Please take a seat: stop making ‘standing up’ the new ‘sitting down’
Have you noticed how standing up is suddenly in fashion? People perched atop their ankles are now everywhere you look. In our banks, supermarkets and newsagents, once sedentary staff are now mobile, haunting our elbows as we try to figure out computerised self-service tills smeared with the frustration of their last poor victim. News channels make their presenters stand and sometimes they walk, throwing headlines at us like Richard Ashcroft muscling his way through The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. Meanwhile, straight out of Silicon Valley, comes news that tech giants are installing desks mounted to treadmills. Upright is this year’s ‘sat down’, an emerging New World Order of vertically aligned totalitarianism in which ‘sitting is the new smoking’ (or so screamed The Guardian back in March).
It would easy to dismiss this as a mere fad but there’s clearly some clever psychology at work that has to do with notions of efficiency, dynamism, as well as personal levels of fitness and not all of it has a sinister edge. Standing whilst working might even have healthy benefits. It can help reduce back pain and actively contributes to greater health. It might also change the quality of that work, though whether that is for the better is itself open to question. All writers know that the small details of their surroundings matter. It’s why we obsess over our pens, keyboards, typewriters, and even the fonts we use. This is why the ‘standing desk’ has such a long and storied history. Leonardo Da Vinci apparently used one, as did the writers of some of our greatest works of fiction. Hemingway famously stood up whilst typing but other writers productive when vertical include Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf. Politicians too have favoured standing. Winston Churchill was a famous standee as were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
It’s perhaps significant that a good number of those were prodigiously active in more than one field, which perhaps hints towards the benefits of standing for some people. Standing makes a significant change to our process. It might encourage more productivity – more active ‘doing’ – but discourage reflection, thought, and consideration. The rest of us, however, should be wary of making this the new normal. Interviewed last week, Jeremy Paxman asked what should be a key question. ‘In a lot of news studios now they make people like you or me stand up to deliver the news. Why? What’s the point?’
‘Well if you sit too long we get piles,’ answered Adam Bolton (seated).
‘Speak for yourself,’ snarled Paxman before moving on to interrogate the modern habits of news with the ease with which he used to deconstruct Home Secretaries. ‘It gives a false sense of urgency and most of this stuff is not urgent […] Actually you don’t need to know most of this stuff in the frenetic way in which it is imparted to you.’
That, surely, is the point. Life is increasingly about that frenzy: the urge to move forward and to avoid staying still. Current trends in urban design see towns and cities stripped of their seating in the name of pedestrian flow, safety, and to discourage lingering. This might make town planners happy but it does little for our sense of society. It also hinders the infirm who must now treat shopping as a strategic battle as they plan their movements between the rare points of seating. Many shops have removed their seats and out of town shopping centres often have no seating at all. Even Argos, famously a place where you could always guarantee to have a sit down, often has little or no seating. They claim to be so efficient that they say you needn’t wait. Never once does it seem to dawn on them an appeal of Argos was that it offered a rare chance to escape the maelstrom and seats were a reason you might choose them over other stores.
And that is what is worrying about this new trend. The world is being pervaded by a notion that stopping still is somehow wrong or unwelcome. Yet standing, though natural, is not so natural. The news feels overly dynamic when the presenters stand. It is deliberately designed to make viewers feel on edge, eager to learn about the next catastrophe. In truth, it just leaves you feeling psychology off-kilter, as though a friend has popped around and you’ve not invited them to sit down.
All of which is why we should perhaps reappraise and champion sitting. There is virtue in sitting. Sitting goes to the very nature of our society. At some point in our distant past, the act of sitting allowed us to form our most important units of togetherness: families, tribes, councils, government. Our civilisation was founded on the simple act of stopping and sitting together. Often overlooked, chairs have contributed so much to human culture over millennia. It is too easy to forget that for every Pale Fire or Great Expectations written on a pair of heels, there are hundreds of classic novels written from a place of comfort. Diplomacy is often conducted down whilst seated and the evidence of Prime Minister’s Questions suggests that we should be thankful that the main business is government is done from a chair. Simply put: the act of sitting produces a habit of mind that’s conducive to reflection and calm. That, surely, is something worth cherishing in this crazy uptight and so very upright world.