Arguably one of the most surreal aspects of cube life is that it’s tacitly understood you’re to live a Clark Kent/Superman existence. Your superiors want to feel connected to you so it makes them seem more approachable, sure, but they don’t want to know so much as to get involved i.e. deal with your politics and presumably scandalous private life (drinking an entire bottle of wine during one episode of The Young Pope).
And this is possibly the most stifling element of a corporate cube job: the expectation that nothing else life-altering is happening outside the partition walls of your cube. The world could be exploding around you, and still you’re expected to go forward with your email responses and nebulous spreadsheet creations. Time stops inside of an office, and it’s only during that half hour (maybe an hour) break during lunch that you can finally recalibrate yourself to some semblance of what’s real.