A Millennial Says, The Older I Get And The Further In My Career I Go, The More I Realize How Deadly Accurate 'Office Space' Was

Adrian Volenik

Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 9:16 AM 4 min read

“It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.” That line from the 1999 cult classic “Office Space” movie might’ve gotten a laugh 26 years ago, but for a lot of working millennials today, it’s hitting uncomfortably close to home.

As one millennial recently put it in the r/Millennials subreddit: “The older I get and the farther in my career I go, the more I realize how deadly accurate ‘Office Space’ was.” That simple statement launched a tidal wave of agreement from thousands of people, most of them somewhere between their 30s and 40s, grinding through careers that feel increasingly pointless.

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When the movie first came out, many viewers saw it as an absurdist comedy. Now, it feels like a documentary. “It came out when I was in high school and I thought the exact same,” one person wrote. “I remember a couple years later in my first office job, like a week in I realized ‘it wasn’t satire, it was a f***ing documentary.'”

Another echoed the sentiment: “Watched it again recently and was like ‘oh sh*t.'”

A number of commenters shared that their daily work lives are basically spreadsheets, emails and meetings with no clear purpose. “People ask me what I do at my job, and I can't even explain it. I send emails and make spreadsheets, homie,” one person said. “My decks are basically full reports with a lot of data and they get referred to for years afterwards. I don’t even get to present them.”

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Many talked about doing great work, only to get tiny raises or none at all. “I crunched for three months at the beginning of 2025, usually 10-hour days with a couple of 12-hour days... Hit the target on both [projects], got a 0.5% raise shortly after. Lowest I’ve ever gotten, in a year where I easily did my best work,” someone wrote.

Another added, “Got a huge promotion/raise I’d been trying and failing to get for 5 years”—but only after they stopped putting in effort entirely after their dad passed away.