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You’re Not Imagining It: Cookie-Cutter Offices Are Making You Less Productive

The science behind how spaces affect our lives

Humans learn by reading, studying, and practising. But these are recent inventions on the scale of evolutionary history. Long before classrooms existed, our ancestors acquired new skills and knowledge by adapting to their surroundings—turning wilderness into shelter, chaos into order. Their physical environment was the classroom, and dealing with new challenges in it was the curriculum.

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This primal way of learning hasn’t lost its power. Pre-schoolers discover how to set personal boundaries by sharing a playroom with their peers. A small-town kid gains quiet confidence from learning his way around the big city. An executive thinks of new ways to support front-line workers after moving her office from headquarters to the factory floor. These aren’t just changes in scenery; they’re catalysts for personal growth.

Unfortunately, many of these opportunities are being engineered away. Offices in Tokyo feel identical to ones in Toronto. College dorms offer all the amenities of home. And why would we bother learning our way around a new city when we have a maps app right on our phone?

We don’t need to give up modern comforts to keep growing through our spaces. But we do need to venture beyond our routines—whether by exploring unfamiliar territories or by seeing fresh potential in familiar ones. Sometimes just sitting at a new cafe sparks different thinking. Other times we stumble upon spaces so vast they humble us completely, reminding us how much more there is to discover. Our surroundings offer both kinds of opportunities. It’s up to us to recognize them.

“Space!” That was the greeting to me when I crossed into the playroom, hoping to get some quality time with my daughter, Josie, who was twisting together pipe cleaners. Her directive was clear. “Space,” she had learned, was the magic word, allowing her to lay claim to a circle roughly ten feet in diameter: a force field around her that no one was permitted to enter.

Josie had learned this life hack at preschool, where the curriculum included jumping from boxes, swinging on ropes, painting each other, and occasionally tossing shovels (I’m looking at you, Noah). In the midst of this chaos, children learned by necessity how to claim their personal “space!”

I saw Josie’s mastery of this lesson during school pickup. Sometimes, she created a ten-foot circle of alone time with that single word. Other times, she staked claim to a protected corner, sheltered under a table, or erected a pillow fort. And in that little oasis of her own making, Josie didn’t need to be on high alert. She could work on her art, take care of her stuffed pigs, or fine-tune her dance moves. It was up to her.

Josie wasn’t only retreating from the chaos when she claimed her space. She was developing a transferable skill. Learning to set physical boundaries teaches us to set emotional ones too.

A bit of neuroscience helps us appreciate how intertwined our physical and emotional boundaries are. Our sense of personal space is partly regulated by the amygdala, the same brain region that processes emotions like fear and anxiety. We know this because, in some well-documented cases, people with damaged amygdalae will freely approach and touch strangers, showing no discomfort when others do the same to them. Without the amygdala’s emotional processing, their instinctive need for personal space seems to dissolve. For the rest of us, the amygdala lights up when someone gets too close, triggering that urge to maintain our bubble.

Back in the 1960s, anthropologist Edward Hall gave this invisible phenomenon a (fancy) name: proxemics. Hall was among the first to systematically study how we all carry invisible bubbles around with us, mapping zones from intimate space (out to about eighteen inches) to social space (from four to twelve feet). He showed that when someone violates these boundaries in either direction—standing too close during casual conversation or maintaining formal distance during intimate moments—we feel it immediately, even if we can’t articulate why. The ability to enforce our personal space translates directly to setting boundaries with pushy coworkers, creating work–life balance, and establishing healthy emotional limits in relationships. Those social boundaries have gone from therapy speak to dinner party conversation, and they matter enormously. But we........

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