I just finished Happy Hour Is For Amateurs and I loved it. A lot of people who read this book are just going to see a collection of drinking / drug / sex stories and a lot of people are going to miss the point.
Most people don't hate their jobs, which is good. A lot of people dislike their jobs, which isn't the same, and they find ways to deal with it. They use their jobs to fund the rest of their life. They take vacations, they buy nice stuff and they come up with interesting hobbies. They have wives and kids and families that make their day job tolerable.
But if you've ever hated your job, then the regular outlets don't work. It's not enough to buy a nice TV or a new car and have that, on the balance, make up for what you force yourself to sit through every day. It's not enough because deep down you know that you'd go home and take a sledgehammer to the TV and an angle grinder to the car if it meant that you didn't feel like you were wasting every day behind a desk. Like at the end of twenty years or forty years the only real memories you're going to have are of an office you don't like and busy work that didn't mean anything.
I don't know Philalawyer and I'm not going to say that our experiences were even remotely similar. I do know that what connected me to this book was that when I was working in IT, I had a lot of the same thoughts run through my head that he describes in the book. Everything from being young and excited to do interesting work and having those impulses run smack into office bureaucracy, which will suck the soul out of even the most committed evangelical, to essentially having to split myself into two people: Work Ben and Not-Work Ben.
That split is terrible. I used to spend so much energy trying to suppress my personality to get through the day that happy hour wasn't ever just a drink to relax; it was therapy, liquid courage, a pep talk and a way to forget all rolled into one. It was the only way that I could slap a fake smile on my face and sit at a desk for eight or ten hours with the realization that I was as replaceable as the copy machine, that I didn't care about the work I was doing and that I was supposed to buy into this system that was boring and cruel. A lot of people will say that I was being immature but I think that's a wildly inaccurate label. In my early twenties I had two things, boundless energy and an almost endless want to believe in what I was doing. And so when I had to shove those two things aside to be able to function in an office, they had to go somewhere.
And that's why I think most people are going to miss the deeper point of this book. They've never needed that explosive outlet that allows you to go along with the fiction that the system is working for you and you're happy with it. So they see the drinking and the drugs and the sex but they don't understand the context underlying it. When you feel trapped, the first instinct is to escape. But when there is rent to pay and everyone around you is doing the exact same thing, instead of running away from what's making you miserable, you run to anything that takes the pain away. Philalawyer probably could have done a better job connecting those two ideas, that everything that happens in the book is an outlet to deal with the job, but it's not a fatal flaw. That theme will be instantly recognizable to anyone who's worked a job they've felt trapped at.
The book comes out on the 14th. If you're a long time reader of the blog, you'll see that some of the blog entries got repurposed into the book. I have mixed feelings about that, on one hand it kills some of the excitement and joy of reading a book for the first time. On the other hand, it was cool to see all of the stories laid out in a way that makes chronological sense and gives a narrative arc to both the character and the lost decade. On the blog they seem to be stand alone stories, but in the book there's a definite feeling of movement and change. I can't say too much more without giving away the ending, so I'll stop there.
Posted by Ben Corman at 8:17 PM