Everything Is Illuminated Badly

Fluorescents were terrible. But LEDs can drive you insane.

In the first few minutes of Joe Versus the Volcano, the surrealist 1990 rom-com, Tom Hanks clocks in for his job at an artificial-testicle company housed in a factory-like building with flickering fluorescent lights. He stares up at the light, squinting and rubbing his swollen lymph nodes; soon, he’s diagnosed with a “brain cloud,” a fatal condition. Watching this scene, I gasped in recognition. This was me. I was Tom Hanks, slowly dying of a brain cloud caused by bad office lighting. To be clear, I’m not speaking specifically about the New York Magazine office’s lighting. Every workplace I’ve known has had lighting that made me feel varying degrees of insane and depressed. Why? I decided to investigate. My first call was to Dr. Mia Minen, an associate professor of neurology and the director of headache services at NYU Langone. I asked if bad lighting could kill you, and she paused for a long time. “No …,” she said. She did agree that bad lighting could ruin the quality of your life and confirmed that office lighting is a common migraine trigger. She said her patients complain to her about office lighting all the time, and she has even gone so far as to write them a doctor’s note saying they need special lighting accommodations at work. My next calls were to Gary Hustwit—a filmmaker who recently made Workplace, a documentary about the redesign of the New York headquarters of consultancy firm R/GA—and Ray Molony, the managing editor of Lux Review. Both men listened patiently as I complained about lights, then they told me offices and their accompanying lighting have mostly always sucked, which made me feel a little better. Back in the 1850s, offices were often dark little cave rooms populated by a handful of men working by gaslight. In the early 20th century, offices evolved to become the enormous, open-plan nightmares we know today, lit mostly by incandescent and then eventually fluorescent light, which was introduced in 1939. By the ’50s and ’60s, fluorescent tubes that threw light straight down onto people’s heads and flickered audibly were the dominant form of lighting. Arguably, things were at their worst in the mid-’80s, when desktop computers were proliferating and everyone was relighting their offices to avoid glare. They accomplished this via the heavily louvered Cat 2 luminaire, which made the office feel like Plato’s cave before Plato realized he could light his cave better. “I lived through the ’80s, and it wasn’t good,” said Molony of the Cat 2s. Eventually, Microsoft Windows made computers primarily whitescreened and black-lettered, which helped with glare; soon, energy-efficient LED lights became popular, cropping up in the Foosball-riddled tech offices of the early aughts, even though, as Molony put it, “LEDs have continued some of the sins of fluorescence.” Specifically, LEDs, now the primary office-lighting technology in the U.S., can slowly drive people insane by flickering at an imperceptible level, giving them headaches and, in my case, the lingering suspicion that reality is a subjective experience. “Artificial lighting in the office is not normal,” said Molony, then he told me about a trend to have lighting that changes in intensity throughout the day to mirror the outside world. Unfortunately, most of us are not part of this trend. It makes perfect sense that, 150 years later, we have not figured out how to light the space where we spend most of our waking hours. The human race famously loves to work against its own interests. “It is kind of a sad situation that we’ve found ourselves in,” Hustwit admitted, as I listened intently from my perfectly lit bed.