Shoulder Shrugs
NOTE: This post is not related to, inspired by, or associated with the exercise “The Shoulder Shrug.”
Recently, I was eating some pizza in San Francisco with a friend — let’s call him Hari because that is, in fact, his name — when we had a random interaction with a random stranger. He, like us, was visiting the city and wanted to know how to get to the nearest BART station. (Let’s set aside the fact that the BART might be one of the worst public transit systems in America, though I should be grateful that the city at least has one. I’m looking at you, LA). As casual visitors who were busy riding Scoot and Bay Wheels during our trip, we did not know anything about BART stations. A few other things about this interaction struck me as peculiar. For one, did this person not have Google Maps (or a related interface e.g. Waze™ or—God forbid—Apple Maps)? Second, why was he — too — eating this pizza (it was not good)?
Nonetheless, he was a very nice individual, and we began to make some small talk as he asked us what we were doing in the city, how old we were, and other such chitchat. These things generally do not happen to me in the Smartphone Age, so Hari and I were glad to talk to him. Serendipitously, we found out he taught Ergonomics at a college elsewhere in California. As someone with self-diagnosed “tech neck,” Hari was particularly excited about this and immediately asked if there was a particular desk chair that our new acquaintance recommended.
Rather than give us a brand or a model, he recommended a few different things to look for in a chair. (This was certainly a bit of a cop-out, if you ask me. And since he won’t be reading this and I, as writer of this blog, am asking myself I will definitively call it a cop-out). He said to look for the following:
- Lumbar Support
- Friction against the ground if your chosen chair has wheels (explanation was rather fuzzy on this point)
- A height that won’t force you to raise your shoulders
This third point he emphasized twice which was twice as much as the other points. Importantly, he said that there is no way to fix shoulder issues without surgery. As someone who has dislocated his shoulder six (count-em, 6) times and already had shoulder surgery, I was mortally afraid. After that random interaction, I have been in a state of constant anxiety about my shoulders.
Most people who know me would describe me as a Type A person. I never really feel fully at-ease. I’m a destination-not-the-journey kind of person. What this means is that in the days following the conversation with the ergonomic stranger (e.g. a stranger who has expertise in ergonomics not a person who is ergonomic in-and-of themselves though the latter may be true as well), finding out my shoulders are constantly raised was not a surprise at all.
An important exception (that may or may not prove the rule) to the destination-not-the-journey personality trait is media consumption. I enjoy media as a pastime (the journey). I don’t get particularly invested (destination is unimportant). The ending of Game of Thrones did not upset me. I was recently berated by a friend who clearly did care about the ending and asked me: “well then, did you ever really care about GoT?” He raises a good point.
There are a few possible explanations, though. Plausibly, I am now so worried about my shoulders that the resulting tension has raised them (see: sneezing is not normal). The act of observation has changed the phenomenon itself. This happens all the time. (In physics, it’s creatively called The Observer Effect while in political science it is known as The Hawthorne Effect.) I doubt my own observation changed my own behavior, especially for something as trivial as shoulder positioning — though apparently it is non-trivial!
It’s also possible that I am in a state of constant anxiety about the future now more than ever before. The post-pandemic year comes with many moving parts and little notion of finality or certainty. Perhaps my shoulders are absorbing all the tension. Using a key human evolutionary defense mechanism (read: denial), I reject this possibility.
Finally, it’s possible that I just have tense shoulders. When in doubt, just chalk it up to genetics. My dad’s shoulders are very tight. I’m a serial optimizer (with a discount factor — β — close to one; shout-out to inter-temporal optimization), so I really want to avoid the possibility of surgery, even if it is several decades later. So to combat my poor genetics, every time I feel the shoulders rising, I just try to let them go. But, unfortunately this is making my shoulders more tense (tenser? *Tension intensifies*).
I am now left with two final queries. Did my random interaction with that random stranger improve my life? (Let’s ignore the fact that this is probably akin to the quasi-philosophical, pseudo-memey “is it better to know or not to know” question). Second, what in the HECK is making my shoulders so tense? To both, I can only muster one answer: do not, I repeat DO NOT, shrug your shoulders.
EDIT: While writing this post, I was very careful to find a comfortable seating position and not raise my shoulders a single time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
