French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit, was based around a depiction of the afterlife in which three characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. The 1944 play is the source of the endlessly repeated aphorism: “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (Hell is other people).
Those who toil in offices do not need to be fans of existentialist philosophy to understand Sartre's essential point because they live the reality of it every working day. As we reported yesterday, a study of local office workers found that two-thirds complained of at least one factor in their workplace – such as polar-temperature air-conditioning, glacially-slow lifts and the distractions of open-plan offices – that made them less productive.
With everyone’s differing preferences, is this just the nature of communal spaces? Maybe the answer is in another literary illusion, Leo Tolstoy’s opening line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
