this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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The Matrix, Office Space, American Beauty, and Fight Club all came out in 1999. They all starred white males between the ages of 30-40 who have become disillusioned with their soul sucking jobs in a consumerist society. They all have an epiphany that breaks them away from the corporate consumerist grind and rebel against it, before finally becoming a sage who can live in the world but not be destroyed by it. Except for Kevin Spacey’s character, but seriously, fuck that guy.
Cipher’s a much better example. He’s tempted not with being an office drone, but with having a steak in a fancy restaurant, so being upper middle class? Anyway, that’s enough to get him to resort to literal murder.
Anyway, 1999 was a weird year in film. It seems almost trite nowadays that having a stable job with stable housing and being able to afford Starbucks every day was the bane of human existence, when nowadays it’s living in the lap of luxury.
Having a stable job just means masking everything different about yourself so you can be a good little worker ant in the capitalist machine. I want a stable job in the sense that I do something I genuinely want to do which serves my fellows.
There's a reason they thought 1999 was peak in the matrix. If the biggest problem was boredom.
We Are Living Inside the Matrix and the Rapper Pitbull Is the Proof - The Ringer https://www.theringer.com/2017/08/11/movies/pitbull-cypher-the-matrix-theory