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The Long, Slow Death of the Cubicle Farm
Why I’m done with the office, and you should be too
For decades, the 9–5 office job has been the gold standard of white collar professional environments. Our great-grandparents, forced to work 12 hour days on farms and factories, may have only dared to dream of such a workplace. The sentiment is the same for many of today’s essential workers who toil for minimum wage in manual labor and service jobs. But the cubicle has become a cage of misery for too many people, forced into an unnatural sedentary state for 8 hours a day with no privacy or personal space, unnecessary disruptions from gossiping coworkers, and constant stress from micromanaging higher-ups.
Not only are such workplaces miserable for workers, but they are comically inefficient for companies as well. Empirical evidence shows the average office worker spends under 3 hours on actual work per day, with many wasting the other 5 hours on the clock pretending to look busy. And good luck trying to do something meaningful with all of that downtime. Those who do not fake it well enough to avoid detection by managers are often punished for the crime of being efficient, and told to complete their work more slowly. Workers who spend free time reading, taking a class, or learning a new skill may be punished for spending time on the clock doing activities not…
