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Comment by cpsns | Hacker News Reader

> I recognize that I have the privilege of not sacrificing my body and health for my income.

Sitting for longer periods in any amount is incredibly bad for one's health long term, every study on the subject has confirmed this.

You are sacrificing your health, just in a different way.

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Comparing construction or plumbing work to sitting is absolutely ludicrous.

I also use a standing desk anyways, but I am not sacrificing my health like my grandfather or father did who had/have back/knee and other health issues in their 50s from physical labor.

Being able to earn a nice living while sitting at a desk is an enormous privilege, and I also get money and healthcare to routinely visit doctors anyway.

No kidding. I did concrete for a single summer. Software engineering barely counts as work compared to that.

"The trades" each come with occupational hazards of their own. These occupational hazards are sometimes much worse than sitting down. Besides, op clearly stated the intent to walk more.

For example, would you accept a 1.4x (+40%) chance of brain cancer? Vs sedentary peoples who have 2x chance of diabetes and +14% cardiovascular disease? (and sedentary means sitting + not exercising after work!).

I'd argue diabetes is easier to avoid through other life changes. I"m confused about whether "sitting" means "never exercising", and articles that talk about "sedentary" lifestyles are not very helpful.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1035250/

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M14-1651

Eh didn’t it turn out that most of that was drummed out in the 2012 era by a few doctors selling books and partnering with exercise and standing desk companies? I feel like most of the more recent stuff I have read has said, yes get your exercise in but sitting itself isn’t actually bad, certainly not the whole ‘1 hour of sitting reduces your life by 1 day’ sort of stuff we heard a decade+ ago.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/21/health/sitting-study-partner/...

My confusion is that "sitting" is confounded with "never exercising". If you exercise 5m/hr for 16hrs (and sleep 8), you have accumulated a huge amount of sitting time, but also a really big amount of exercise time. Nobody does that, but what if we did?

I read somewhere that somebody did some study with god knows what methodology (people like to use current-world HG communities, not representative of ancestry) and decided that our ancestors walked about 12mi/day. That's about 3-4h of walking daily. We have like 280k years of that selection criteria. But also we came from apes, so we're sorta shitty at this upright stuff.

An aside: I also just loathe ergonomic design, I'm never comfortable in anything other than a recliner or laying on a couch or bed. I'm wholly convinced that chairs are the way they are because "they've always been that way" with tables and desks following suit. It's unfortunate that better designs haven't caught on, aren't readily available, and tend to be inordinately expensive. What I'd really like to see is a practical true to form holistic ergonomic design instead of this weird traditionally inspired clusterfuck with its productivity centric model.

> It's unfortunate that better designs haven't caught on, aren't readily available, and tend to be inordinately expensive.

Do you have any links to examples of these different designs? After using a bunch of different chairs, I'm seriously considering just repurposing my piano stool, even though I'll lose all the back support.

I just can't find anything sustainably comfortable and supportive.

HAG has the Capisco, which I've eyed. There are also kneeling chairs, they tilt the pelvis forward, they can be had cheaply, but I'd hate to buy one just to throw it out. Of course there are the ball based chairs and such.

I sit seiza-style on my chair currently to enforce good posture by tilting the pelvis, but it's taxing after a while, and it took me a long time to adjust to seiza, I use a standing desk in complement.

https://store.flokk.com/us/en-gb/products/hag-capisco?model=...

I set a timer that goes off every 45 minutes. At which point I'll walk around for a couple of minutes and do some push ups and pull ups.

In the mornings I walk my daughter to school: 25 minutes exercise.

At lunch time I'll take a 30 minute walk.

There's no reason to be unfit as a software developer.

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