Your Brain Hates Your Cubicle—Here’s How to Thrive Anyway

Work is a most unnatural thing to happen to a human if you stop and think about it.

For most of our species' time on this planet, we've labored only in exchange for immediate returns. Food, shelter, a fire that wouldn’t go out overnight; the kind that is nestled firmly at the bottom of the Maslowian hierarchy.

Ethnographic time-budget studies of modern hunter–gatherers and nomadic pastoralists show a similar rhythm where a handful of focused hours are devoted to subsistence tasks, followed by a long drift of conversation, storytelling, and play. Most likely, this is the closest approximation of humankind's relationship with work for countless millennia, up until the moment it all abruptly changed.

Work as a separate, clock-bound institution of intrinsic value is a human invention through and through, and a surprisingly recent one at that. This insight sits at the heart of anthropologist James Suzman’s magisterial book Work: A Deep History, which casts a curious glance at how an activity once measured in avoided hunger pangs turned into something that now devours half our waking lives.

Why “work” had to be invented in the first place

As Suzman and many others have observed, humans are the only species that regularly bribes others to toil eight uninterrupted hours at tasks only indirectly related to survival. Our cherished concept of work would be entirely foreign to our ancestors from 10,000 years ago, and we have agriculture and, later, factories to thank for rewiring the equation. Food surpluses enabled population booms and the birth of civilization, but they also tied us into routines and a newfound sense of roteness. Both the wheat field and the factory floor convert time spent by humans into outputs, and the twentieth-century office cubicle, or nowadays the open-floor plan, is simply an assembly line with softer lighting and an occasional beanbag in the corner.

Work came to signal not only access to money but membership, status, and moral virtue. David Graeber famously called modern white-collar drudgery Bullsh*t Jobs in his 2018 book, yet even he conceded that people often find that work carries an existential charge many of us yearn for. We like being able to answer, “So, what do you do?”, and the fact that we were able to self-domesticate an entire planet's worth of people into doing work speaks of deeply rooted evolutionary triggers that the concept tugs on.

In fact, no other species can be cajoled into spreadsheets or night shifts. Ants tunnel and bees forage, and sure oxen and horses till the fields, but none clock in extra hours for abstract perks and 20 days of paid leave. In addition to there being few other options, humans comply with the concept of work because work taps ancient social circuitry, and because work works for us.

Evolution wired us to seek reputation, reciprocal favor, and proof of usefulness to the group, traits that once increased the odds our kin would feed us when luck ran dry. Neuroscience confirms the dopamine hit we get from work, with cooperative effort lights up reward circuits much like food or sex (Rilling et al., 2002). A paycheck is nice, but feeling indispensable is intoxicating.

Cultural evolution has weaponized this itch over the millennia that followed the agricultural revolution. As soon as grain surpluses and factories created tasks that were divorced from immediate survival, we began to wrap them in narratives of duty and identity. Medieval guild oaths, Protestant work ethic sermons, corporate mission statements all rebrand toil as a badge of belonging, if not honor. The result is a species uniquely capable of self-domesticating into offices and assembly lines, deeply persuaded by the notion that labor itself is a moral good.

From an evolutionary lens, Homo sapiens are optimized for the impact, not the grind. We seek to alter our surroundings in ways that raise inclusive fitness. We protect our kin, gain allies, signal competence and take on roles valued by others in our society.

Grasping this sets the stage for understanding why a growing number of us are disillusioned with the modern workplace.

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The spreadsheets, status meetings, and quarterly OKRs that keep us busy today don't exactly provide the same kind of sensory feedback or sense of purpose that our species thrives on, or what converted us into the religion of work to begin with. Research on self-determination theory shows that intrinsic motivation spikes when activities satisfy autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Most jobs meet these needs only sporadically, which is why “quiet quitting” and “The Great Resignation” feel inevitable rather than rebellious.

How to Re-Engineer Work so Your Brain Says “Yes” To Work

Even if evolution hates our cubicle, all is not lost.

A 2018 meta-analysis found that people who experienced their work as meaningful showed the same neural signatures of flourishing while on the clock as they did during leisure (Allan et al., 2018). The enemy, then, is not work itself, but work that starves us of the very nutrients of purpose, mastery, belonging, that life outside the office must also supply.

We can start restoring these nutrients with three simple moves.

First, restore agency. Autonomy is a biological appetite. Studies of job-crafting show that even modest control over when or how tasks get done lifts engagement and buffers burnout. Batch your deep-focus blocks; kill the “always-on” chat tab; negotiate one day a week for thinking work that is interruption-free.

Second, make feedback visceral. In hunter-gatherer bands, effort translated quickly into praise, or dinner. Tighten your own loops: pipe customer stories straight to the team, watch a live dashboard update as code ships, celebrate micro-wins in real time. Dopamine cares little for an annual review delivered six months late; it craves a near-instant proof that the tribe noticed.

Third, anchor effort to a shared story of purpose. Humans interpret labor through narrative. Research with hospital cleaning staff shows that simply hearing patient-recovery anecdotes boosts pride and cuts absenteeism (Wrzesniewski, 2012). Link your next slide deck to a user’s problem solved and the midnight edits feel less like sandpaper and more like craft.

Work may be an invention—recent and often ill-fitting—but it is not doomed to feel unnatural. We can redesign the job, or our stance to them, until the hours we spend earning a living also feel like hours spent living.