human biology vs. the modern work environment

Once upon a time, I was talking to a friend about some of the more popular utopian sci-fi worlds, particularly, the world of the Jetsons in which we were predicted to have primitive robot maids, apartments in the sky, vacations on a lunar base or a city on Mars, and 30 hour work weeks for even the most workaholic nations. As we discussed the likelihood of all this happening in the near future, she brought up a point about George Jetson I didn’t even bother to consider. If he was a real person who lived the way all residents of his future do, he should weigh a ton, literally. His lifestyle isn’t even sedentary, it’s stationary! Everywhere he goes there are moving walkways, escalators, elevators, hover-pods, and so on and do forth. The man only needs to lift a finger to eat and that’s actually not always the case. And considering his near-constant immobility and certain morbid obesity, he, as well as every other typical resident of the future, would contribute to private and public healthcare budgets that would soar into the hundreds and hundreds of trillions, dying between two years and two decades early.

Don’t just take my word for it. A recent study shows that a sedentary lifestyle costs two years of your life and at least every twenty minutes, you’ll need to get up and walk around to mitigate the ill effects of sitting still. No matter if you put in an hour a day three to five days per week at the gym as doctors recommend, a job in which you sit at a desk, or wheel, or a machine, all day is going to be detrimental to your health. Trouble is, it’s not as if you can just excuse yourself from the typical hour long meeting or an intense assignment to go stretch. This is simply not how white collar jobs are designed. So what about blue collar workers who get to stand most of their day and move around on a regular basis? Why don’t we re-finagle our cubicles and offices to allow more mobility and require less time that our rear ends press down into our seat cushions? Well, there’s a problem with that too because standing too long and too much causes joint pain. So we’re back to the 20 minute break schedule that’s downright impossible for most workers, from mail room interns to CEOs if we want to live just a few years longer. Guess that’s another argument for why cubicles are pure evil and humans don’t belong in them and why we shouldn’t be standing in the same few spots on an assembly line year in, year out…