I do IT work (about 1.5 years now) for a company that prides itself on being pretty loyal to their employees, and they really do seem to be. My management is honestly incredible. My boss treats everything very personally, allows my team time off when we’re sick without even stressing that we use our PTO unless it’s more than a day.
But the feeling still hits me like a truck every day I enter the parking lot: how in the world could this be considered natural, much less considered good? Am I really going to sit in this box under fake lights for the entirety of our sunlit hours instead of being outside? Despite there being other offices with windows? Is that what tenure gets you? Sunlight?
I think a tweet I saw recently put it best:
“The human body evolved over hundreds of thousands of years so you can sit at a desk in a sterile cubicle and look at fake lights in a box and pretend you don’t want to kill yourself. And if you can’t focus on doing that for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, that’s a mental disorder”.
Am I really destroying my eyesight for this? Destroying my circadian rhythm and therefore my sleep schedule? Am I ruining my ability to enjoy the time I do have off just so I can work another 5 days in a row? Is even going outside for the walk to my car for lunch even enough for my body? Because that’s all I can get 🙁
I guess the easy answer is maybe I’m in the wrong field, but screens would be everywhere anyway. How the heck do I fight against architecture? How do I get a job based on whether the *literal* environment is genuinely terrible to exist in?