“The Office” Found Me in a Low Place

You know what they say. Fool me once, strike one. But fool me twice...strike three.

-Michael Scott

There is a thing that happens when people feel isolated and overworked. That thing is simple: to cope with their stress, they will likely further isolate and overwork themselves. Crazy, right? This tendency is widely recognized among mental health professionals. The very thing that isolated people need the most - connection - feels less and less desirable the further they go into isolation. It’s kind of a cruel joke.

Some summers ago I was right in the thick of this dynamic. I took an internship in Nashville after my second year of seminary. In many ways, I was spending time in a place that had historically been healthy for me. But I just wasn’t feeling the soothing Nashville vibes anymore.

Undoubtedly, I was in a negative headspace because of the seminary environment I had just left. I had moved to Atlanta to begin grad school with the intention of finding a new community and a new calling. In some ways, that happened. In more ways, it didn’t. When I unexpectedly found myself living alone my first year, it didn’t take long to realize it would not be the season I thought it would be. I was going to be busier, lonelier, and far more uncertain about the direction of my life than I wanted.

Have you had a season like that? Have you found yourself in a new place only to feel like a complete outsider with no social net to catch you?

Typically when this isolation happens, we adopt strategies to cope. However, we are rarely conscious of the strategies we begin to employ. Those habits are beneath our awareness, slowly working their ways into our behaviors and decisions. Unfortunately, they aren’t always good for us, and they often lead us further into loneliness.

My strategies were simple: to cope with my isolation, I would work out and study far more than was normal. To fill all of my lonely time, I read. A lot. I read classics; I read emerging voices. I once estimated that I added another year and a half worth of theological education by replacing free time with additional reading. Even worse was that because of all I was doing, I excelled in the classroom. Every time I went beyond the achievement of what was expected of me, I got a little dose of validation, which made me want to do it again.

Then there was the working out. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get extreme. Lots of cardio, lots of endurance weightlifting. While I didn’t make myself unhealthy, I wasn’t exactly healthy, either. I was quite thin, but more importantly, I was frequently exhausted by my own doing.

I would not recommend this regimen as method of becoming a joyful human. By the time I took that internship, I had forgotten how to be social, how to have fun, how to be stupid just because it feels good to be stupid sometimes. I had somehow convinced myself that the best opportunity to live into the calling God had for me - whatever it was - was to use every minute to get better.

That works until it doesn’t. That summer in Nashville I ran out of gas. There were people inviting me to spend time with them, but I was declining. In the absence of willpower to keep reading and working out, all I had left to do was watch those people have fun while I sat in a house alone. One fateful night, out of a surge of FOMO, I pulled up Netflix and started The Office for the first time. This decision was a big one for me. I had stopped watching shows - especially silly shows. (I was supposed to be getting better every minute, remember? Laughing at comedy did not feel productive.)

It took me a while to laugh at The Office. It was so incredibly ridiculous at first. When I watched the “Diversity Day” episode, it was so cringy I almost stopped. But something changed for me in the fifth episode, “Basketball.” I began to pick up on the realism of the show - those soft nudges of real, genuine emotion that I could see on the characters’ faces. Suddenly, I could relate to them.

In “Basketball,” that moment of realism was the look on Jim’s face when the love of his life, Pam, cheered for him during a game of pick up basketball - only to then go home with her crummy fiancé, Roy.  The look of joy and delight on Jim’s face followed by the longing glance after Pam leaving without him reached me. And out of nowhere, I understood the show.

The Office is about real life. People who say it’s absurd misunderstand the show. There are real struggles, real mundanities, real moments of joy in The Office. The comedic extremes grab our attention. But it’s the depth of humanity in the show that changed me. Romance, loneliness, boredom, failure color the characters each and every episode.

What I saw was that the comedy of The Office isn’t just about slapstick laughs. The comedy bravely looks at the messiness of life - things I could relate to - and instead of giving up, chooses to create something beautiful with flawed ingredients. It is this creation from brokenness that sparks joy in the show. For example:

• Michael Scott is a lonely man with weird personal habits that flow out of his isolation. So much so that he wakes up one morning and burns his foot on a grill he had laid on the floor to cook bacon and spends the whole day on crutches.

• Dwight Schrute, the Assistant to the Regional Manager, is deeply narcissistic. When the former temp, Ryan, starts a full time position, Dwight takes him on a sales call, only to kidnap and then haze him at his beet farm.

• Jim finally gets the girl of his dreams, Pam. Shortly after they become official, the two of them are supposed to run a 5k when they stop by a garage sale. Pam makes Jim carry what she bought, and Jim visibly can’t process the feeling of being annoyed with the girl he wanted for years.

I began laughing at all of these things when I understood the realism beneath the comedy. What could be bleak suddenly made me smile. That act of transformation, from despair to life, is what changed me.

You see, I had been thinking of transformation in the wrong way. Methodist types like me talk often about sanctification - the lifelong process of growing in grace and becoming a better follower of Jesus. I had convinced myself that the way to grow was to work, shoving aside room for fun as if laughter and silliness hindered my holiness.

The Office taught me that this view of sanctification is too narrow. Growing in grace does not mean we continue to get better marks on our report card; it means we become more fully human as God intended us to be. Positive transformation does and should include disciplined growth. But because part of humanity is joy and laughter, we ought to grow in those disciplines, too.

All I have to prove this point is my experience. Methodists are keen on using personal experience as a means by which we discern the will of God. That summer, I found that the more I laughed, the more I felt closer to God. The more that laughter propelled me into friendships with others, the clearer God’s will for my life became.

When I returned to school for my final year, things were still hard. But there were positive changes I made in my life - changes which I believe were spurred on by the grace of God that found me in a TV show on Netflix. When that new semester started, invites with friends came in. My gut reaction was to say “no” and get to studying.

But then I remembered what that life was like. And I said to my old habits, “Fool me once, strike one. But fool me twice...strike three."