We're living in a period some have called The Great Resignation. Or are we quiet quitting now? While this hostility toward work feels radical, we've been here before. As Blink-182 said in their 1999 song "All the Small Things": Work sucks.

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.