It was Friday, April 19, 1996. I remember that day clearly. I had just returned from Executive Council in Laguna Niguel, a week of reward from Dupont Radiopharmaceuticals for surpassing my sales forecast. Later in the day, I would be closing on a house I had the good fortune to purchase in the tony section of Scottsdale Arizona, called Troon. A good day all around.

Before I went to the realtor’s office I had to make a stop at Comp USA. I was being pressured by my girlfriend Carol, to get a home PC so we could manage our finances using Quicken. I wasn’t keen on the idea because Carol never knew a check she couldn’t bounce and I didn’t know a megabyte from a mosquito bite.

Being in good spirits, I relented. I was home in two hours with three big boxes. A laughable Microsoft configuration by today’s standards. Be that as it may, in about an hour, my whole life had changed. Completely. There was magic in those boxes.

Within weeks, I was producing a newsletter, “News From The Left”, web sites for my customers, and recording music on that contraption. I had launched myself into cyberspace. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day.

Within a year, I had made some new friends: chiropractors, neurologists and massage therapists. I never put two and two together. All those new but punishing hours in front of the screen was wreaking havoc. Add a statin drug to the mix and I was in pain central. And it was constant.

Lance Dreher, a local body builder and radio personality, gave me some exercises to do but the pain always came back. I thought it might have had something to do with all the luggage I toted all over the country, but in my 6 years in the field, I never had a problem before. Age? I shuddered to think. I was barely 50.

As it turns out, technology is exacting a toll on our physicality. By sitting hunched over and leaning into our screens, or staring into our devices of choice, we are protracting our shoulders and leaning forward so much we are throwing our bodies out of alignment.

It’s not just our upper half, our hip flexors get shortened, our calves get tight and our backs start getting a nice little arch. It’s all connected. The hip bone’s connected to the…

All of which means compensation and pain. (Bet you never thought you’d see those two words in the same sentence.)

But that’s the reality of today’s technology. Our heads are down, our shoulder’s are up and our backs are out. I won’t touch on diminished attention spans.

I could say that a lot of these problems are easily remedied by simply becoming more flexible and stepping away from our devices, but that would be a stretch.

But it’s exactly what we need 🙂