much exactly what I'm doing now", then I'd argue you're already in a pretty good position.

If your answer is completely different, that's probably worth thinking about before you spend another decade getting to your FIRE number.