Privacy is both an essential and a luxury. Most of us, regardless of socioeconomic status, are separated from our neighbors by walls. Sometimes you might hear those neighbors through the walls, but the separation is still there. It’s pretty much a baseline requirement of life. The richer you get, though, the more privacy you might be able to afford via gates, shrubs, hell, a moat, if you fancy.

Yet privacy, at least privacy in any sort of architectural form, is an incredibly new human invention. And whether this invention is entirely beneficial is up for debate when you really look at the big picture.

For centuries, our ancestors ate, slept, breastfed, bathed, and lived virtually every waking and sleeping moment together with the other members of their clan. As anthropologists like David Samson have discovered, when an individual or couple did require some, ahem, alone time, this was communicated nonverbally. If........

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