For all but the last ten thousand or so of these many years, we lived as seminomadic hunters and gatherers. These timescales are sufficiently vast for the insistent logics of natural selection to adapt our bodies and brains toward an existence in which our experience of “work” was centered on foraging. When seeking to understand the friction points in contemporary office life, therefore, a good place to start might be to identify where our current work routines most differ from what our prehistoric ancestors evolved to expect.
