The only thing worse than a standing desk – a treadmill desk
There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure... but it is never safe to make an assumption about how the different generations feel about anything, from vegans to scented candles.
This week, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly ponder the perks of being perpendicular
Like insisting on woollen underclothes, there’s something cranky about working at a standing desk. But now a scientist from Manchester Metropolitan University has exploded the whole fad: slouching is unlikely to hurt your back and standing at a desk is unlikely to heal it. Far more important are regular breaks from a fixed posture.
What really repels me is the electronic, plastic, gym-equipment aspect of standing desks in offices. Old wooden ones, not made for the cult of workplace fitness, look less pathological. Even so, when I was shown one in Birmingham at which St John Henry Newman wrote his great autobiographical Apologia in 1864, I took it for part of his ascetic life, like standing in the sea to recite the Psalms. Since there isn’t much sea in Birmingham, he stood writing away in a wide upstairs corridor.
In my childhood, prolonged standing was deemed harmful. Sitting on a step gave you piles and standing gave you varicose veins. But Victorians, though they fainted if not fed every three hours, defied the dangers of standing. Like breaking the ice on their cold bath in the morning it was a bulwark against loss of moral vigour.
Today, standing desks rise up, like the mighty Wurlitzer, for a sect that zealously recruits historical figures. Dickens, they say, had one and so did Wagner, though he liked pacing (which comes into a different category), and probably stamping, for all we know. When it gets as far as Nietzsche – obsessed with his intestines and hating any idea hatched while seated – one wonders whether he might have ended up less loopy ensconced in a comfy armchair. In any case, he liked best of all thinking out of doors, without a desk of any kind.
I can’t complain about open-air thinking-while-you-walk since it served Aristotle’s peripatetic school so well. But worse than the standing desk is a machine that looks like a satire on the whole tendency: a treadmill desk, with a lumbering conveyor belt beneath the feet. Someone used to use one in the office. I’m not sure what became of him. I fear he might have become an MP.
This all reminds me of a classic headline from The Onion: ‘National Funk Congress Deadlocked On Get Up/Get Down Issue.’ It feels like only yesterday that we began rising above the office parapet and standing to attention, invigorated by the promise that we’d work smarter, healthier and faster if we simply…cancelled chairs.
At the time I only tentatively reached for the Kool-Aid. I liked the idea of a standing desk, of towering over my elderly colleagues like a lifeguard at the pool, but I couldn’t help noticing that everyone who installed one soon found themselves writing tweets beginning, ‘Some personal news! Due to events outside my control, I am now accepting freelance commissions.’ (Right of reply from HR: ‘No they did not.’) This kept me grounded.
Yet still the propaganda came. Meetings conducted standing up are more efficient, we were told. Standing-only restaurants sprang up, based on loose pledges that ‘this is how the Italians and Japanese do it’. Ryanair looked into having standing-only plane tickets.
Then came the film directors. Christopher Nolan, Anne Hathaway revealed, ‘doesn’t allow chairs, and his reasoning is, if you have chairs, people will sit, and if they’re sitting, they’re not working’. It’s true: never once did you see Robert Oppenheimer sitting down. We’d have lost the war if he had.
Bradley Cooper’s at it too. ‘I’ve always hated chairs, and I feel like your energy dips the minute you sit down in the chair,’ he said recently. ‘There’s no sitting down… I banned chairs from the set.’ Imagine how into standing you’d have to be to say you’ve ‘always hated chairs’.
It seemed like sitting was fully on the way out. Consigned to history, like fainting couches, or Gavin Williamson. I prepared to make the step up. This would be the year. I drafted an email to the services department. As Maya Angelou wrote, in a poem it seems unlikely was about ergonomic desks, ‘Just like hopes springing high/Still I’ll rise.’
So this latest news is a spanner in the works. Back down I go. Though I think I might just hover midway, until the next development. A crouching desk. Join me – scientists say it’s good for the knees.
