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

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.

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 need to keep reinforcing their physical foundations.

Parents can nurture this boundary-setting skill in their children by giving them age-appropriate ownership over specific spaces. Like letting preschoolers lay claim to “their” chair at the kitchen table or giving middle schoolers a bedroom wall they’re allowed to draw on or a corner where they can build projects without being told to clean up. Teenagers need even more autonomy: their own room (and the expectation that parents will knock before entering) or a garage space where they can play loud music, paint, or tinker—on their own terms. Having total control over these small realms builds the independence kids need to assert their agency everywhere.

When we are adults, opportunities to practise setting our physical boundaries abound. When we enter a coffee shop, we might scan for a quiet corner with ample space between tables, then angle our chair to discourage interruptions. At work, we can position our computer so that we aren’t tempted to make eye contact and then conversation with passersby, or perhaps we take a deep work task out of the cubicle to the flex space with a door. When we wish to make our boundaries more porous rather than firmer, we can choose the communal table, signalling openness to chance encounters. Learning to claim and defend our personal space is just one way in which our surroundings help us grow. Once we’ve established our territory, it’s time to venture beyond.

Back when I was looking at colleges, my dad always insisted on going “off-tour” during campus visits to see what my life there would really be like. We’d peek into labs where students ran experiments and art studios where half-finished projects lay scattered about. He’d even insist we eat in dining halls with college students in their natural habitat. Picture me trying to look cool while my dad asked strangers about snack food options and salad bar logistics: “Are there always Sun Chips?” These unscripted moments were the beginning of my higher education. Despite the occasional humiliation, they allowed me to imagine myself navigating these new spaces—and my new life in them.

The growth that happens when people venture from home to explore new lands is so formative that it has become a classic storyline. While these stories are fiction, the larger arcs resonate because they’re true. These mythical characters grow when they acclimate to new lands. So do we. And while it’s not just the new physical surroundings that change us, learning to adapt to new places is a big part of the equation.

One juncture at which this learning reliably happens is when we first leave home, whether off to college, to the military, to a new city, or just to our own apartment. I see it every fall. Whether the first-years I encounter have embarked from a suburb of Washington, DC, a small rural town in Virginia, or another country, they are standing on a threshold between two worlds, leaving one set of experiences behind and immersing themselves in new ones.

The growth during those first months is remarkable to witness. Yes, students learn from their classes. But the most dramatic learning comes from adapting to a whole new world. The dorm room requires negotiating shared space with a stranger. The campus layout demands figuring out the fastest route to class and learning to distinguish between nearly identical-looking buildings. And the dining hall’s seating configurations are like a seminar in the social hierarchies of college life. As Annie Murphy Paul argues convincingly in her acclaimed book, The Extended Mind, “Much more than we usually recognize, humans use their environment to solve problems—an environment that is both material and social.”

When students gain confidence navigating their surroundings, their confidence grows in other areas. The once-overwhelmed first-year student who showed up with a parent-curated schedule now confidently drops a class that isn’t the right fit and adds one that sparks their interest. Students who were (sensibly) nervous about the communal bathroom start hosting movie nights in the common room. Whether it’s a new country, a new city, or merely a new apartment, adapting to a new physical place can sometimes overwhelm us, especially when that shift is compounded by other life changes that we’re managing. New spaces can help us grow, but sometimes they can push us over the edge.

This tension is reflected in the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, versions of which have been used since the 1960s as a rough measure of how someone is handling change. The scale assigns points to life events that require readjusting, things like marriage, pregnancy, and retirement (with bigger disruptions counting for more points). The total score indicates how much stress someone might be under. It’s a simple but revealing scale: High scores correlate with stress-related symptoms and illnesses, like fatigue, anxiety, and heart disease.

One thing to notice about the scale is that it includes living in a new place. Being a new parent with a new job gets a high score. But being a new parent with a new job in a new city gets an even higher one. Getting used to new spaces—whether that first dorm room, a forever home, or a retirement downsize—consistently ranks at or near the top of life’s most stressful experiences, right up there with personal injury, divorce, and death of a close family member.

These events are especially stressful when we take a sink-or-swim approach. Spatial learning deserves the same care and preparation we give other types of growth. When learning math, we don’t go from times tables straight to calculus. When getting fit, we don’t run our first mile one day and a marathon the next. Going away to college will be terrifying for the teen who has never spent more than a night away from home, and moving halfway around the world may overwhelm the young adult who has never travelled outside their home state.

We want to be challenged by our spaces, not overwhelmed. At the same time, we’ll never reach the marathon if we only run a mile each day, and we’ll never learn calculus if we never master multiplication. To grow in a big way, we need to get slightly out of our comfort zone, adapt to the new reality and then do it again and again and again.

My friend’s dad, Larry, refuses to use GPS in a new city. He only uses paper maps, and sometimes, just for fun, he’ll get on a random bus, get off at a random stop, and challenge himself to find his way back. Yes, this sounds like the classic trope about men refusing to ask for directions, but Larry’s approach is different because it’s intentional practice, not prideful avoidance.

We can follow Larry’s lead by occasionally choosing the less-travelled spatial option on purpose. Take the long way home. Try to find new shortcuts. Do pickup instead of delivery. Small doses of spatial novelty build our adaptability muscles and make us feel capable.

This approach has even become a movement: During the annual World Wide Wander, thousands of people around the world sync up to deliberately get a little lost in their respective neighbourhoods. Like Larry’s bus adventures, each small navigation challenge strengthens wanderers’ confidence in their ability to handle the unknown.

Of course, it’s also nice to not get hopelessly lost visiting a new city, to set the temperature where we want, and to be able to try a new restaurant without leaving the couch. The challenge is finding the right balance between familiarity and growth.

The right balance may come from changing how we move through our spaces, and it may come from adapting how we use them. New uses for the same spaces can be a great way to stretch ourselves without getting overwhelmed. The problem is that brains tend to form fixed ideas about how certain places should be used based on what we’ve used them for before.

Our brains are remarkably good at learning the “right” way to use things. But this ability can become mental handcuffs when we need to think creatively about spaces. The more we use something the same way (the table for eating, the pantry for storing food, for example), the more we overlook other possible uses. These mental labels become self-fulfilling prophecies that limit both our spaces and ourselves.

Once recognized, however, those limitations turn into opportunities. That formal living room might get more use as an art studio for your middle schooler. The garage might be perfect for hosting neighbourhood game nights. Even small shifts—like drinking your morning coffee on the back steps instead of in the kitchen—can reveal new possibilities.

One summer, our friends, the Lees, changed the way they thought about their backyard’s function. They had taken to eating dinner there—and not just for special cookout dinners when the weather was nice. The backyard became the default choice for family meals, and it made the whole experience better for everyone. Instead of reverberating off the kitchen walls, vegetable-related tantrums evaporated into the warm summer air. When the twins had to “get some big energy out” between dinner and dessert, the geodesic climbing dome and basketball hoop were right there. Spilled milk and thrown peas weren’t messes—they just cycled nutrients back into the ecosystem.

Imagining new uses for the same spaces adds more variety to daily life. So does taking a different route somewhere familiar, or visiting a space we’ve never been to in our hometown, or spending an hour in a completely new environment (eating at a new restaurant, taking a walk in a new park, or visiting a new city). These small shifts remind us that the world is still full of places that can teach us something.

And just as we can expand our comfort zones to learn and grow, we can use spaces to instill specific lessons and ways of thinking.

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Recall the last time a grand view took your breath away. Maybe you pulled over at a scenic overlook to gaze across hills and valleys. Maybe you hiked to a summit and watched the world open up below. Or maybe you wandered a trail and found yourself in a cathedral of towering pine trees. In these moments, the awesome natural surroundings quiet our internal chatter, as if our brains know this is a moment to be present.

For our ancestors, this would have been a useful response. When you are fully present in your natural surroundings, you’re more likely to notice important features—safer paths, new food sources, subtle warnings of impending danger. It’s the opposite of habituation. Instead of tuning out the familiar, these moments demand we tune in completely. Over time, evolution may have favoured this ability to temporarily shift into this receptive state and truly see what’s in front of us.

So where, other than the rare pockets of unspoiled wilderness, might we encounter these mind-opening experiences? Two psychologists, Dacher Keltner and Yang Bai, took an elegant and exhaustive approach to this question, asking people to share stories of times they felt “in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” They gathered responses from across the globe—2,600 stories in twenty different languages—then analyzed them to determine what brought people these glimpses of transcendence.

What Keltner and Bai found was that people still have perspective-shifting experiences when taking in vast landscapes, like deserts, mountains, and oceans. But they also have them in human-built spaces—and not just majestic churches and monasteries but everyday homes and gardens too. People told so many stories of transcendent human-made spaces that Keltner gave them their own category in his taxonomy of transcendence.

Unfortunately, awe-inspiring surroundings are becoming harder to find. Most people spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, sealed off from natural sources of transcendence. Electric light means we never have to notice when the sun sets or the moon rises. Soundproof windows silence the birdsong just outside our walls. Rivers disappear beneath highways, mountain views are cluttered by towers, and light pollution erases the majestic night sky.

We’ve created spaces designed for comfort and convenience—not transcendence. Even our outdoor time rarely delivers. Mowed lawns, paved paths, and manicured gardens may look orderly and even impressive, but they’re hardly awe-inspiring. And when we do encounter places that would have blown our ancestors’ minds, our knowledge can diminish the wonder. That towering redwood? My dad explained its cellulose and water transport systems. That stunning sunset? Just light scattering through particles. We’re awed by what we can’t understand—and science has explained away many of the mysteries that once left people speechless.

But growing wiser need not dim the world’s magic. We can still find awe by seeing new details, noticing what’s missing, or discerning which features were planned and which evolved. Whether it’s appreciating the physics that keep massive buildings standing or contemplating the countless decisions that turned our cities into complex systems, opportunities for transcendent experiences surround us. We just have to train ourselves to notice them.

To reclaim those perspective-shifting moments our ancestors stumbled into daily, try what I call the “awe audit.” Spend one week noticing when you feel that little spark of wonder—maybe it’s the way afternoon light hits your kitchen wall or how the city looks different from the sixth floor of a parking garage. Write them down. Then graduate to the bigger stuff. Find a special spot within thirty minutes of home that reliably makes your daily concerns feel small, maybe a hilltop, a cathedral, or even that one intersection where the highway curves and the whole valley opens up. Visit your transcendent spot monthly, the way you might schedule a dinner out. Awe is available to all of us. And unlike our ancestors, we get to choose our dose.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive by Leidy Klotz, published by Little Brown Spark, an imprint of Hachette Group, 2026.