We did a lot of things differently during lockdown. Our bins went out more than we did. Socialising meant pub quizzes on Zoom. Going for a 35-minute walk was an act of reckless abandon worthy of police intervention, flour was harder to come by than depleted uranium, and we all got very into our home working setups.
Did you experiment with a standing desk in 2020? No, come on. There’s no shame in it. It was a different time. And anyway, I did. Terrified by the thought that my already sedentary lifestyle would be disrupted by a government-mandated period of remaining indoors and gleaning my only exercise by banging a pan outside my front door every Thursday night, I panic-bought (among other crippling and regrettable expenses including a vast double freezer) a standing desk.
This desk, I reasoned, would save me. It would be my ally in the fight against obesity, diabetes, circulatory problems, cancer, cardiovascular disease and premature death. It would do these things, because I’d Googled ‘standing desk health benefits’ and the article at SERP zero had listed those exact bullet points. That information still circulates freely, much like COVID-19 itself, to this day. But it perhaps isn’t interrogated very robustly. I certainly didn’t think to do so. I just got the screwdriver out, assembled my new sit-stand desk, and waited for Ryan Gosling’s body to emerge from within my own.