“High-functioning sleepwalkers”

“High-functioning sleepwalkers” is a phrase for people who appear to manage their lives while moving through them with diminished awareness and little real joy. Introduced in a conversation about dissatisfaction with work, it becomes more than a description of one unhappy employee: Clark Thompson recognizes it as a name for his own years of routine, and the novel uses that recognition to question what passes for happiness when distraction substitutes for engagement.

Meaning and Context

Dahlia applies the phrase to people who have ended up in lives different from the ones they might have wanted. They have done what was expected of them, but obligations such as a mortgage and children make change seem impossible. Her example, Dan, does not appear to recognize that he dislikes his job. The expression therefore describes a gap between outward functioning and inward awareness: a person can keep meeting responsibilities without recognizing how little the life built around them satisfies them.

Dahlia’s account makes that condition concrete through the daily rhythm of work. A brief, enjoyable break with colleagues can create an afterglow, but by late afternoon the day has settled back into routine. The cycle reaches toward five o’clock, the weekend, and a few weeks of paid vacation, while the years accumulate around those anticipated intervals. Such moments of pleasure are real, but, in Dahlia’s analysis, they are too slight and temporary to amount to sustained happiness.

Clark’s Recognition

Clark is affected by the description because it makes an ordinary experience feel newly legible. He remembers spending five minutes laughing in a break room at a colleague’s impression of a television bit. Against Dahlia’s account, the incident no longer stands as evidence that work is fulfilling; it resembles a brief interruption in an otherwise repetitive day. Clark’s response is not simply agreement with her assessment of Dan. He begins to suspect that the pattern describes him as well.

As he leaves the interview, Clark reflects on his own work and on his years of moving through life half-asleep. He cannot identify when he last felt genuine joy in his job, or when anything last moved him deeply. His questions mark the phrase’s importance in the novel: it gives him a way to recognize a condition that had not presented itself to him as clear unhappiness. The problem is not that he has ceased to function, but that functioning has become detached from attention, inspiration, and a felt sense of being present.

That recognition also changes how Clark thinks about other people. He regrets judging people absorbed in their phones on the sidewalk, understanding that he too has been minimally present in the world. He extends the same reconsideration to the people he has written about in his 360° reports, now aware that being made the target of such a report can be painful. The metaphor thus opens outward: recognizing his own inattention leads Clark to question the judgments through which he had treated other people as objects of scrutiny.

Habit, Movement, and the Changed World

The phrase acquires added force in a narrative where the structures that once supported ordinary routines do not survive. In the world after the pandemic, airplanes remain on runways and in hangars, no longer carrying people between distant cities; some are repurposed to store food. The Travelling Symphony’s former pickup trucks have had their engines and fuel systems removed and are drawn by horses. These details do not define Dahlia’s metaphor, but they sharpen its contrast: before familiar systems of movement fail, people can be busy and outwardly productive while feeling trapped in lives they barely examine; afterward, movement itself becomes difficult, dependent on different resources and routes.

The distinction is visible in two departures. Kirsten Raymonde and Peter leave an emptying Toronto in an abandoned car, but clogged expressway ramps and side roads eventually force them to continue on foot. Jeevan Chaudhary, determined to avoid other people, follows the lakeshore rather than the roads. Their actions belong to the physical emergency of the changed world, not to Dahlia’s account of workplace malaise. Read beside the expression, however, they make passivity and constraint resonate differently: the earlier sleepwalker’s life is shaped by obligations and habitual expectations, while the later traveler must confront the conditions of movement directly.

Significance

“High-functioning sleepwalkers” captures a form of dissatisfaction that can hide inside competence. Dahlia’s example identifies the routine; Clark’s response supplies its personal consequence. What first sounds like an observation about someone else’s work becomes a recognition of lost attention, followed by a more sympathetic view of strangers and the people Clark has assessed professionally. The phrase’s force lies in that progression: waking up begins not with a dramatic escape from ordinary life, but with noticing how little presence ordinary life has contained.