6 ms·

We've known for all of history that sitting inside for extended periods, allowing yourself to atrophy, not socializing with others, self-indulgence, and neglect

• aidenn0 2y ago
  First of all, I predict that approximately zero people will change their behaviors because of this study. So saying "people need studies to tell them" is a bit much. > We've known for all of history that... I don't want to go too far into the epistemological weeds here, but we've also known that the earth was the center of the solar system and that many health problems are caused by an imbalance of the humors.
• infotainment 2y ago
  > We've known for all of history that sitting inside for extended periods, allowing yourself to atrophy, not socializing with others, self-indulgence, and neglecting your spiritual and mental health are bad for you. This, IMO, is why WFH is a bad thing and should be avoided.
  • hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Only for those who depend on the workplace for their social life. Which might even be most people, but I don’t think it’s healthy. But here we go again with a rehashed debate.
    • iwontberude 2y ago
      The bigger issue is why should we be forced to subject our biology to the pathogens in the office. Why should I have to sacrifice my health?
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Ongoing, low-key exposure to pathogens is usually good for you, as it helps you keep immunity. Conversely, quarantining yourself is not a healthy way to live.
        • iwontberude 2y ago
          I have exposure to people through my family and other close friends, why do I need to swap germs with my coworkers and their kids and their classmates?
          • TeMPOraL 2y ago
            So everyone is exposed to broader variety of germs.
  • cannonpr 2y ago
    I chose to live next to a lovely forest and get to enjoy a walk when ever I like during my workday. When working from an office I was stuck 2 hours each way in an underground tunnel, and then in a tiny box office, preconceptions are a funny thing.
  • thelastgallon 2y ago
    > This, IMO, is why WFH is a bad thing and should be avoided. yes WFH bad. Drive 3 hours to sit in a cube instead with 1/6th the space of your room at home.
    • seam_carver 2y ago
      I agree, but only because the office is a 25 minute walk away. If I was driving an hour I’d feel different.
      • infotainment 2y ago
        Because you have common sense; so many of these commenters seem to think that it’s somehow everyone else’s fault they chose to live in a place where everything is a 3 hour drive away.
        • TeMPOraL 2y ago
          Yeah, that works at best only as long as you're single; once you live together with a partner, it's highly likely one of you will be getting a long commute.
          • infotainment 2y ago
            In a proper metro area, where jobs and housing are concentrated, this isn't such an issue, as there’s a high probability both your and your partner’s jobs would be quickly commutable. Sadly, America’s backwards zoning policies have led to a situation where nothing is typically near anything else. But hey, at least people can have huge front yards that they never ever, use for anything! That’s something!
            • TeMPOraL 2y ago
              There's another problem, that's hitting Europe right now: approximately no one can actually afford to move to "a proper metro area", at least not when it comes to larger cities. Even on a dev salary, when you move to a place you can afford that offers basic comforts to family (i.e. not renting out single rooms shared with others), your commute is now back to ~1h each way. But at least you and your partner are traveling in the same direction, so there's that. It's much easier for people who already own a place in the city.
  • micromacrofoot 2y ago
    versus being stuck in a car alone during that time instead? then go to work and don't have friends because I can't say anything that can get me fired
  • smolder 2y ago
    The take away should probably be that while indoors for long periods, you should sit with a window nearby and within view, so you can focus on far away objects periodically. (I've heard 15 second every fifteen minutes or 20 every 20 as rules of thumb.) And maybe take walks outside more often. Do you have less opportunity to sit next to a window you can look out of periodically, when working from home? I'd think not. Less time to take walks outdoors? Nope. For many people, offices are going to be more of a detriment than a help.
  • bagels 2y ago
    The variety in vocal distances in my home office are much greater. I have a nice sunny window to look out into the distance, and the outdoors are 10 steps away which I indulge in at least every couple hours.
  • jwells89 2y ago
    Maybe if it becomes normalized for companies to have several small, localized offices that enable employees to live in lower cost areas while still being within a short drive (or preferably, walk/bike) of home rather than demand that everybody comes into the mothership without paying well enough across the board (not just devs) to make it not prohibitively expensive to live reasonably close by. In short, as long as hour+ driving commutes are commonplace, WFH shouldn’t be going anywhere.
    • hibikir 2y ago
      Extremely unlikely. The main reason most companies used to have offices in large metros is not because they were expensive, but because they offer great access to workers. This became even more important as women's labor participation went up, as moving for one job is stressful, but moving when you have two earners is a real problem. The main advantage for a company of WFH is opening up the pool of workers even more: I've worked at teams that might as well been UN sumits if you look at just nationalities and locations. Small, localized offices in lower cost areas do not provide any significant social advantage over home if you don't find at least a handful of people you work with in said office. But if the company is very distributed, this isn't going to happen. So then you have to try to hire people living hear those, lower cost of living offices, which shrinks the available pool again. And if those places had a lot of highly paid workers, they stop being low cost of living anyway. The only road to shorter commutes (once having an office is taken as mandatory) is massive density and public transport. It doesn't guarantee it, but then there are more people that are technically close enough to the office so that if they worked there, they'd have a short commute. Compare, say, LA and Madrid. LA is bigger, but the number of people that can get to a random point in downtown LA in 30 minutes is far lower than in Madrid.
      • graemep 2y ago
        I always thought that as women's labour force participation went up, working hours should have fallen. If you have double the workforce, surely people can reduce their hours? My main reason is that it is better for families, and it would be kids spend more time with their parents (in the UK it is now common for kids to have breakfast at school, and be picked from after school childcare every day). With regard to this problem, it would also make commuting a lot easier. The biggest problem I have found with commuting is the crowding at peak times: it makes things slower and less comfortable, and means you cannot get work done on a train, etc. If you had shorter and more flexible working hours people could avoid peak times.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  We do science because sometimes common sense turns out to be wrong.
  • Gigachad 2y ago
    Most of the time "common sense" is actually just stuff that was drummed in to us as kids because it's what the research of the time said. So yeah, you do need these studies, and then they become common sense later.
• mywittyname 2y ago
  I wish my parents would have known that sending me outside would prevent my needing glasses. Or that schools would have offered some sort of treatment to help prevent it. I feel like society generally accepts myopia as something you just get, instead addressing it like a disease that can be prevented. Sure, it's manageable with corrective lenses or surgery, but prevention is so simple. Better education, through articles like this might catalyze some of the changes we need to make to allow a lot of children grow up being able to see things naturally. it's like diabetes, sure, some people are born with it, but others develop it through lifestyle choices. Except in this case, this effects children, who have very little control over their lives. It's up to adults to help them grow up to be healthy.
• electriclizard 2y ago
  The west has shifted into believing subjective experience is useless compared to objective knowledge. This is like a BackEnd engineer saying that he doesn't believe the FrontEnd exists. We've been studying the FrontEnd for the majority of human history, and while many things we've found are just plain wrong in an objective sense, they still have subjective value. Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community.
  • paulryanrogers 2y ago
    > Case and point: look at how meditation has been receiving continuous affirmation from the scientific community Has it? Most of traditional medicine is quackery, as useful and correct as a broken clock.
    • electriclizard 2y ago
      Yes. All my therapists have referred me to meditation and explained to me that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy takes some influence from it. There are tons of articles published in journals on it. As for the quackery, that comes from attempts to discern objective truths. Traditional medicine is terrible for objective truths. But it shines in subjective experience.
      • mewpmewp2 2y ago
        I don't know, it seems everyone has different idea of what meditation is and if it doesn't work for me I will be told I am doing it wrong in some way. At least CBT seems to have a clear enough definition and instructions.
        • electriclizard 2y ago
          Yeah, it's these "different ideas" of contemplative studies that gives it a bad name. There are especially a lot of grifters in the west selling snakeoil "eastern medicine." Ultimately, you have to try things out and see what affects your subjective experience. You will know by direct experience what is transforming your experience. If something doesn't work, throw it out. There are a lot of different ways of meditating, because the brain is complex enough that every person has different predispositions. But ultimately meditation begins by watching your mind so that you can know how it behaves and then testing different things to see how the behavior changes. But I do like CBT and agree is has the strength you're talking about; it has the rigorousness of scientific research behind it, so its solutions tend to be applicable for larger categories of people. Science usually throws out anomalies where something only works or doesn't work for a few individuals.
• swatcoder 2y ago
  > We've known for all of history that sitting inside for extended periods, allowing yourself to atrophy, not socializing with others, self-indulgence, and neglecting your spiritual and mental health are bad for you. That doesn't really capture the risk-carrying lifestyle they're highlighting in the article, though. Spending your days contributing to your community in a safely sheltered school, office, etc as part of a social community and then your home time further learning and socializing indoors, with others, doesn't really look anything like what you described but seems to carry the similar risk here. While some have an intuition that's already skeptical of that life, many people wouldn't give it a second thought. You're being productive, social, healthy, and maybe even physically active. Doesn't sound too bad! But you're not getting much sunlight, you're not seeing a lot of distant focal points, and you're specifically probably doing a lot of reading and watching -- that's where the increased risk of myopia quietly slips in.
• MeImCounting 2y ago
  Except that thats how progress is made. If people like Hooke, Newton and perhaps every other genius who made monumental contributions spent their life outside socializing with others and acting all spiritual we wouldnt have calculus or know about atoms.
  • greatwave1 2y ago
    Hooke and Newton did spend a considerable amount of time outside and socializing with others lol
• heavyset_go 2y ago
  > I get why people study this sort of thing and why it's useful. The thing that I don't understand is why people need studies to tell them they should skip desert, leave the phone on the counter, go outside, and ask your neighbor how they're doing. People have all kinds of weird beliefs, and there are entire industries selling quack remedies and therapies that people, willingly and unwillingly, buy into. Sure it won't reach everyone, but it might reach some people who genuinely thought their previous beliefs and behaviors were "correct".
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I prefer not knowing my neighbors
• manoweb 2y ago
  What is wrong with dessert? Last night I cut strawberries with my kids and placed them over some banana ice-cream I made in the morning. Not everybody needs to avoid sugars, especially if the diet is balanced and varied.
  • strken 2y ago
    In the US, two thirds of adults are overweight or obese by BMI, and this is roughly the case across most of the developed world. That proportion is likely even higher by body fat percentage, since BMI tends to incorrectly label unhealthy body compositions as healthy. 11% of the population are diabetic and 38% are prediabetic. I like dessert, have a normal BMI, and don't have diabetes. That being said, desserts like stewed fruit and yoghurt are not representative of what the average person is eating, and any unnecessary food is going to make problems with excess weight worse.
• rubicon33 2y ago
  Born to move, payed to sit.
• throwawaysleep 2y ago
  > The thing that I don't understand is why people need studies to tell them they should skip desert, leave the phone on the counter, go outside, and ask your neighbor how they're doing. I don't want to. I want them to find a different solution. And eventually they do. The solution isn't skipping dessert, but rather Ozempic.
  • scotty79 2y ago
    Doesn't Ozempic suppress appetite so you skip desserts with it, just involuntarily?
• code51 2y ago
  The economy expects us all to be guild navigators - doesn't matter how your body is transformed if you're producing some economic value in the near term.
• allen_berg 2y ago
  People are perfectly capable of being self indulgent, asocial and neglect their health outside and develop perfect eyesight. I really don't see how the moral judgement is relevant here.
  • Nasrudith 2y ago
    Because it allows for oh so convenient victim blaming of course!