Writing

Something in our brains keeps pulling us back into the digital realm, beyond habit, beyond preference. Dr. Anna Lembke calls it the dopamine economy: the relentless pursuit of pleasure, and the lost ability to tolerate discomfort. The smartphone, she argues, is the modern hypodermic needle. What does this mean for knowledge workers and for workplace strategy?

During my 100-day digital detox, I kept a diary of my digital cravings. Patterns emerged around time, intelligence, and space. What I hadn't anticipated was this: place itself became a mechanism for managing digital behaviour, literally creating geographic distance between myself and the urge. Could physical place be the antidote to the virtual vacuum?

On 1 August 2024, I began a 100-day virtual vacuum cleanse: no Netflix, no mindless scrolling, screens used only with intention. I had failed a similar experiment earlier in the year after just 14 days. This time, I kept a diary. What I found was not quite what I had expected, and it changed how I think about the role of place in the digital age.

You know that moment when you step outside in the morning and it strikes you what a beautiful day it is? Those moments of solitude are becoming rarer. Not because the sun isn't shining, but because something else is pulling at our attention. I call it the virtual vacuum. And I think it is quietly reshaping how knowledge workers experience place.

First place, second place, third place, and now a fourth. Unlike the others, this one has no address. The digital realm has become a place we inhabit daily, a cloud that forms above every other space and pours its influence into each of them. What does human geography make of a place that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time?

Home is the first place. Work is the second. Everything else, cafes, parks, libraries, is what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called the third place. But something has shifted. Work is spilling into all three. When the boundaries between first, second, and third places dissolve, what happens to our sense of belonging and our relationship with place?

What would the ideal workplace look like through the lens of topophilia? Not just the office, but a train, a library, an airport lounge, a cruise ship. Knowledge workers are showing up in all of these, and their presence is quietly transforming the nature of each space. This is a thought experiment in workplace utopia, and what it reveals about place attachment.

The relationship between knowledge workers and their central workplaces is, in many ways, the most contested it has ever been. Staff are visiting their offices less. The bond between people and place is weakening. There is a word in human geography for that bond: topophilia. Understanding it may be the most important thing workplace strategists do right now.

Humans have a deep-seated desire to control geographic space. Geographer Robert Sack called it territoriality: the attempt to assert and delimit control over place. It plays out at the geopolitical scale, and it plays out at the desk-booking scale. What does territorial instinct reveal about how people actually experience the modern workplace?

In the 1960s, knowledge work was concentrated in time and place: standard hours, centralised offices, analogue tools. That world is gone. Work has since diffused across space and time in ways that bring both remarkable flexibility and genuine confusion. Human geography has a framework for understanding exactly what happened, and what it means for workplace strategy.

Hägerstrand's time geography was built on a fundamental premise: humans can only be in one place at a time. That was 1960. Since then, a third dimension has entered our daily lives, the digital realm. The space-time model no longer captures reality. So what does the updated version reveal about how knowledge workers experience work today?

In the 1960s, Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand developed a model to visualise how people move through space and time across a single day. It is called the space-time path. Applied to the workplace, it reveals something quietly profound: the constraints shaping where and when knowledge workers show up are not just logistical. They are geographic.

Human geography studies the interrelationship between people, space, and place across time. It is a discipline that has spent over a century asking questions that workplace strategy is only beginning to take seriously. Before we go further, it is worth understanding what human geography actually is, and why it matters for the world of work.

For a while, I kept deferring the idea of a newsletter. The abundance of workplace discourse left me wondering: is there more noise than value out there? But I kept sensing a real desire for deeper exploration, to go beyond the surface and apply a human geography lens to how and where we work. That is exactly what this series is about.