Upon recently watching the saccharine and mawkish movie The Intern, a movie not so much about an intern as about the fruits and effects of pride that discover themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel, I came across the phrase: sitting is the new smoking.
And I thought: not if you’re in a saddle it ain’t.
And then I got to thinking about the chair, the modern comfortable chair which has been ergonomically designed to have you in it for inordinate amounts of time. I thought back to my time in Warsaw where my furnished apartment came with a standard ‘communist armchair’ whose filling was so out of sorts (deliberately) that you could only sit in it for a very short period of time before developing numb-bum syndrome. My then Polish girlfriend had told me that this was part of the design process, that it wasn’t a flaw as I had initially presumed but a perfection. I kinda liked it too, that here was a chair, which was comfortable up to a point, but which would not allow you to fall asleep in it, or to remain in it for any considerable period of time. It was as if this simple armchair had been fitted with its very own ejector seat, an ejector seat that was silently telling you, ‘This sitting for hours on end is not natural!’ And it isn’t.
The difference between the cyclist’s sitting and an office worker’s sitting should be obvious, that the cyclist is pedalling as he is sitting, the cyclist is working - he is powering his own seat - and has thus de-served it. The same cannot be said for those sitting in offices. Quite the opposite in fact.
And so I thought of the chair and its history and how far it had come from its days of royalty and dignity to evolve into that perfunctory pinnacle of ergonomic perfection the Lazyboy, or its corporate equivalent, the tremendously engineered Sport Seat.
Once a symbol of the chosen few, the chair, overtaking the chest, bench and stool, has now become the ubiquitous vestige of everyone, and for good reason. Not because they have suddenly been granted some higher authority as the word ‘chair-man’ might suggest, but so they can sit for longer periods of time in the same position, presumably carrying out work that is so mind-numbingly awful that they need the comfort of the chair in order to offset the existential unease caused by the work itself.
In fact it wasn’t until the 16th century that the chair eventually became common, and the chest, the bench and the stool were relegated to the second division. It’s no surprise then to learn that this was about the same time that the notion of work began to shift from being part of a holistic life-view (making your own clothes, growing your own food, building your own dwellings, the operative word being ‘own’) to a dissociated world-view where one’s life gradually became more and more separate from one’s work, and thus the world.
Indeed, we have now reached the zenith of absurdity when one states (simultaneously absolving oneself of the causes and effects of that work), that ‘I am not my work’, and ‘my work does NOT define who I am’. The implication being that work is no longer a medium for the nourishment and the growth of the human, but simply a means to making money.
But such statements are the result of a society that does not think anymore… that does not want to think, that is in effect anti-contemplative, and obsessed with being in an almost permanent state of busyness.
‘...the contemplative will have a totally different attitude to work’, writes Raimond Pannikaar in Invisible Harmony. ‘The primacy will not be given to work but to working, i.e., to the act itself (the finis operationis of the Scholastics) so that every work will have to yield its own justification, or rather its own meaning. If an act is not meaningful in itself, it will simply not be done’.
Dugald Semple, whose education was nothing more than ‘a form of conscription in preparation for our soulless and war-like commercialism’, wrote in his autobiography A Joy in Living, clearly anticipating my own sentiments, ‘Perhaps this is why I am one of the happy unemployed, and am trying to make up for the human race working too hard.’
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