This cognitive dissonance is the inspiration for recent books such as The Expansion Project, or the TV show Severance, which present office life as dystopian. And the built-in lack of agency that we have in corporate life is also making a lot of people miserable. A Deloitte survey of Gen Z workers found 40 per cent were “stressed or anxious all or most of the time”; another, by Gallup, found the proportion of global workers who are “engaged” in their jobs fell from 23 to 21 per cent last year.