Thank you for not sitting

Do you sit at work for hours on end? Did you know this is killing you?

Doctors now say sitting is the new smoking. Lying down is the new heroin overdose. Coconut water is the new breast milk.

And this just in: Doctors discover children are the new adults.

The scourge of societal sitting continues unabated. What is the government’s, um, stand on sitting?

I was on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, standing all the way, and I couldn’t believe all the people who were sitting. Sure, destroying their own health is one thing. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

What about second-hand sitting? There was someone sitting RIGHT BESIDE ME. I politely asked him to stop sitting. Instead, he sat on top of me. Who knows what the long-term effects of that will be.

I asked him if he’s tried the sitting patch. He didn’t know about it. It’s simple, and it works, I said. Stick a rebar up your butt. You will never sit again. He promised he would consider it, and tell all his Facebook friends.

At first it was hard to give up sitting. But then I read a scandalous article in O magazine. It turns out chair manufacturers are deliberately making chairs more comfortable to entice people to sit. They are actually manipulating the amount of foam on the seat to increase your bum’s craving for a nice place to hang out. And they are putting chairs in schools to hook kids. Disgusting.

Think of all the hapless victims of sitting, continuing in this deadly behaviour because the chair industry still denies that sitting is bad for you. They won’t even agree to a warning on each and every seat.

A standing committee wants to sue the chair manufacturers. The only roadblock is they can’t find 12 jurors who will stand for the entire 6 month trial.

Until then, the standing committee is committed to wiping out all references to sitting in popular culture. It’s a huge task. So far, they’ve changed all instances of the Fonz, from Happy Days, saying “sit on it, Potsie” to “stand on it and move around every 20 minutes or so.”

Their next project is to achieve universal acceptance for the term “babystanding” instead of “babysitting”.

Maybe we should ban all padding on seats. Experts view seat padding as analogous to filtered cigarettes. If people insist on sitting, we should at least make it uncomfortable for them to do so.

What about the Lotus position, a seated position adopted by the great meditators of our age? That must be okay. It is, in fact, okay, as long as your intention is to stand and you spend a good part of the rest of your day standing on the back of a turtle.

Churches are a particular challenge. Hordes of people sit for hours. The standing committee on sitting recommends people stand, and better yet, walk around the church lugging a heavy cross.

One night my wife got home from a party and I got very upset. “You smell like you’ve been sitting” I said. It was all over her clothes. She claims she’s only a social sitter, but I suspect otherwise.

All this dangerous sitting. I can’t stand it anymore.