The Shape of Our Work

A call to knowledge workers, blink twice if you’re alive.

Think of a rock god, flung backward under his guitar as it points to the sky. Think of a basketball star, chin hammered outward, flying over opponents toward the rim. Think of a ballerina, her lithe limbs like fireworks bursting in air.

Three bodies rapturously expressed, these are the shapes of their work.

What’s the shape of yours?

If you’re any one of nearly 250 million knowledge workers in the world today, it’s nothing to photograph.

The comparison feels unfair, but it’s instructive — these are opposite ends of a spectrum worth considering. On the embodied end, we have ballerinas and brickmasons; in the middle, nurses and chefs; on the disembodied end, analysts, designers and countless other purveyors of information.

For some, the body is essential. For others, it’s at least acknowledged and respected. For most knowledge workers, it’s an inert inconvenience — a pile of flesh and bones to be dragged along while climbing the day’s to-do list. We resent its aching protest and begrudge it even the smallest breaks.

Over many decades, under the weight of technology, economy and convention, we knowledge workers have become a sad sight — crumpled and expressionless, but for our fast-firing fingers. If we think this is acceptable, let alone optimal, we’ve lost our minds too.

What are the consequences of sedentary, desk-bound life? Most people would cite occasional backaches and dismal calorie burn. Those who are more astute might note the relationship with afternoon fatigue, or declare that “sitting is the new smoking” (while barely knowing what that implies).

Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to it than that. You ought to take this sitting down.

According to the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School and the American Cancer Society, prolonged sitting is linked to cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, kidney disease, suicide, lung disease, liver disease, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, among them 8 of the 10 most common causes of death.

According to a World Health Organization report in 2008, approximately 3.2 million deaths per year are attributable to insufficient physical activity. That’s based on data collected before the advent of smartphones and streaming. Prolonged sitting is not just unnatural, it’s not just “bad for you,” it’s literally shortening your life.

Perhaps you exercise regularly? Great, but it’s not enough. Mounting evidence shows that regular exercise does not counteract the effects of sitting, related to early death outcomes.

Prolonged sitting is also linked to peptic ulcer and other digestive disease, nervous disorders and musculoskeletal disorders, osteoporosis (thinning and weakening of your skeleton), hip and spine dysfunction, varicose veins and deep vein thrombosis.

Enough with the body, what about the brain?

Prolonged sitting is correlated with depression and anxiety, it’s responsible for short-term declines in blood flow to the brain, which inhibit thinking and memory, and it’s responsible for long-term declines in blood flow to the brain, linked with neurodegenerative diseases like dementia. Oh, and by the way, a 2018 study from UCLA found that sitting strongly correlates with “reduced medial temporal lobe thickness.” Lovely.

How did we get here? I see three major forces to blame: technology, convention, economy.

The technology part is easy to understand. Over the past four decades, with the advent of the personal computer and the internet as we know it, most of our attention has been drawn down into the tight physical confines of our screens. In concert with that, knowledge work occupations have added more jobs than any comparable segment since the 1980s — about 1.9 million per year. Along the way, digital technology has generated countless trillions of dollars of wealth in the global economy.

The convention part is also easy to understand, though a bit harder to recognize. The prevailing attitude towards the body in the modern workplace is something between dismissive and contemptuous. Not surprisingly, the range of ways we use and express our bodies is painfully short (like our muscles).

Consider how we spent thousands of years squatting to do all kinds of work — shaping pieces of flint, sowing seeds, washing bowls in streams — and that a squat is one of the healthiest positions in which the body can be arranged, but if you dared to drop your laptop on a chair and squat while typing an email, you’d be considered a grotesque eccentric in most workplaces. Paying a trainer hundreds or thousands of dollars to fix your dysfunctional squat technique is normal, but incorporating squats into your movement at work is bizarre. Or how about this: can you imagine standing up and doing a few trunk twists in the middle of a long meeting, while someone’s talking? People would think you’re insane. We have confined ourselves to a prim stillness at work that defies both logic and instinct.

The economy part is, well, easy to understand but difficult to face. Some call capitalism the most dominant religion in the US. They’re not wrong.

If you’re a knowledge worker, have you ever stopped to think why you sit so much? It is the position in which the economy finds you most useful.

Your body is built to move, it wants to move. Your joints, muscles and skin are not meant to be assembled in static, ergonomic order at your office each day. They are meant to move in all the ways you move them when you don’t have to work: playing sports, playing music, dancing, hiking, biking, swimming, gardening, cooking, crafting, building.

The economy is not remotely concerned with your long-term health. By the time heart disease and dementia arrive, you are of little economic value, either in terms of production or consumption. Sure, the economy will build you a sit-stand desk, it will reimburse your carpal tunnel compression sleeves, and every day in headlines it will proclaim new managerial and environmental elixirs for a fitter, happier, more productive workforce. But at the bitter end of a static life, you’re on your own.

The economy simply lacks incentive to construct for you an appropriately active, embodied, holistically healthy life. That’s your job. And it’s our job, as a culture, to produce workplaces both productive and kinetic. Workplaces where the body is operated, not repressed.

I’m not condemning knowledge work — it can be as important, fulfilling and exciting as any kind of work. I’m not condemning the desks, chairs and other devices that support knowledge work — they are useful tools. I’m encouraging people to wake up to the longstanding forces that confine our physical lives.

Ultimately, I’m encouraging another sort of waking up too. No question, the physiological benefit of a body moved is paramount. And we should all be invested in performance — the ability to focus, think creatively, make good decisions, use energy efficiently. But my main concern is a spiritual one — I’m most interested in how people can quickly and reliably become spiritually aware.

Spirituality arises from two conditions: presence and self-transcendence. What concerns me so much about the plight of the knowledge worker is that it’s nearly impossible to be present without being present in your body.

The question is, can you move away from the dualistic notion that you are your mind, dragging along a body that’s only occasionally allowed to participate… toward an understanding of yourself as a whole, integrated organism that will only truly thrive when treated as such? You don’t have to do pirouettes while dictating emails to Siri, to be fully alive. But you ought to take a moment to reflect on what it means to be fully alive.

Picture it — the spectacle of a human, fully and exquisitely alive. Perhaps it’s a man surfing, his board vibrating and the air around him softening as a wave hollows overhead. Perhaps it’s a woman dancing, bathed in light and sound, surrounded by the ecstatic faces of people she loves. Perhaps it’s a man caring for his sick father, bathing him, holding him as he tries to stand.

In every instance, the body is elemental and the person is present in it. Now think of spending 40 hours a week acting like a brain on a broomstick. What you believe about yourself is what you become. Are you an ever-stiffening cog in an economic machine, or are you an agent of the ineffable magic of consciousness, in an elastic body, your heart casting a six-foot-wide electromagnetic field around you and your feet held to this planet by an invisible force as together you spin through the darkness, tracing an ellipse around a giant ball of fire? I implore you wake up to a bolder perspective of what this is.

Start this second, to be present in your body. This isn’t fanciful talk and you need no metaphysical belief to guide you. This is as real as anything you know. At the end of this sentence, close your eyes, take a breath, and for a few moments, let yourself be charmed by the feeling of life inside you, by the warmth, by the shimmers, by your pulse as it hums you a lullaby.