Standing Up for Sitting Down

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For most of his life, my colleague Dan Coyce, a senior writer at Slate, enjoyed a common pastime.

Sitting.

Like as in the opposite of standing.

I would say I was very pro-sitting.

I would sit and read.

I would sit and write.

I would sit and do nothing.

I was a highly qualified, enthusiastic sitter.

Dan has a place he likes to sit when it's cold.

We have a very nice chair right by our fireplace.

That's my winter seat.

There's a record player in there.

He has a place he likes to sit when it's balmy.

We have a porch on our house.

I basically spend all my time sitting in those glider chairs that just gently ease back and forth.

Like, that's my habitat.

But about a decade ago, Dan started to hear some ominous rumblings about his hobby.

Americans are sitting way too low.

On average, they sit about nine to ten hours a day.

Do you have sitting disease?

That's a term given to a collection of ailments that researchers starting to connect with the long stretches of sitting common in the office place.

Some doctors warn that sitting all day can lead to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer.

Studies have found that people who sit for too long have a hundred and forty-seven percent higher risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke, a 112% risk of developing diabetes, and that physical inactivity is associated with 3.2 million deaths around the world every year.

The main one I remember was that when you're sitting, you burn one calorie a minute.

And I remember thinking, I definitely consume more than an average of a calorie a minute.

As Dan was hearing these dire statistics in the news, he got a phone call from an editor in a magazine with a funny idea for a story he wanted Dan to write.

The funny idea for the story was that I would not sit for an entire month.

Like as a extreme health experiment, I would follow the science and if a little standing was good for you, obviously a lot of standing must be really good for you.

So I would do nothing but stand for an entire month.

The pay was good and Dan enjoys a stunt.

He agreed to do the piece.

I would not sit down during the day unless I had to drive somewhere or if I had to poop.

Dan was confident he could do it.

I was like, whatever, I'm basically hail and hearty.

I play soccer.

I, you know, play basketball.

If I need to stand for a while, who cares?

No problem.

And also, maybe he was sitting too much.

He thought it might be useful.

Change his habits.

But I did think, oh, probably this is going to make a real difference in how I occupy my time and how I exist in the world after this.

So on April 1st, 2014, eager, curious, and with his computer atop a giant stack of books, Dan began a month of standing.

And day one,

by like 11 o'clock, I could barely concentrate on anything because my legs hurt so bad.

And like, I could feel my hamstrings like seizing

and my calves and my thighs hurt.

And I just had to keep taking breaks, but a break didn't feel like a break because I couldn't sit down.

So basically like three hours in, you were like, I've made a horrible mistake.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you're lucky, it's possible you've never thought about sitting, that it's been something in the background, something your body just does, like breathing or sleeping.

But in the last decade or so, sitting has stepped into the spotlight and has a kind of villain.

It's a head-spinning transformation, but it's not the first time sitting has been the subject of controversy.

In today's episode, while continuing to follow Dan Coise and his radical experiment, we're going to have two conversations that contextualize what exactly is going on.

The first is a history of an earlier panic about how we hold our bodies.

And the second is about another way that sitting is under attack.

So today on Decodering, if sitting is a way to relax, why can't we relax about sitting?

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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When we left off Dan was three hours into his experiment and full of regrets, but he didn't quit.

I sort of thought, all right, obviously I should have thought about how this would be hard at first.

Of course, any new thing you make your body do is making new muscles do new things, and if they're not used to them, they get angry about them.

So then I was like, okay, okay.

So I've started this new workout routine, the workout of not sitting down.

But probably I'll get better at it over time.

So I just need to stick it out and like plow through and it will get better tomorrow and it will get better the day after that.

Did it get better the day after that?

It did not get better the next day and it did not get better the day after that.

Even so he stayed the course.

And actually with every passing day, he committed further to standing all the time.

Standing up at a movie, standing up at a Broadway play, standing up on the Amtrak Acela all the way from Washington to New York, standing up reading stories to my children at bedtime.

What Dan didn't know as he soldiered through his long, painful days was that he was part of a grueling tradition that goes back more than a hundred years to when millions of Americans also challenged their bodies to stand in ways they were not used to.

Because long before there was a war on sitting,

there was a war on slouching.

In every interview you've done, does the person start by sitting up straight?

Yes.

Or they say, like, oh, I've really sat up a lot straighter reading your book, even though my book is like

kind of a critique of it.

Beth Linker is a historian of medicine and disability at the University of Pennsylvania, and her book is Slouch, Posture Panic in Modern America.

It lays out just how much effort has been expended to get Americans to stand up straight.

At first, she first got curious about as a child.

I was told, like many people, to sit up straight, stand up straight.

It was good for me.

But then I went to physical therapy school and that really didn't make much sense.

There's such anatomical variability.

Like, what does that even mean to tell somebody to sit up straight?

To whom am I speaking?

What does their spine look like in the first place?

Do they themselves even know what it feels like to quote unquote adopt a straight position?

The truth is there isn't scientific medical consensus on the correct way to stand or sit.

Yet most of us think there is, and we worry all the time that we're standing or sitting incorrectly.

So when Beth got a PhD and became a historian, she wondered, where does this come from?

She traces our collective posture panic back to the mid-19th century, to Charles Darwin.

So Darwin posits that the first characteristic that makes humans human is standing up straight.

And this is in

contradistinction to thousands of years of thinking that

what distinguished humans from non-human animals was brain and intellect.

Scientists went out into the field looking for proof and found Homo erectus, a human ancestor with a smaller brain, but a remarkably human-looking thigh bone.

It seemed to confirm that bipedalism was really important to how we evolved into Homo sapiens.

But right away, the educated elites newly attentive to posture, and given the time, they're all white guys.

They look around and they see us.

people not standing up all that straight people slouching hunching sitting standing up straight may be essential to our humanity but all they see are people doing it wrong.

And they start to get really concerned, like, what does this mean?

Is this like an evolutionary mistake?

And as they keep looking at people and their posture, they start to see some people they believe are doing it right.

They start looking at these quote-unquote native peoples who squat.

who walk around head carrying, who don't use chairs, and they think those Indigenous peoples, they are closer to the original purpose of how the human body is supposed to function.

And they glorify that, but they also fear it because if they, if Indigenous peoples have somehow more physical prowess, they could overtake the white class.

This racial panic informs the way slouching is understood.

It starts to be seen as a so-called disease of civilization, a sickness caused by the condition of modern living.

Turn the 20th century, we have mechanized travel on trains.

We will soon have automobiles, and they do a lot of book learning, a lot of sitting.

And they worry that what they call over-civilization is the problem.

That's what is causing slouching and all other kinds of disabilities and dereliction.

The ramifications of this fear are huge because slouching isn't just seen as a symptom of poor health.

It's also seen as a cause of it, helping to spread diseases like tuberculosis.

So they're looking at posture as an indicator of

a person's health and also a predictor of a person's future health.

And so in the early 1900s, as unprecedented numbers of immigrants are being processed at Ellis Island and as many Americans are being drawn into World War I as potential soldiers, posture becomes the shortcut for determining their fitness.

And the posture exam becomes this quick and dirty way to size up a person in one glance.

You're either healthy or sick or disabled or not disabled based on the alignment of your spine.

Suddenly, posture has gone from something people didn't think very much about to something serious.

And things really ramp up in 1914 when the American Posture League is founded, an organization that disseminates posture standards to the whole country.

They developed equipment to measure posture and to record it and then to be able to grade it.

Soon, K through 12 schools and then universities are conducting posture exams on incoming students, and the findings are alarming.

In 1917, a founder of the American Posture League assessed incoming Harvard freshmen.

And according to the posture standards of the time, four out of every five students had bad posture.

80% of these kids who were otherwise healthy and not in pain, who may have never worried about standing before, were suddenly told they had a problem and it needed fixing.

It is pretty striking.

You know, if you have 80% of the population with this problem, holy moly, what a market.

In the coming decades, you could buy all sorts of stuff to help with your posture.

We know today that girdles and corsets are supposed to support and protect the figure.

The correctly fitted girdle lifts the abdomen and helps to flatten the back.

Girdles, posture supporters, braces, posture, shoe wear, so heads, shoes.

If you want shoes with lots of pep, get get kids, kids, kids.

Or bounce and zoom in every step.

Get kids, kids, kids.

And more than just products came out of the posture movement of a century ago.

There are so many things that are still with us, like the idea that being able to balance a book on your head is the epitome of grace.

Or physical activities you do at school, like the crab walk and swinging on the monkey bars.

Pilates was invented around this time, and so was the ergonomic chair.

And it's also in the 1940s that the term straight comes to mean heterosexual in common slang.

That's a prime example of how posture

can be taken to have both cultural, behavioral, moral meaning and health-physiological meaning.

Good posture wasn't just about your musculoskeletal system or your health or even aesthetics.

It was a moral and social good.

And the pressure to comply, to stand straight, to be straight, was intense.

Adrialine knows that for some reason, she doesn't fit into the picture, but she doesn't know why.

This is a 1953 educational health documentary about a teenager named Adrialine, who he sees sitting alone, slumped in a corner, not connecting with the popular kids.

What is it that creates this unfavorable impression the others have have of her?

There's a mirror, Adrialine.

Go on, look at yourself.

See if you can discover what it is.

As she looks in the mirror, the narrator tells us the problem isn't her looks or her weight.

It's something else.

Like a lot of boys and girls, your posture is your problem.

But it's within Adrialine's power to fix her posture.

If she just pulls herself together and tries hard enough.

Your teachers and your parents will give you encouragement, but the standing tall and walking tall are up to you.

It's about individualism and what are you doing

to control your own behaviors.

And this message kept being conveyed for decades.

Those posture exams for incoming college students, they continued through the 1970s.

By then, posture was not the pressing public health concern it had once been.

As we've learned more about what actually causes disease, the panic around posture has abated, but it hasn't vanished.

It still lingers in our culture and in our commerce to this day.

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Looking down at your computers and phones is causing pain.

Major publications are calling it text neck.

It makes sense to try and alleviate pain, but to be concerned about bad posture in and of itself and the robust number of products there are marketed to help.

Beth says that's a hangover from the posture panic.

So then you're like, I need the ergonomic chair and the standing desk, and then I need to go to yoga and Pilates and have the posture form bra.

And before you know it, you have a whole closet full of posture devices that you have paid a lot of money for,

and none of them work

because not one single thing is necessarily going to solve it.

And the posture panic has stayed with us in other ways as well, beyond posture, because the whole thing created a blueprint for all kinds of wellness worries.

We're often told that we're performing basic bodily functions incorrectly, and it's hindering our long-term health, bringing discomfort and death closer.

Even if we didn't know know it, couldn't feel it, even if we used to think it's how we just ate or drank or slept or sat.

So if a previous generation of experts worried that we weren't sitting straight, today's evangelists say the problem is that we're sitting at all.

We're built to move.

That is how the human being was designed.

This is Dr.

James Levine, an endocrinologist and nutrition specialist at the Mayo Clinic, giving a TEDx talk.

It's the way we're built.

It's the innate biology to to search and find our food, to grow food, to chase food, to kill food, to find shelter.

So excess sitting isn't simply a matter of not burning calories, if you like.

It's very much the case that excess sitting is seriously harmful for health.

It's Dr.

Levine who, in addition to inventing the treadmill desk, apparently coined this now ubiquitous slogan.

Sitting is the new smoking.

Sitting is the new smoking.

Sitting is the new smoking.

Sitting is the new smoking.

What do you make of sitting is the new smoking?

I find that

offensive, actually,

because my mind immediately goes to wheelchair users.

And

to say that sitting is the new smoking is to condemn people who are sitting as being innately defective or unhealthy.

And to me, that is like off the bat, stigmatizing.

It's also an analogy that suggests we should be sitting exactly as much as we smoke.

And everyone knows health-wise, we should be smoking zero.

The message you get definitely is that every minute that you sit down is a minute closer to death.

There's no reason you should ever be sitting.

It's that message that led Dan Coise to his close-to-zero sitting experiment.

When we last checked in on him, he was just days in and aching.

Oh.

So he started calling scientists, physiologists, doctors, kinesthiologists to discuss the merits of his undertaking.

I assumed that they were going to tell me that what I was doing was great and heroic, and they were proud of me.

And in fact, they all told me that what I was doing was a really bad idea, and why was I doing it?

And they hoped I would be okay.

These experts reminded Dan that long before we knew sitting all the time was bad for us, we knew standing all the time was bad for us.

In fact, when the posture movement was at its height in the 1910s and 20s, there was a simultaneous movement to improve working conditions by giving people chairs to sit in, because standing all the time causes muscle and back pain, sciatica, varicose veins, and increased risk of stroke.

And I remember thinking, oh, right.

There's a whole thing about people who have to stand all day because of their terrible jobs and all the damage it does to their bodies.

And I've turned myself into a line worker at an Amazon warehouse or whatever by accident.

As the weeks passed for Dan, there were some benefits to standing.

I did actually lose weight that month, like I lost four or five pounds, I think.

And I did sort of by the end of it, feel a little bit stronger.

Like I felt a difference, especially like in my calves and even like my core felt like a little bit stronger, like I could accomplish a little bit more just from all that exercise that I put myself through.

But the trade-off definitely was that I just like, I was deeply uncomfortable slash in low level pain at all times.

And then that pain would sharpen up basically every afternoon.

Like with most things, going whole hog in one extreme direction isn't great for you.

Standing all day, not great.

Sitting all day, not great.

What's the solution?

Probably some mixture of the two, but it really depends on the person.

And that's assuming the person has a choice about how much standing and sitting they can do at all.

And they might not because they're disabled, because of their health, because of their job.

But there's another relatively new reason someone might not have a choice about sitting.

And it's when they find themselves at a train station.

When we come back, the war on sitting moves from your office to your commute.

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There's an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer and Mr.

Burns, his supercilious billionaire boss, get trapped together in a cabin in the mountains.

And before everything goes wrong, they find themselves enjoying one another's company, chatting like peers, sipping on champagne, sitting right beside one another.

Oh, these sure are comfortable chairs.

Oh, yes, sitting.

The great leveler, from the mightiest pharaoh to the lowliest peasant, who doesn't enjoy a a good sit?

Oh man, you are so right.

But in many public spaces these days, sitting is not the great leveler.

It's something more divisive.

A texture, Amtrak passengers for train number 647.

A few weeks ago, I went to Moynihan Train Hall in New York City on a weekday afternoon.

And awaiting instructions from the gay usher.

Thanks, Miss Miller.

Moynihan is the city's new Amtrak hub.

It opened in 2021 in an enormous old post office building.

And it's beautiful.

It's airy and bright.

There's a giant glass atrium, marble floors, upscale food options, clean bathrooms.

It has everything.

Well, almost everything.

Oh my god, there is no sitting here.

This is Gianna.

She's an engineering student and one of dozens of people we found sitting on the floor at Moynihan Train Hall.

Because this brand new $1.6 billion train station has no public seating.

This is just like

insane.

There's like literally aisles and aisles of escalators, but it's like we just need a chair.

Did you look for one for a long time?

I took a glance and I'm like, oh my god, I'm going to give up.

So what did you decide to do then?

I'm just here sitting and waiting for my friend, and I think when my friend is here, he's going to go, oh my god, there's no chairs here.

There is seating if you buy food, and there's a small waiting area for ticketed passengers that could not actually accommodate all ticketed passengers.

But generally, there is nowhere for the public to sit in a train hall, which used to almost definitionally have a waiting area with long rows of benches.

And that's true in more and more public spaces all over the country.

What you're describing is what is called a ghost amenity.

Jonathan Pacheco Bell is an urban planner in Los Angeles.

Like at a bus stop, you normally would have a bench, but I I can point to bus stops, for example, in LA where you have the covering over to maybe protect against the rain, but the bench has been removed.

This kind of ghost amenity is just one example of a larger phenomenon known as hostile architecture.

I define hostile architecture as elements of the built environment that are designed to deter normal human behaviors.

like sitting or resting and make publicly accessible spaces unwelcoming for targeted populations.

Those targeted populations include first and foremost unhoused people, but also young people and skateboarders like Jonathan used to be.

That's how he first noticed this back in the 1990s.

There was a turning point where I and my fellow skaters started to notice metal attachments grafted onto handrails and similar metal obstructions attached to curbs we used to use to skate, to grind, right?

Other examples of hostile architecture include crossbars on benches that you can sit, but you can't lie down.

Or if you're not a certain size, you can't really sit at all.

Sometimes there are literal spikes coming out of a ledge so you can't rest on them.

Or loud music blasting out of a store so it's unpleasant for teens to hang out in front of it.

All these are forms of hostile architecture.

It's the built environment deliberately made to be unwelcoming, to push undesirables away.

When you start start looking for it, you can see versions of hostile architecture all around, on public transportation, in airports, and shopping districts.

It goes way back to the earliest forms of cities, the ones surrounded by defensive walls, which were hostile to invaders, and to the London of Jane Austen, where bulges were put into walls so they would splash back on anyone who might be inclined to pee on them.

But hostile architecture in its contemporary form really began with the rise of suburbia, which left American cities hollowed out and struggling.

The rush to the suburbs leaves behind abandoned buildings, neglected property, deteriorating business districts.

By the 1970s and 80s, though, local governments and business improvement districts wanted to do something about this, to revitalize certain areas, to bring residents and shoppers back, often by partnering with developers.

That's what happened in Jonathan's hometown of Los Angeles.

The old joke about LA being 40 suburbs in search of a city is being made obsolete by a revitalized downtown Los Angeles that is a renewed political, cultural, and commercial center.

But renewing downtown LA meant tearing down seedy but affordable single-room occupancy hotels in the neighborhood.

When those buildings came down, many of the people who lived in them had nowhere else to go except the streets outside.

And that wasn't going to fly with the city either.

So public spaces are designed with this intent to push away people who are, for example, not consumers and people who are not desired to be part of this reborn downtown LA.

So the city started implementing various strategies that we would now call hostile architecture.

It bulldozed public toilets.

Sprinklers were used to drive homeless people from public sidewalks.

Restaurants built cages around their trash to prevent dumpster diving.

You want to shoe the homeless people away so you make the built environment unwelcoming for them.

Tactics like these were being used all over the country.

The justification was often concerns about security, at least the security of shoppers, employees, tourists, and anyone else spending or earning money, protecting them from having to interact with so-called unsavory individuals.

My critique is this.

It solves nothing.

At best, it just pushes it away.

It displaces the problem.

That's not solving anything.

You still have unhoused people.

The solution is to provide what they need.

Instead, concerns about security got turbocharged after 9-11 when fears extended to terrorists.

The city got even more obsessed with fortification.

You started to see even more surveillance cameras.

You started to see even more signage warning that you were being watched.

This form of urban planning and urban design, this tactic, it spreads to cities across the United States and now cities globally.

You can follow the encroaching logic of all of this.

Understand why you might want to protect your town from invading armies or terrorist attacks, or someone might not want people to urinate or sleep right next to their door or their business.

But then it just keeps going and going until, in the name of security and containment, and keeping out undesirables, we're kind of all undesirables standing around in the train station, looking for a place to sit.

I'm Willa and this is Max.

I'm seeing you here with all your bags in the train station.

I was wondering if you had been looking for a place to sit and you couldn't find one.

Oh no, I sat on the ground.

I was on the floor.

This is Cal.

We saw him standing in the middle of Moynihan train hall with all those suitcases and we thought we'd ask him about it.

And we were interrupted.

I mean, if we're sitting in a hall and we're all waiting for trains, you've got to have a press pass to do that.

It's a little hard to make out, but what you just heard is a security guard, a goateed white guy in his 30s, wearing a polo shirt with a Moynihan patch on it, telling us we have to stop recording.

We ask you to leave the building.

Seriously.

You're being very stern.

We're just recording a pot.

We're not like doing undercover work.

This is New York City.

Or you should know better than that.

It's not a public place.

It's public access.

Yes, exactly.

So it's not New York City, is what you're saying.

And there's no conversation.

Okay.

Don't you always wish you said exactly the right thing?

I've been dreaming I'm singers for this one.

Instead, we stopped taping.

Turns out, even though Moynihan Train Hall was largely funded by the public, it's managed by a private company.

And in return, they get control.

This is how urban revitalization often works, making the spaces that seem public not so public after all, leaving us with gleaming new parks and train halls that are at the same time under patrol and deliberately uncomfortable.

So you can see it's not just unhoused people, Willa.

Everyone is a target of this defensive approach to city design.

Sitting is a very normal human behavior

that is surprisingly under attack.

As I was having these conversations about sitting, I kept thinking about optimization.

the one-high mathematical term that has since spread far and wide.

It's the idea that if we try hard enough, we can make everything optimal.

But your optimal and my optimal, they might not be the same.

In fact, they surely are not.

Someone's optimized public space is new and shiny and has clean bathrooms and decent food.

And sure, there are no seats, but it never makes anyone feel an iota of discomfort about the vast asymmetries that exist between human beings in the same city.

And someone else's optimal public space doesn't do that because it has a chair.

And then there's what's happening in private spaces, in our personal lives.

What's the optimal amount of sitting?

And what's the optimal amount of standing?

And also,

what's the optimal amount of optimization?

After a grueling month, Dan Koise wrapped up his experiment and he tried to answer these questions for himself.

So when it ended, did you just sit for like a week?

When it ended,

I did for quite some time try to find sort of that optimized mix of sitting and standing during work time.

And then sort of that all fell away.

And now I mostly just sit all the time.

And how do you feel about that now?

I feel the same ambivalence I feel about all my bad habits, which is that there's this constellation of behaviors that I engage in that I know that are bad for me.

And the idea of eliminating all of them is overwhelming and impossible.

And so I pick and choose the unhealthy things that I feel I can successfully stop doing.

And generally, sitting was not one of them.

Maybe partially as a result of having an entire month where I realized how precious sitting truly is.

Life is fleeting and sometimes uncomfortable, however however well optimized.

And so, Dan,

sometimes he's going to sit.

God gave me a body that's good at sitting.

God gave me a cushiony ass.

God gave me a bunch of really nice chairs.

And who am I to reject the gifts that God gave me?

Sitting,

sitting is the opposite of standing.

Sitting is the opposite of running around.

Sitting is a wonderful thing to do.

Because you sitting

sitting.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by Max Friedman and Willipaskin and produced by Max.

We produced Decodering with Katie Shepard and Evan Chung.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

You're listening to Sitting by TJ Mack, aka Brian Jordan Alvarez, as remixed by Josh Mack.

We'd like to thank Stephen Nessen and Rob Robinson.

For some of the background on hostile architecture, we're indebted to the late Mike Davis' book, City of Quartz, and in particular, chapter 4, Fortress LA.

You should also read Dan Coise's great and very funny New York magazine article about his exploits.

It's called Sitting is Bad for You, So I Stopped for a Whole Month.

We will link to it on our showpage.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

And if you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering and every other Slate podcast without any ads.

You also get unlimited access to our website.

Member support is crucial to what we do, so please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

We'll see you in two weeks.

Sitting,

sitting is the opposite of standing.

Sitting is the opposite of running around.

Sitting is a wonderful thing to do.

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