Underneath the text was a GIF of a woman repeatedly spinning on a pole. Sabrina stared at it for a moment, watching the woman’s body twist around and around, and then noticed that there were already seventeen replies to Mackenzie’s email, which had just gone out five minutes ago.
From Chelsea in product: best day evarrrrrrrrrrrrr!!
From Jenny in marketing: a GIF of Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live saying, “I’m so excited!”
From Oliver Brandt: in your dreams, Alvarez.
Sabrina sighed. If there was anything that perfectly encapsulated the daily sense of alienation that she felt from her colleagues, it was this email and the responses. People didn’t used to take pole-dancing classes with their coworkers; they maybe got drunk with their coworkers, and that was the extent of it. But now you were expected to engage in forced, organized fun with people you worked with, and it seemed to her that the definition of fun had been majorly stretched. When she was in her twenties, people were way too jaded to think that something like a pole-dancing class, with colleagues, was even remotely cool.
She also felt like there was something slightly more insidious going on, about how you were now supposed to feel like your work was your everything: where you got your paycheck, yes, but also where you got fed and where you found your social circle. Everything had started bleeding into everything else. These kids—she felt no compunction about calling them kids—expected that their workplaces would provide all this for them, as if work were an extension of college, with its own clubs and student organizations. Even more disconcerting was that many TakeOff employees lived together or had roommates who were in some way connected to other TakeOff employees, and now there were even apartment buildings that were actual dorms for grown-ups, where you lived in a suite with a few other people and had common areas and nightly activities. It was almost like a return to the days of Henry Ford, when a company provided you with housing and meals and social events. What had happened to having to figure out life on your own?
God, she was starting to sound like Dan. She read the email again. Really, what was wrong with a little pole dancing if that was what made people happy? Just because she didn’t want to participate didn’t mean that other people couldn’t. But people noticed when you didn’t sign up for their pole-dancing classes and softball leagues and weekend dumpling crawls, and it made them think, again, about how you were old. To most of them, thirty-six might as well have been eighty-six in terms of how abstract it felt; they lumped her in with the rest of the “people who don’t matter” population. The funny thing was, they thought they wanted to get married and have kids, but that was all far off in some nebulous future, and in the few conversations she’d ever had with any of them about it, they were almost adorably vague about how all that was going to happen.
Most of them also had this notion that they needed to get everything out of their systems by the time they were thirty, which was some kind of arbitrary witching hour, after which life suddenly Got Serious. Once, she’d overheard Chelsea lamenting, almost to the point of tears, the fact that she was about to turn twenty-eight, which meant she was only two years away from thirty, and that was when she was going to have to start figuring everything out—did she want to get married? Have kids? What about her career? Should she stay in New York or move back to Chicago? How would she ever save money?—and she just wasn’t ready for that life, but then as soon as she noticed Sabrina walking by, she fell silent.
Maybe there was a part of Sabrina that was jealous of this version of their twenties that they were all getting to experience. Her twenties had been filled with such pathos. New York was different then too. She didn’t want to say grittier, exactly; maybe less sanitized was a better way to put it. And it felt more mysterious. Your life wasn’t documented on Instagram for the world to see.
“So Mack just told me the good news.” Sabrina jumped; she hadn’t noticed Isabel standing behind her. Usually Isabel didn’t get in until at least ten thirty. Why was she here so early today? It was barely ten. This was the time that Sabrina got to have to herself. Not today. Sabrina took off her headphones and swiveled around in her chair. “Do you have time to get coffee?” Isabel said. “Or are you doing some hard strategy work already.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” Sabrina said. “You mean in the eighteen hours since Mack told me he wants to change my job? Yeah. I’ve actually rethought our entire social strategy.”
Isabel squinted at her. Maybe this wasn’t the time for jokes. “Anything’s possible. So you want to get that coffee?” Sabrina didn’t, not really, but there was something so pathetic about the way that Isabel—was she already her former boss?—was standing there that she felt like she had to. She got up, laying her headphones carefully on her desk. They were the big, over-the-ear kind that she usually saw teenagers wearing on the subway. She had been self-conscious about getting a pair but finally caved after she realized that if she just had earbuds in, people didn’t notice them and kept trying to talk to her, and she needed the Do Not Disturb that the bigger ones telegraphed. If you looked out over the office at any given moment, approximately 80 percent of people had headphones on and were staring intently at their screens; 10 percent were walking around, either going to a meeting or getting something from the snack room; and probably only 10 percent were working without headphones or engaged in conversations. It gave the office an almost tomblike quality, despite the light streaming in from the windows and the slogans on the walls.