I first read Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs in 2000 in the midst of the high-tech boom—of which my company was a small part. After almost a year of 12+ hour days, I was burnt out and in need of a serious break. My boss had responded to my burnt-ness by agreeing to send me overseas for a few months to help get our European operations underway. On the way there, I unwound my hunched shoulders and devoured Microserfs in one sitting—it was the first book I’d had time to read in a looong time.

I had expected a light-hearted book all about the trails and travails of computer programmers in the 1990s, and Microserfs surely delivered that. But I was surprised by the book’s huge heart and love for its geeky, awkward, somewhat inscrutable characters. This book asks some really big questions, as relevant to our post-tech boom lives as they were to life in the first flush of internet fast money. How do we find meaning in a world made up of tidbits of information? When there are no rules or models for relationship, no overarching theme to life? When we’re not even sure how to reach out to each other in the flesh? In this hilarious, sweet, unassuming story, Coupland’s characters find a way.

Published in 1995, Microserfs documents the life of several young Microsoft employees through the eyes of Dan, a tester who lives in a programmer group house and keeps thinking that he needs to get a life. He’s not sure how, and being surrounded by socially inept high-IQ tech types doesn’t help. But he strikes up a friendship with fellow Microserf Karla by bringing her noodles, and over udon, shiatsu, and deep conversation, they start to fall in love. Dan’s relationship with Karla is the first building block of the life he is creating, though he isn’t exactly aware of it yet.

As the story unfolds, Dan and his friends escape from Microsoft and head to Northern California to start a new company, Oop!, a platform which allows users to create their own worlds within the program. The original low-tech future-creating tool, Lego, becomes the team’s totem as they put in long hours and try to find a coherent way to live and work and think about the world. After all the effort and faith in their ideas, will the new company fail or succeed? And more importantly, will the members of the team figure out how to put together the pieces of their experiences and dreams to create fulfilling, happy lives?

Much has been made of Coupland’s ability to capture the zeitgeist, and it’s true that this book is chock full of nerdy pop culture references that were so perfect they made me laugh out loud—one passage where the female geeks riff about their periods and the terrified males secretly IM each other in shock had me literally rolling around in my chair.

But to praise the book for its dead-on cultural reflection is to miss the point. Microserfs is about these characters’ attempts to build their lives on something besides the shifting sands of quotable TV shows and outdated technology. Even as the characters examine and luxuriate in postmodernity—they explicitly talk about it on at least a dozen occasions—they still can feel, intuitively, that there is more to life than skillful navigation of corporatized cultural mish-mash.

In creating Oop!, they are reaching for an organizing principle, a new platform for living. It’s no accident that as their world-creating computer program takes shape, so do their lives. Coupland draws connections between human bodies and hard drives, between computers and consciousness, and in so doing shows us an optimistic vision of creative possibility in both the digital and analog real realms, especially in the story’s incredibly satisfying ending. I think, therefore I am, is replaced by We create, therefore we are.

This little book is much more than “an accurate look at a thriving subculture,” as proclaimed by the Boston Globe on the back cover. It’s an exploration into how we can get past nihilism and uncertainty to build truth and family, even when we don’t know how.