Someone once made the same point about fitness, you used to have to roll down your windows manually, but now its automatic. More and more muscle functions being eliminated by automation. Add them all up and it makes a difference.
I was thinking of building a little motor that can raise and lower the desk, ideally to a voice command. Wouldn't it be neat to say "<assistant of choice>, (raise|lower) the desk"?
Honestly, I'm going to scrap that project right now. While it would be interesting to learn how to build it, you're completely right we're getting lazier every day. Maybe I should be raising and lowering the desk myself.
Thank you.
Only trivially small ones that we'd do a few times a week. There's still lots of physical activity that we do (eg walking around, carrying things like shopping, sex, etc).
Plus, many people have replaced the small manual activities like opening car windows with going to the gym. Anyone who has a sedentary desk job but tries to live a relatively healthy lifestyle probably does far more activity than their parents would have done if they had desk jobs.
Not everywhere — one of the major reasons fitness (and BMI) is correlated with walkability of a city is that in many typical US cities, you barely have to walk anymore, while in the more walkable cities driving is less possible, and you’ll walk or cycle much more, and usually use transit more (which means walking to/from the stops).
All this adds up.
It's not so much that as that you CAN'T walk around in most cities. The last place I lived Walmart was several miles down the road which had no sidewalks and was trenches for water 3 inches from the road. No bike lanes, no nothing. It isn't that most of America is difficult to walk through, it is impossible (if you don't want to be hit by a car at least).
The weeks I am in Chicago I lose weight without really trying - simply from walking to/from the train every day and around the neighborhood running errands. Then of course lunch in the office which of course is another walk away. All those little walking trips add up to miles/day without even noticing and add up to a noticeable change in weight loss/gain.
Minneapolis it's rare to walk more than 100ft (to a car and back) to go anywhere - unless you make a concerted conscious effort to take time to walk for the sake of walking.
Living involves the acts of experiencing the real world and doing things for yourself.