Our history of love with the President has horrific consequences

According to a rough estimate, there could be more than 60 billion chairs on the planet.

Why are there no chairs in the Bible or in the 30,000 lines of Homer? There is no such thing in Shakespeare's Hamlet – written in 1599. But in the middle of the 19th century, it's a completely different story. Charles Dickens' Bleak House suddenly has 187. What's changed? The session being called "the new smoker", we all know that spending too much time on chairs is a bad thing for us. Not only are they unhealthy, but like air pollution, they become almost impossible to avoid for modern men.

When I started researching my book on how the world we created changes our bodies, I was surprised to discover how rare the chairs were. Now they are everywhere: offices, trains, cafes, restaurants, pubs, cars, trains, concert halls, cinemas, medical offices, hospitals, theaters, schools, university lecture halls and everywhere in our homes (I guarantee you

If I were asked to make an even conservative estimate of the number of Chairs in the world, it would be difficult for me to go down from 8 to 10 per person. more than 60 billion of them on the planet Should chairs be one of the universal signals of the arrival of the Anthropocene? Just like the data needed to justify the name change of our geological age, they are found on all continents.

As for the reason why there are so many pulpits, there is no clear and clear reason.It is a confluence of fashion, politics, of change of habi studies of work and thirst for comfort. The last of these requires no explanation in a culture where ease and comfort are among the main drivers of consumer decision-making.

A History of Chairs

While chairs began to appear a little more frequently in the early modern period, it seems that they have become much more popular in the 18th and 19th centuries during the Industrial Revolution

Before the 18th century, a chair was relatively easy to find, but the majority of the population hardly used it. Even today, it is not easy to sit in a hardwood chair for prolonged periods and padded seats were prohibitively expensive. But the fashion of a new sloping culture (imported from the 18th century French court) has helped to popularize their early use.

For centuries, chairs had been persistently badociated with power, wealth, and high status. They were about as widely used by the peasantry as a crown. There is an instructive staging in King Lear's First Folio in which the monarch enters while he is carried by servants "on a chair". The idea of ​​seats as a status symbol still persists today. The highest performance in my own profession, academia, is called a "pulpit". The person leading a meeting calls "a chair". The head of the company is also a president or a woman. And it is a universally recognized fact that the best chair in an office building still belongs to the boss.

The democratization of the use of seats (especially after the French Revolution in France and the major reform laws of 1832 in the UK) coincided with a slow change in our modes of job. Most of the work done in the Victorian era would have been understood as manual labor or factory work.

But towards the end of the 19th century, the second wave of technological revolution was accompanied by inventions such as the typewriter and telegraphy. and the increasing uses and applications of electricity, the job market has also begun to change. The new category of office workers was the fastest growing occupational group in the second half of the period. The 1851 census indicates that fewer than 44,000 people were doing administrative work. But in just two decades, sedentary workers have more than doubled to 91,000.

A sedentary planet

Today, sedentary workers are in the majority. And throughout the 20th century, a forest of sedentary activities developed around us to align with our new professional life.

The reading of novels gained popularity throughout the 19th century, followed by sedentary leisure: cinema, radio and television. More recently, the game, the streaming and the time spent in front of a screen are usually activities that make us want to stay still. The anthropocene human needs chairs to fill all these activities (I guess we could call them).

If modern life presents us with a bunch of sedentary behaviors, then chairs are the pillars. They are so necessary to lead a modern life that most of what we do seems unimaginable without them. Research conducted by the British Heart Foundation suggests that we enjoy about 9.5 hours a day of sedentary time. This means that modern humans are inactive for about 75% of their time. This poses some problems.

Our body does its best to be the kind of body we need. Wolff's law and Davis's law can be summed up in the adage "use or lose" for the hard and soft tissues of the body, respectively. In both cases, they tell us that the muscles or bones will react either to an increased load or to the cessation of use. The bones become thinner or denser. The muscles, stronger or weaker. Sitting so seated, with most of the back musculature sitting in an armchair, it is no wonder that with our weak spines, back pain is now the leading cause of disability in the world.

an anthropocene environment, we could also clbadify ourselves as anthropocene humans. Paleolithic humans die most often at a young age. Violence and trauma were also common causes of late death. However, modern humans mostly die as a result of metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers – all closely related to inactivity: namely the use of the chair.

A 2012 study on the effects of inactivity collected behavioral data on 7,813 women and found that those who sat for ten hours a day had shorter telomeres (an indicator of cellular aging). Their sedentary habits had aged them biologically by about eight years. Some studies even suggest that the effects of sitting for extended periods can not be compensated by a small exercise.

These studies and many others attest to the fact that we should think about investing more in our relatively new and pbadionate activities. love story with the president.

Vybarr Cregan-Reid is Reader of Environmental Humanities at the University of Kent.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. Read the original report here .

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