C. Montgomery Burns once described it as “the great leveller”: “From the mightiest pharaoh to the lowliest peasant, who doesn’t enjoy a good sit?” It was intended as a rhetorical question, but increasingly the answer is the slouching, overweight, RSI-stricken masses spending most of their waking hours hunched over a computer.
The blogosphere and those of us who knock around it between nine and five are agreed: to sit for prolonged periods is to suffer death in very slow motion. As you probably suspected at 5.15pm on Friday.
Of course sitting is just one of the things that is killing us – but because it’s not one of the fun ones that we don’t want to give up, we’re rushing to kick over our wheelie chairs and put cinder blocks under our desks. In the past few months especially, the chorus seems to have reached a new peak of hysteria: standing desks are going to save us all. (And a treadmill desk will entirely absolve us of our sins – but hey, nobody’s perfect.)
It makes sense. You burn more calories while standing. It makes you more productive. You lower your risks of all sorts of diseases and health problems by standing more often than you sit. And if the carrot doesn’t work, try the stick: There is disquieting research that suggests that even regular strenuous exercise won’t counteract the damage you do to your body from prolonged periods of sitting. A 2012 Australian study [pdf] found that adults who sat for 11 hours or more a day had a 40 per cent higher risk of dying in the next three years than those who sat fewer than four hours a day.
READ: How might work change in the coming decades? We asked an economist, an academic and a scientist.
As I am by nature a lazy person, the idea of putting time that I am contractually obligated to spend producing worthy online content to even better use appealed, and I informed my manager of my desire to begin my new, more virtuous life at work as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, what all the blogs that rhapsodise about don’t take into account is that adjustable standing desks are expensive (more than $1000!). I resigned myself to 45 hours a week spent hunched over my workstation like the indentured servant of the news cycle I am and a spine like a shoelace by the time I’m 40.
Then the newsfeed gods delivered on my sacrifice of personal data, as they always do, with a Kickstarter link to Refold, a Wellington company that makes standing desks out of cardboard. The desk weighs less than seven kilograms, and takes about two minutes to put up or collapse into a carrycase.
LISTEN: Designers Fraser Callaway and Oliver Ward of Refold on This Way Up.
I cajoled the Refold designers Fraser and Oliver to lend me one of their desks for a week in the interests of public service journalism; reducing my risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, thrombosis and basically death’s cold embrace was just a happy side effect. Wireless contributor Aleyna Martinez documented my experience.
One week later, I can happily report that I’m still alive and, as far as I could deduce from a cursory look at my tongue in the women’s bathroom on level four of Radio New Zealand House just before, still disease-free. But now that I’m back at my work station, who knows how long for.
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