Jennifer Schuessler’s essay in the New York Times on the disappearance of actual work from literary fiction made me wonder if anybody is really, truly interested in the day-to-day minutiae in a corporate world where most of it could be summarized as “read emails” and “responded to emails.”

For example, Moby-Dick’s ridiculous number of chapters devoted to whale anatomy could actually be more interesting than reading in detail about the number of times I read an email, talked to our accounting department, responded to first email, and read the next email.

Modern Tools

But, one could argue that Melville wasn’t talking about the whale because it related to Ahab’s work. He was talking about the whale because it was the other ‘person’ in a complicated relationship with Ahab. Melville couldn’t pick apart what the whale’s motives were; he could only describe the physical aspects of this mammoth creature. We knew why Ahab had such respect for the whale because we were learning about the sheer strength and indestructibility of the whale ourselves.

So then, perhaps my interactions at work – or anybody’s daily toil – is only interesting to us when there’s some sort of relationship involved. We are the world of Twitter, Facebook and email, after all. Maybe the same reason that nobody wants to read via Twitter that you had a BLT for lunch, is why nobody wants to read pages upon pages about filling out TPS reports? Unless TPS reports are your white whale, there’s no relationship there.

And we are in the age of relationships.