I've worked in offices on four continents, and the small differences astonished me. Take the bathrooms.
In Saudi Arabia, when women first started working in offices, there were no women's bathrooms. It was easier to bring women into the workforce than to redesign the buildings (walls and plumbing) to include them. In Kenya, the women's bathroom is more like a backstage lounge than a utility room. An outside woman comes in every day to wax and braid hair. Female employees take their coffee breaks there, and no topic is off limits. It’s an entire ecosystem of gossip, care, and counsel, just out of sight of the official office. In London, most office bathrooms have a shower for use after sweaty commutes. The first time I walked in and saw my colleagues’ shower gels and toiletries lined up, I was embarrassed. Here, the office extends right up against the private routines of home.
My name is Mona, and I'm taking a break from work to explore the anthropology and phenomenology of work. Work is changing so fast, and I feel an urgency to understand it. I'm fascinated by the office as a habitat with its own ecology. This project is personal to me for several reasons:
- When I was born in 1990, 0.4% of Saudi working-age women worked in an office (12k). The number now is 10% (roughly half a million). But AI might radically change that and could clear them out as fast as they arrived. Their entire time in the office could begin and end within one lifetime, mine.
- Work changed my life more than anything else. It carried me from a married woman in an insular Saudi community to a divorced woman in New York working as a venture partner. I grew up with no access to secular books, music, or art. Hungry for the intellectual life I'd been denied, I fed that hunger with work. It paid for my life and taught me the world. I made my choices around it: Work was my education, my passport, and where almost all my friendships were built. I never took time between jobs.
Now let’s talk about my project:
"Work is the inescapable starting point for all social inquiry." — Robert Heilbroner
This project is for aliens who might arrive in 2070, or for our grandchildren (or possibly our alien grandchildren), trying to make sense of our office culture. It is also for the worker of today, who doesn't see what they're inside of.
We spend roughly a third of our waking life at work, and something that large leaves a footprint on everything: identity, status, purpose, school day, family form, city, weekend. All of this is shaped by work.
Now office culture is about to be altered beyond recognition, maybe even ended, by AI. Before it slips away or hardens into nostalgia, we need a clearer record of what it was like and what is worth carrying into designing what comes next.
Most narratives about office work fall into two traps. They are either about the hero's journey or about the 1% who made it. Or they are flat and tell an official story. They miss the internal experience and hidden details for most workers. They aren't where we go to feel a world, or to imagine another. For that, we turn to artifacts, personal accounts, the people who were inside it.
That is what Poetics of Work is for. I'm nosy. I love learning about people's lives and interiors. I'm drawn to private spaces. To the stories that form within them. The office is the most private space we have after the home, and almost no one has looked at it that way.
Georges Perec had a good definition of that: "endotic" and "infra-ordinary," calling for the attention we save for distant cultures to be turned onto our own overlooked, everyday life. So that's what I want to do. I plan to attend to the overlooked personal and emotional responses to office work, both in real life and in literature. I've already begun through interviews, photographs, and my own journals, as well as through novels like Pessoa's accountant in The Book of Disquiet.
I'll make these records and my notes public. So the felt life of the office exists somewhere. But my goal is also to identify in them the structures and theories that can accompany and support later grounds for politics and economics.