Self is the best investment
Nick Easen for CNN
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(CNN) -- Few authors on modern culture have anything profound to say about the environment in which we spend most of our daylight hours -- the office.
But since the 1980s, Canadian author Douglas Coupland has been doing just that.
He believes that if workers are to survive the coming decades, they need to shift their investment away from corporations and instead put the capital into themselves.
"Money no longer seems to attract money and what you do no longer seems to attract loyalty," Coupland told CNN.
"If you put money into yourself -- in the form of training or some other form of enrichment, or tools for yourself -- that is the real investment."
Coupland, a writer and designer, helped popularize the terms "McJob" -- meaning low-paying work -- and "Generation X," referring to bored and dispossessed youth.
After 20 years, Coupland is still putting our office-based existence under the magnifying glass. What he finds, worries him.
"I think the workplace ethic has become far too invasive. It kind of scares me. You cannot take your work home with you because home is also work now," he says.
"The only advantage that youth has over old age is that youth has more hours in the day that can be sucked away by a company."
Vancouve-based Coupland is the author of ten books, including Life After God, All Families are Psychotic and Microserfs -- a fictional account of life at a software company.
He believes the biggest challenge now facing technology in the workplace is how to reduce the number of interruptions.
"Instead of being interrupted 50 times a day, you are now interrupted 400 times. Cumulatively you lose your sense of time -- it is called interruption-driven memory," he says.
"Within the space of one year you say 'boy, that was a quick year wasn't it?' When you lose your sense of time you also lose a sense that your life has some sort of value."
Although Coupland stopped working in offices 15 years ago, there is a part of him that still misses the cubicle farm.
"They are hell but there is the water cooler, and there is the gossip. Offices are not all bad -- I miss them sometimes," he says.
-- CNN's Andrew Carey contributed to this report
