Jemima Lewis: Let's admit it: we really prefer to work in an office

The griping of the office worker was never a sign of unhappiness - merely one of the rituals of the rat race

For more than two decades now, social forecasters have been confidently predicting the demise of the traditional office. Way back in the 1980s, when mobile phones were as big as gravestones and computer screens still glowed with eerie green script, we were told that technology was about to liberate us from the shackles of the nine-to-five. The Henley Centre for Forecasting predicted that, by 1995, as many as 10.5 million people in Britain would be working from home for at least part of the week. A glorious utopia was conjured up, in which millions of whey-faced commuters would cast off their pinstripes and head for the sunlit hills, there to achieve a perfect "life/work balance" with the aid of a laptop and a fax machine.

But the revolution never materialised. In fact, something entirely opposite has happened. Now that we can leave the office, it's increasingly clear that we don't want to. Only 1.5 million Britons have taken to working from home – and most of those nip into the office at least once a week. Those who don't report painful withdrawal symptoms: in a survey published this week, more than a quarter of "homeworkers" said that not going into the office was making them miserable. They felt lonely and lacking in self-esteem; they were easily distracted and – irony of ironies – they felt that their "life/work" balance was hopelessly out of whack.

Where the social forecasters got it wrong, I think, is that they took us too literally. The habitual griping of the office worker was never a sign of unhappiness – merely one of the many pleasurable rituals of the rat race. Most of us, however much we may grumble, are actually half in love with office life.

We all go through the motions of dissatisfaction – groaning about Monday mornings, bitching about the boss, willing the clock to tick faster towards Friday afternoon – because not to do so would contravene the spirit of the thing. But very few of us would exchange these trials for those of the freelance worker. Given that we all have to earn our keep – and that most work is pretty dull – the only thing that makes life bearable is the social network of the office or the factory floor. The handing round of Maltesers at tea time; the whispered nuggets of gossip exchanged under lavatory doors; the mass inspection of purchases made in the lunch hour; the sudden seizures of loathing for an unsuspecting colleague with an irritating phone voice: these are the things that lift work from being a mere necessity into something we might secretly enjoy.

Far from imprisoning us, the office sets us free. It gives us a structure around which to build our lives: we work until six and then we are disgorged back into the world to enjoy a few hours of glorious liberty. The "homeworkers", by contrast, face a never-ending working day. They get up late, gloomily conscious that they have nowhere to go and no one who'll miss them, and spend most of the day watching telly or gazing idly out of the window. Finally, around the time that the happy office worker is getting in the first round at the pub, they'll knuckle down and begin the long night shift, feeling mightily sorry for themselves all the while.

If novelists, freelance journalists and artists find it famously hard to knuckle down without the incentive of deadlines and disapproving bosses, how much more difficult must it be for the typists, sewing-machine operators and underwear- packers who make up the bulk of the homeworking population? The notion that people who work at home are glamorous yuppie types, lolling on the sofa with an expensive laptop and a cappuccino, is one of the great modern myths. In fact, they are mostly underpaid women and illegal immigrants, desperately trying to scrape together a few extra pennies.

And yet the dream lives on. The social forecasters may have lowered their sights – the Henley Centre now anticipates that it will be another decade before the number of homeworkers reaches 10 million – but the assumption remains that we are all itching to move in that direction. Lately I have noticed a rash of new housing projects around London advertising "live/work spaces". As far as I can tell, these are just flats with lots of plugs. But the very phrase suggests a failure to understand the nature of work. For most of us, work is dangerously close to being life, or a very sizeable chunk of it. That's why it's so important to keep it demarcated, lest it takes over everything: family, home, even your dreams.

Work needs to be different to stop it being oppressive, which is where offices come in. They turn the mundane business of earning a crust into something exotic: an intoxicating mixture of boredom and intrigue, grind and gossip, resentment and romance. No technology, however modern, could do better than that.

The writer is editor of 'The Week'