They are in fact exhibiting a disturbing psychological phenomenon known as learned helplessness . What your employer needs nowadays is your brainjuice, your ability to turn on the light bulb above your head, to shift ideas around rather than bales of hay. So, if you want to get paid for using your head rather than wearing out shoes or developing the hoary hands of the outdoors worker, it's 40 years of desk-centred activity for you. Humans, being immensely resourceful and yearning creatures, suffer from and react against such confinement. There are the health implications of sedentary careers - lack of exercise, poor posture, no fresh air, the glare of screens, repetitively strained tendons, atrophied mentalparts.
Office workers seek to escape through drink, drugs, karaoke and other noxious psychological habits.
Productivity suffers when office politics erupt like the gang wars you'd expect in any other cramped and fetid slum. Home Stories , a television show to be aired on Thursday, reveals that every week 1800 people quit the city and their jobs to move to the countryside. The author Steve Aylett asserts that 'an office is a machine for dying' - if that is so, then it is the office that must die first. As for the big picture, looking back on natural and social history it appears that periods of stagnation and stasis occur just before bouts of fitful expansion and innovation. This Week's Survey Office Rage.