My first real office job was in this building downtown where my desk sat directly under an air conditioning vent that rattled. Loudly. Every fourteen minutes is like clockwork. I timed it because by week two I was losing my mind. And the fluorescent lights overhead? They hummed at a frequency that I swear made my teeth hurt. I lasted four months before I quit, and honestly the job itself wasn’t even that bad. The space just made it impossible to think. That experience stuck with me, though. Made me start paying attention to how the rooms we work in actually shape our days. And here’s what I’ve learned after years of writing about design and talking to people way smarter than me about neuroscience and workplace psychology: where we work isn’t just background noise. It’s actively messing with our brains, our bodies, our ability to do literally anything well.…
