At Atlas Financial Solutions, there’s a generational divide that’s highlighted by the flip of a switch.
“I like the bright light,” Amanda DiGiacomo, the owner of the Bakersfield, California, firm (and avowed millennial), told Business Insider. “I just feel like I can see the computer screen better. My eyes can focus on it more, and it feels like I’m not about to go to sleep.”
The office’s younger employees don’t agree.
“It makes me feel pressured, and maybe anxious,” Reyna Arredondo, a payroll specialist and Gen Z-er, said.
In-office debates over the “big light” — often the bright, cool-colored fluorescent strips jammed into commercial ceiling tiles — have become a recurring topic on TikTok. There, overhead-haters have proposed solutions, including light covers, window blinds, and even bringing their own lamps to work.
Online, it’s been cast as the latest Gen Z-versus-the-world office debate.
Business Insider spoke to 11 office workers at six companies and two interior designers about their experiences with bright overhead office lighting.
For some employees, fluorescent office lighting helps them feel alert and focused and makes text on a computer screen easier to see. For others, the bright overhead lights can contribute to glare, eye strain, headaches, or distraction — or simply make the office an unpleasant place to stay from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
That disagreement poses a familiar problem for employers. Like debates about office temperature, lighting is both highly personal and difficult to individualize in a shared room. Giving one worker the bright environment they need to focus may leave the person at the next desk squinting or reaching for the light switch.
In some offices, lighting is a generational divide
At Atlas, lighting preferences fell neatly along generational lines. They filmed a TikTok spotlighting the differences.
Atlas’s younger employees told Business Insider they found ways to soften the office-y glare. Some used software that gives their computer screens a warmer tint, while others asked millennial coworkers to switch off some overhead lights.
But they haven’t gone as far as workers at other Bakersfield businesses they interact with, who they said have bought window shades or covers that diffuse the ceiling lights.
“I’m a little bit scared that’s a fire hazard,” DiGiacomo said.
Desiree Posey, Atlas’s office’s manager and a millennial, who works in the same office as Arredondo, said dark offices strain her eyes and can give her a headache at the end of the day.
She and her Gen Z coworker have reached a compromise: the big light over Posey’s desk can be flicked on, but the one over Arrendondo’s is permanently turned off.
Daria Ershova, a 25-year-old marketing consultant, said she also hates the big light. At a previous job, she adorned her office desk with a lamp — and said she started a bit of an office evolution.
“A few of my Gen Z coworkers noticed what I had done, and suddenly we had a whole coalition,” she said.
Eventually, management added a budget for Gen Z-ers to buy their own lamps, she said.
The Big Light has non-Gen Z haters, too
That neat generational divide doesn’t play out everywhere.
Brittany Blackman, the founder of Discover Freedom, an executive leadership consulting firm, is 36 and identifies squarely as a millennial. Her job brings her into corporate offices across her home state of Florida.
When it comes to overhead lights, she sounds like she’s Gen Z. She spoke to Business Insider from a dark room, which she called her “happy state.”
“I have to talk to people in offices, and my eyes twitch,” she said. “I’ve had to say to clients with big lights in their offices before, like, ‘Hey, I’m not winking at you. It’s just that the lights really impact me.'”
Blackman said she had also brought a lamp to a previous office job.
Interior designers say big-light haters have a point
Lucia Fuentes, 28, is a San Diego-based interior designer. She’s pretty ardently anti-big light, saying it tends to “wash everything out.”
Even though she works at a design studio, she said she brought her own lamps to work. They’ve helped with her focus, she said.
“It was weird too, because my job is literally designing spaces and yet I found myself sitting under something I wouldn’t recommend to clients,” she told Business Insider. “Several people have commented that my workstation feels more inviting than the rest of the floor, which is great validation for someone whose entire career revolves around letting others know how lighting can affect a room.”
Fuentes has seen a lot of the big light discourse on TikTok, and she has notes.
She told Business Insider that she does not recommend covering fluorescent lights with flammable covers like paper towels, because, well, fire is bad.
Also, “It tends to look messy,” she added.
Instead, she says the most cost-effective solutions are either buying a small secondhand desk lamp or asking the company to replace the big lights with warm-white LED bulbs in the 2700-3000 Kelvin range.
For Fuentes, the larger point isn’t that every office should go lo-fi. Good workplace lighting, she said, gives employees options — a mix of natural light, warmer ambient lighting, and task lamps rather than one uniform source overhead. That can matter in shared offices, where one worker’s ideal lighting can be another’s headache trigger.
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