Butt, obviously
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of the most respectable minds in the world, once noted that carbohydrates, heroin and salary are three of the worst addictions afflicting our species.
Let me add chair to the list.
I can’t think of a viler influence in our day-to-day life, especially if you’re leading a sedentary lifestyle. You wake up in your bed, freshen up, settle in your car/cab/auto seat—or bus/train seat, if it’s your lucky day — and go to office. At your workplace, there is a game of thrones waiting for you. Needless to add, there’s no bloodshed in the making here. It’s quite sorted in a lot of ways. One thing is for certain though: You’ll be sinking in your chair like a king as the day progresses. Of course, this doesn’t apply to the few fitter souls among us who are conscious about their posture. They know what atrophy means and neither stoop while they walk nor slouch in their swiveling abode. To add insult to our injury, some of them work standing up with their elevated laptop. Seems like it’s the rest of us who are paying a heavy price for having a job.
Yes, not entirely the chair’s fault. It’s our lazy pathetic self too.
No, wait.
Let’s rewind a bit.
It’s not like we sat comfortably for the first time only after we started slogging for a living. There were wooden benches in our schools and colleges while a lot of houses had the luxury of chairs too. The difference occurred with the rising amount of time spent glued to one’s chair. Can you remember an instance from childhood wasted with your bum on a piece of furniture for more than an hour? Ditto. It’s impossible to imagine being on something for THAT long when we were younger. Our impatient self wouldn’t allow us. Comparatively speaking, we are shamelessly tamed now. We don’t have the enthusiasm left to be running around like we once used to. If we walked as much as our body silently demands, we wouldn’t be learning the medical terminology for heart-related diseases in the not-so-distant future.
Yes, there are toilet breaks and water cooler breaks and cafeteria breaks and pantry breaks. Still, if you do the math, the total hours spent in a chair is astounding. Your ass is all over the place and is busy conquering more space as the years pass by. Rest assured, you’ll either reach a point where you’ll ask yourself what the heck is going on with your body or you’ll continue to fatten the hell up without noticing anything amiss. Interestingly, in the corporate world, bench has a negative connotation as a benched person portends liability whereas chair carries a positive air as it often translates to promotion. Makes complete sense.
In the olden days, people enjoyed an industrious lifestyle. Forget the lower class, even the wealthy folks tended to their share of hard work. Why? Because the dignity of labour was in bed with the notion of staying healthy. Even the term ‘work’ was true to physics and earned respect through displacement. Moving ABC from MNO to XYZ was equal to work. Not anymore. Thanks to digitization, our idea of working leads to barely any movement other than those of our waltzing fingertips on the keyboard.
Something is clearly wrong.
Pass me that bean bag, please.
