Monday Feelings, Open Plan Offices, and the Myth of Workplace Happiness

There’s a meme floating around that basically captures the existential dread of dragging yourself into the office on a Monday morning, and the comments underneath it turned into something far more interesting than the joke itself. Hundreds of people sharing their workplace grievances, their small victories, their nostalgia for cubicles — yes, cubicles — and the occasional moment of genuine philosophical despair. It’s oddly comforting and deeply unsettling at the same time.

Let me start with the cubicle thing, because honestly, it deserves more attention than it gets. There was a time when the humble cubicle was considered the symbol of corporate soul-crushing monotony. Office Space made a whole cultural moment out of it. And yet here we are in 2025, and people are genuinely nostalgic for cubicles. Someone in the thread mentioned they hadn’t seen one in decades, and that now fifty people are crammed into a single room euphemistically called an “open plan office.” Another person described it perfectly — a white collar sweatshop. That one stung because it’s not entirely wrong.

The open plan office was sold to us as a revolution in collaboration and creativity. Tear down the walls! Foster spontaneous connection! What actually happened is that we got fluorescent lighting, zero acoustic privacy, the constant ambient noise of someone’s Teams call, and the creeping paranoia that everyone can see your screen. The research has been pretty consistent for years now that open plan offices hurt productivity rather than help it. And yet somehow, here we all are, sardined in together like it’s a great idea.

Working in IT, I’ve lived through multiple office configurations. There’s something to be said for having a dedicated space — even a modest one — where you can put your head down and actually think. Deep work, the kind that actually requires concentration, is nearly impossible when there’s a running commentary happening two metres away. I’ve genuinely had colleagues pop noise-cancelling headphones on as a do not disturb signal, which is a workaround for a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Now, the work-from-home crowd in that thread had some things to say, and look — I get it. Someone describing their home setup with an expensive ergonomic chair, birds outside, a water dragon doing its thing by the pool… that does sound pretty idyllic. But they also admitted they miss people sometimes. That’s the tension nobody really wants to talk about honestly. Pure isolation has its own costs. The sweet spot — a proper hybrid arrangement with genuine flexibility, not the performative “we trust you” that evaporates the moment a new CEO wants to justify the real estate spend — that’s what most people actually want.

The part of the discussion that stuck with me most, though, was the debate about whether it’s even possible to not hate your job. Someone pushed back on all the doom-posting and said, look, it is possible to find work you don’t despise, and they got absolutely roasted for it. The sarcasm was thick — I LOVE MY JOB AND I LOVE SYNERGY! — and honestly, I laughed. But there’s something worth unpacking there.

The critic wasn’t entirely wrong. It genuinely is possible to land somewhere that doesn’t crush your spirit. I’ve had jobs I’ve genuinely liked. But “just find a better job” as advice exists in a vacuum that ignores housing costs, visa situations, family obligations, skill gaps, and the reality that the jobs market isn’t a frictionless marketplace where the best option is always just one application away. In Melbourne right now, cost of living pressure is real, and a lot of people are in roles they’d leave tomorrow if they could afford the risk. Telling someone to just find a job they love when they’re locked into a mortgage in the outer suburbs with a teenager to feed — that’s advice that lands with a thud.

What I think the more nuanced take looks like is somewhere between the two poles. You probably shouldn’t hate your job — that’s genuinely corrosive to your wellbeing over time. But the cultural pressure to love your job, to find your passion and monetise it, to have your identity wrapped up in your career — that’s its own kind of trap. A job can just be a job. It can be a thing you do competently, that funds the life you actually care about, without being your reason for existing. There’s dignity in that, and I think we’ve collectively forgotten it somewhere between hustle culture and LinkedIn inspiration posts.

The young person in the thread who said they’d been in the workforce five minutes and already felt burnt out — yeah, the pile-on for that was a bit harsh. Gen Z entering the workforce is doing so into an environment of hot-desking, contract work, wage stagnation relative to cost of living, and the lingering psychological weirdness of having done their formative education years through a pandemic. A little grace wouldn’t go astray.

What would actually help? Better workplace protections, genuine right-to-disconnect legislation (which Australia has started to move on, to be fair), managers who understand that productivity isn’t the same as visibility, and maybe — just maybe — bringing back some damn walls in offices. Even partial ones. Give people a sense of their own space.

The meme was just a joke about Mondays. But the conversation underneath it was people being genuinely honest about something they rarely get to say out loud. That’s worth paying attention to.