In the latest “being alive can kill you” news, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) is warning of the risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease from sitting at your desk for too long. As a new survey shows that most office workers spend only half an hour a day on their feet, the BHF and Get Britain Standing are launching a campaign to get people up and walking around more. That might sound sensible from a physical point of view, but psychologically it is myopic. The worse work gets, the more we want to stay at our desks.
Sitting at a desk, after all, feels safe. The depth of the desk provides a physical barrier to anyone threatening to intrude in front of us. (Ideally, there should be a wall at one’s back. That is one of the many reasons why open-plan offices are so unpleasant: the possibility that anyone could creep up on you from behind is why sitting with your back to a door is bad feng shui.) For as long as we sit there, the desk is entirely our domain. The nesting instinct is awakened, and we create a personalised space with photographs, Keanu Reeves action figures, plants, and arrays of mechanical pencils.
The derisive term “desk jockey”, then, is curiously inapt. We are not (at least most of us) sat astride our desks as though they were horses, jiggling around to the thundering of tablelegs. We are, instead, pleasantly cocooned, the universe shrunk down to a few square feet over which we enjoy perfect mastery. This is why, in wartime, soldiers envy those of their fellows who manage to land a “soft” desk job. The critical use of the term “deskbound” for people who sit quietly and think about things, meanwhile, rests on an implausible dichotomy between desk and “real world”.
While you are at a desk, you are still in the real world. And thinking about the real world is often easier, and more comfortable, if you are sitting at a desk.
While you are at your desk, of course, it is also impossible for passing bosses to tell at a quick glance whether you’re actually doing any work, or simply watching cat videos on Facebook or posting sarcastic one-liners on Comment is free.
At your desk, then, you are free, even as you imitate physically the attitude of a compliant worker. No wonder, then, that a third of people surveyed said they even put off going to the loo in order to stay at their desk.
So if we are chained to our desks, it is with what William Blake, in another context, called “mind-forg’d manacles”. In the horrendous environment of an office, being seated at your desk is the one position conducive to psychic calm and freedom. Which is why it is actively sinister to try to persuade us to lead healthier lives by encouraging us to work at standing desks or, worse, treadmill desks, as though we were giant hamsters.
God save us too from the appalling suggestion of “walking meetings”. (Walking and talking at the same time is unnatural and difficult, as can be confirmed by observing the artificial manner of TV documentary presenters.)
All such wheezes, I confidently predict, will backfire and lead to an even more miserable workforce. (Corporate health and “wellness” programmes, after all, as Carl Cederström and André Spicer note in The Wellness Syndrome, simply add even more to the quantity of labour expected of the employee.)
The real health menace behind excessive desk time is not people’s all-too-human desire to take the weight off but the modern scourge of presenteeism. If the authorities really want us to spend less time at our desks, they should let us spend less time at work, full stop.
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