Michael Scott is the Sanest Character in The Office, Depression & HBO’s Westworld: An Existential Analysis of The Office
You have to be insane to pretend you’re not crazy!
A gonzo philosophical inquiry into mass psychosis and conformity. This gonzo philosophical argument challenges the conventional wisdom which views Michael Scott from The Office as a crazy character. My unconventional argument against conventional wisdom is that he’s — in fact — the sanest character on the show.
I recently took a 2-month depression leave from my work. I needed time to solve existential problems that I never had a chance to solve due to the fast progression of my life — started university right after high-school in September, began working immediately after undergrad, and have been living off of that momentum ever since.
Like a treadmill forcing me to run fast and not giving me a sufficient breather to ask “why am I running on this specific treadmill?” — or at least to pant that question, while still running.
My life has been a ripple effect of decisions I made when I was 17 when I graduated high school, I’m 27 now. I did engineering in undergrad, worked in tech for a bit, and currently a CFA level 2 candidate.
You see, people have the wrong idea about how depression feels. It is gravely conflated with a mental disorder when in reality it’s an existential disorder.
Depression is not sadness, it’s more like pensiveness — the ability to see things for what they really are and then deeply internalizing what you glean.
An extreme ability to pierce through the canopy of society which requires you to not really pay existential attention to it, on a daily basis.
Depression took away my ability to maintain the charade and to get up and to go to work — to run on the treadmill, so to speak.
This pensiveness and hyper-rationality elucidated the fact that I am going to my 9–5 simply because I can’t think of a more suitable option for me that can pay my bills.
Why? because, I don’t have a strong sense of self; of who I am. And asking what you want to do is synonymous with asking who you are. Because, the goal in life is to be you, as a full-time job.
One Monday morning — as I was brushing my teeth getting ready for work — I was pensively looking in the mirror and couldn’t answer a simple question that popped into my mind:
“In a couple of years, I’ll be able to afford nice toys just based on my career trajectory…but so what?”
I was stunned and couldn’t move. Tooth-brush in-hand, I started suffering a panic attack because I couldn’t answer the “so what?”.
I mean, I genuinely thought that that’s what I wanted in life, otherwise, why would I get up every day at 7 am to do this? sacrifice my time, my young years, my life…if it’s not me, then I must be insane!
Like a Pavlovian dog who forgot that the bell should represent the lunch, I forgot that the money should represent the outcome of providing something as a result of being me — whatever that looks like.
I am the pavlovian dog who suddenly realized he was drooling over the sound of the bell but didn’t even know what kind of dog food he really liked.
I immediately ceased and desisted by taking a 2-month leave of absence. Engineering, Tech, Finance…all games that had already existed and are fine to play if they are genuinely right for you, otherwise, you’re insane and suffering from a psychosis if you get up day-in-day-out to play a game that’s not meant for you.
Because even in the best-case scenario in life, you’ll still eventually die, so you suffer psychosis to delude yourself that it’s the right game for you, despite what your buried impulses tell you.
I know it’s uncomfortable to read this but you’re not alone, we’re all living in mass psychosis.
The definition of mass psychosis is a phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population in society as a result of rumors and fear (memory acknowledgment).
(also known as mass psychogenic illness, collective hysteria, group hysteria, or collective obsessional behavior)
Well, as a society, we live in fear of being different by expressing ourselves. Why? because of the perceived, illusory threat, that if we do, we will die alone — the fear of perceived loneliness.
And boy are we lonelier than ever!
The General Social Survey found that the number of Americans with no close friends has tripled since 1985.
Little do we know that when we conform, we betray our sense of self, hence everything we do ironically ends up feeling empty and exacerbates our loneliness even further.
Because you achieve your humanness by expressing the craziness, unique to being you. If you don’t express your humanness, you forget what it even means to be human and then you find yourself living as a Westworld host.
Just think of your interactions with your colleagues at work.
The predictability of the pattern of thoughts. Talking about the same topics with great repetitive cyclicality — every week, every month, every season — how cold the weather is, how hot the weather is, what the kids did this weekend, how much workload there is, what renovations were implemented around the house…etc.
(Without investigating the underlying electric circuitry, I would never be able to tell the difference between a Westworld host and people from around the office. The human element is simply not there.)
This terrifies me. It reminds me of the first season of HBO’s Westworld; how Dolores and all the other hosts wake up every day and think the same thoughts, express the same ideas, and do the exact same things day-in-day-out — like a conveyer belt of a well-scripted routine.
Which brings us to The Office & Michael Scott.
Michael Scott is the human being who achieved self-awareness and expresses his humanness in a society suffering from mass psychosis.
This makes him feel hollowly alone — like Dolores achieving humanness in a Westworld park full of A.I. hosts. No wonder he craves companionship…
So, if Michael Scott is the character who achieved his own humanness then the other characters — who are jaded in the office — are insane and suffering from psychosis. Insane for doing something, day-in-day-out, that’s clearly not right for them!?
Michael is the only sane character on the show. He’s not the brightest and that’s why the game that’s right for him is being a regional manager at a failing paper supply company.
For someone like him who's not very intelligent, he found the thing that’s exactly right for him — the most suitable treadmill on which to run the conveyer belt of his life, day-in-day-out.
We can tell that he’s being himself always! By exuding his child-like playful spirit every moment, because that’s what being human means.
To express your unique craziness and find a position in life that pays you to be you. To be human. As Hunter S. Thompson says:
If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up
And expressing yourself is inherently an act of craziness, especially if there was no outlet or any job position for your uniqueness because it never existed before. Much like Descartes’s “I think therefore I am”:
I am human therefore I am crazy, but not necessarily insane.
You have to be insane to pretend that you’re not crazy.
I’ll leave you with the following dialogue from The Office. It was between Jim & Michael in Season 5.
[Michaels says declaratively]
Michael: There’s something wrong with society.
[Jim says sarcastically]
Jim: Maybe there’s something wrong with you.
[Michael says gravely]
Michael: If it’s me then society made me that way.
[speechless by how reasonable a response that was]
Jim: ….
[Jim nods to himself in shocked agreement]
