The one where Chandler Bing’s impenetrable job defined a generation

The aspirations and frustrations of the white-collar worker have been depicted by great fictional characters in novels and on the screen, notably Bartleby, the Scrivener, Revolutionary Road’s Frank Wheeler and The Office’s David Brent. To that pantheon of office drones must surely be added Friends’ sardonic Chandler Bing, played so beautifully by the actor Matthew Perry, who died at the weekend at the age of 54.

The US sitcom which ran over 10 series between 1994 and 2004 was of course about friendship but it was acute on work too. Chandler represented the office worker whose life was impenetrable to outsiders. Between nine and five, he spoke corporatese, complaining about “the WENUS . . . Weekly Estimated Net Usage Statistics.” No one knew what he did: “Something to do with numbers . . . a transponster!”

Compared to his friends with easy to understand jobs (Ross, a palaeontologist, Monica, a chef) Chandler’s profession seemed void of purpose, a word frequently evoked by today’s management commentators. Even waitress Rachel (played by Jennifer Aniston who also starred in Mike Judge’s great cinematic satire on cubicle culture, Office Space) was on the up — Central Perk was a stepping stone to her true love: fashion.

Chandler was self-aware and funny, embodying the cynicism of Generation X. But he didn’t want to go deep. “I’m not great at advice,” he said. “Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” As Justin Spitzer, writer and producer on the US version of The Office and creator of Superstore and American Auto, workplace comedies, pointed out to me, “Chandler was just a guy who worked in exchange for a pay cheque, but didn’t need or want his work to define him. That’s relatable.”

Indeed, he tried not to think about the meaning of his job until, perversely, a promotion forces him to admit “that this is what I actually do”. Security had become a trap. At a time when Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation (2001) suggested the future was freelance, and jobs for life were outdated, this was understandable.

Chandler’s job also crystallised contemporary concerns about white-collar work as emasculating. As Neil Ewen, senior lecturer in communications at the University of Exeter, put it: “Chandler is a comedy version of The Narrator in the classic Gen X film Fight Club (1999): an office-bound clone in a suit whose life is going nowhere and whose job defines his helplessness.”

Some like Ewen see Chandler’s career as an example of bullshit jobs, a term coined by the late anthropologist David Graeber to mean those “which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist.” André Spicer, Executive Dean of Bayes Business School, suggests a new category altogether: a “Chandler Bing job”, one indifferent to finding meaning, “low on existential rewards but relatively high on extrinsic rewards, like pay and promotion”.

Chandler’s stoicism more broadly reflects Gen X’s tacit acceptance of their lot: the forgotten latchkey kids squished between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. Jennifer Dunn, author of Friends: A Cultural History, says he “showed that we might not all find fulfilment in the first, or even the longest lasting job we will ever have.” Compared to today’s employers who are increasingly concerned about making their younger colleagues happy, few cared about Gen X’s work-life balance.

Chandler didn’t complain, he just got on with it until he couldn’t anymore. Even then, the trigger for a career change wasn’t an existential howl for passion but because he wanted to be with Monica. There was no more social meaning in his new job (advertising) than his old. Could he BE anymore of a white-collar worker?

emma.jacobs@ft.com