Drauzio Varella thinks we are not spending enough energy
[Translator’s note: Drauzio Varella is a Brazilian physician and one of the country’s most famous TV health communicators.]
I had an enormous desire to write about how our computers and electronic devices are anti-ergonomic and harm our health, our posture, our bones and our muscles, because we have to sit, hunched, crooked and focused to use these devices. But somewhere along the way something happened, and I changed my mind — now I suspect the problem is not in the devices themselves, but in the part that uses the device.
I read a text by Drauzio Varella about laziness, physical exercise etc, in one of those links you click on Facebook without asking yourself why. I am not a fan of Drauzio, you know how it is — a physician (scientific knowledge, authority, power over life and death in the popular view) ventilated by the big television media (Rede Globo, films etc) — that is a lot of power given to one man, I get suspicious, I don’t know, I don’t even own a television, although it reaches me through the Internet; the news portals mix soap-opera “news” in with the “facts” and I don’t even like to imagine what the masses make of that reading. Back to Varella’s text.
At some point early in the text, Doctor Drauzio links human anatomy to the terrible habit of spending hours glued to electronic devices. Over to the doctor:
If the human body had been designed for today’s uses, why such long legs and arms? If it is only to move from one seat to another, they could be half the length. If arms serve only to reach the computer keyboard, why forearms? We would be dwarves with atrophied limbs, but with an enormous, cushioned backside to give us comfort in chairs.
It is an interesting mental gymnastics to imagine the human being of the computer era. I myself have done it, long before Doctor Drauzio, and here is the proof, in a text I published on March 15, 2010 under the title Meanwhile, in a not-so-distant future. The Varellian literature on the subject was produced yesterday (01/14/2014). You lost, doctor! An excerpt of my text for the lazy:
I remember the day I got my first netnetnetbook. I opened it deeply moved — an emotion that lasted very, very little. After a few minutes of typing, I noticed that my hands had to stay very close together, and my fingers had to make tortuous, contained movements, so that I would not press multiple keys at once on the minuscule keyboard. A horrible tension in the wrists and forearms settled in next.
That’s right — I have just quoted myself. I think I will open my Facebook profile and masturbate looking at my own photos. The Internet does wonders for the ego. But the truth is that my text is a flop with public and critics alike, the critic in this case being me. The prophetic exercise was terrible; the text is set in the future, and today one can already tell we will no longer have keyboards, and the dominant device is not remotely the netbook but smartphones and tablets. Besides which, my text must have some 15 views, and Varella’s already has 12 thousand likes in 2 days. Back to the doctor’s text, then.
Drauzio goes on about the origin of species, about how animals are not given to wasting energy without purpose, hence laziness: its origin lies in that damned “genetic inheritance” of beasts that do not act without necessity. The doctor, however, errs (on purpose) when he claims there is no energy expenditure in our sedentary activity; that, just because we no longer walk or exercise our bodies in any way, we are standing still. We are more active than any athlete at the peak of exertion.
Or are we now going to pretend we manage to do nothing? No activity whatsoever, in a state of rest, relaxation? I challenge anyone to do nothing. Or to do something like watching one minute pass on a clock — I doubt we can look at a clock for one measly minute without getting distracted. I will make two distinct lists of things we can do while sitting, without spending energy according to Doctor Drauzio Varella, since he mentions computer use as an activity where no energy is spent.
List 1:
- Watching television;
- Using social networks on the phone or tablet;
- Reading news and watching videos on the Internet;
- Playing Facebook games (or any electronic game).
List 2:
- Reading a good book (not Veja’s best-seller list) or watching a good film (hint: it’s not playing at the mall multiplex, there is no exception, you are wrong);
- Meditating;
- Contemplating a landscape;
- Devoting yourself to a creative activity (writing letters, poems, diaries; making drawings; crafts etc).
Which activity from List 1 have you done in recent days? And from List 2? And what is the difference between the lists? And the similarities? Let’s start with the similarities. There is energy expenditure in both lists, or else you could perform any of those tasks indefinitely. Staying awake requires energy. That is the end of the similarities between the two lists.
The energy spent on the activities of List 1 contributes nothing to the void you feel, that despair that makes you enter the same websites, watch the same shows, endure the same commercial 50 times in one day, get outraged at the state of the world and want to put a bullet in your own head after spending 4 hours of your day on Candy Crush Saga or on porn sites. You are getting fat, your back hurts, you neither shit nor sleep properly, nobody likes your Facebook posts, but you keep iterating over the activities of List 1, and the only problem with the iPhone is the price, and your only problem is lack of money. You are tired, but not exactly tired — it is a strange sleepiness, a lost gaze, a feeling that something is missing — I have never seen a depressed or obese wild animal. You have no power to react, you are out of energy, despite being sedentary.
The activities of List 2, on the other hand, require much more energy and disposition than those of List 1, even though they can be done sitting down. Yet it is incredible how much they can tame — and even fill — that void which is symptomatic of the activities of List 1. You may even become a better person — in the sense that you may begin to take interest in things other than badmouthing people, watching and discussing television, playing useless games etc. Maybe you will even talk a little less.
And this is where Varella comes in: oh, what laziness, “for squandering energy goes against human nature”. I would like to meet these human beings the doctor refers to; most of the human beings I know (myself included) are specialists in squandering energy. We are capable of spending a whole day active without doing absolutely anything that brings us satisfaction — the kind that allows a peaceful sleep and a healthy gut, for instance. What a waste of natural resources, wouldn’t you say, doctor?
And that is why I cannot blame my computer and my completely inadequate desk for my back pain; nor my smartphone for my wrist injury, finger cramps and inability to relate to people who are not behind a screen. It would be absurd for me to make that kind of criticism; these kinds of devices exist because we asked for them. You are reading a news story about Romário going out with a transsexual and thinking, “look at the kind of thing newspapers publish these days“. Surprise: if you are reading it, the story was created precisely for you — if you can remember one sentence from this text, remember that one. If you can see it, it’s meant for you. And with every useless news story you read, every time an ad repeated for the hundredth time rapes your mind, you lose energy.
But according to Drauzio Varella, if we sit in front of the computer or the television all day, we are not spending energy. Think very carefully about what that message represents. 870 thousand people like Drauzio Varella on Facebook; he has a weekly column in Folha de São Paulo. Good night.