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Comment by armagon | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body.

Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous.

(It's been a long time since I've watched it, but I think this talks a bit about the idea: https://vimeo.com/115154289 - "The Humane Representation of Thought")

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Stephen Wolfram (of the Wolframalpha.com fame) has a treadmill attached to one of his workstations [0]. I've read claims that walking 1-2mph takes no mental effort. Lets say 4 hours of walking would net you about 5 miles. That's a decent effort for the day and you could still sit the other 4 hours out of your 8 hour day.

[0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...

> Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years.

Your body wasn't designed to do anything. It's the result of random mutations that survived better than other random mutations.

> The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous.

A somewhat sedentary job with the option to take breaks to move around and exercise outside of that is still vastly preferable to any other combination. Non-sedentary jobs and manual labor will break and wear down your body in different ways, they aren't some ideal to aspire to.

> A somewhat sedentary job with the option to take breaks to move around and exercise outside of that is still vastly preferable to any other combination. Non-sedentary jobs and manual labor will break and wear down your body in different ways, they aren't some ideal to aspire to.

It's a scale though. A job in construction is different to a job as a park ranger. Both are different to office work.

> > Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years.

> Your body wasn't designed to do anything. It's the result of random mutations that survived better than other random mutations.

Fair enough; it would be more accurate for me to say, "Our bodies are poorly adapted to sitting in chairs for 8 hours a day for 40 years."

I'll agree with you that many jobs will wear your body down, but it isn't obvious to me that a sedentary job with forced motion breaks is the best combination.

> but it isn't obvious to me that a sedentary job with forced motion breaks is the best combination.

You left out exercise. With exercise it's the best combination because you're able to choose what kind of stress to put on your body, in what quantities and you can do so safely in a controlled environment. That's a huge luxury that many people who do manual labour don't have.

When the newspaper prints what time is sunrise, I don't write it to protest that the sun doesn't go anywhere; it's the Earth that is spinning on its axis. Sunrise is just the way we refer to that phenomenon because it looks like the sun is rising.

I think it's perfectly fine to say that your body was designed to do this or that. It may have been the result of random mutations, but evolution has done such a good job it damn well looks like it was designed.

There are plenty of jobs that consist of not much more than walking around - beat cop, traffic warden, security guard, park ranger, even janitor. I find it unlikely that walking around for 8-12 hours is going to damage your body more than spending the same time mostly sitting down, not moving. Speaking personally, I've held both types of job, and I know which kind leaves me feeling healthier (it's not the sedentary kind).

If it paid as well as my current job I think I would much rather be a mailman.

I had a shower thought the other day. When playing games it's often quite normal to lean left, right, back in the heat of the moment. (The good old falling out of a chair in the heat of the moment).

It would be nice to have some sort of simple peripheral that would allow to translate simple body movement and maybe breath patterns (multiple games have a button to hold breath) into controls. I know that VR is a thing but I think there is quite some space between here and there.

For office style work one idea would be to have an extended desktop with parallax.

I got to play HL:Alyx recently and it felt sooo awesome to peek around corners. I definitely want more bodily interaction in VR as it grows.

Head tracking (without full VR) is quite a big niche in flight/space sims, whether just for rotations or a limited amount of translation as well. It's much more natural using your head to look around, keeps your hands on the flight controls, and frees up hat switches and other buttons which no longer need to serve that purpose.

That talk looks really interesting. I'm all for a future that unbinds us from tiny 2d screens.

We're always going to need to do exercise though. There's no way knowledge work could ever e.g. raise your pulse, use your strength + agility etc. We are hunter gatherers removed from our original environment.

I can imagine software development becoming like something out of Minority Report and that's just about it.

There is such a thing as a walking desk. Linus Torvalds uses one. Never used it myself, though. Couldn't imagine doing any serious programming like that.

If you can use a standing desk to program, you can probably get used to a walking desk. In the worst case you'd just need to stop walking when you start getting deep into some parts of your work. If you can't use a standing desk to program, then a walking desk is almost certainly out of the question.

Personally, I just accept that for 5-10 minutes of every hour I will not be at my desk and will instead be near my desk doing calisthenics.

I've found working with the laptop in my garden can help. The mix of air and standing seems to help

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