Some more of that “science” people like so much is going around this week, this time from Public Health England (PHE), who want us to stand up more at our desks. A study co-commissioned by the PHE, suggests office workers need to aim to spend at least two hours a day standing on their feet, and when they’ve got that nailed, raise it to four. “We are creatures of habit and we have come to the wrong conclusion that sitting is the optimum way of conducting office work,” the study says. “We need an environment where people feel much more liberated to do desk standing.”

If you are reading this at your desk at work – perhaps on the sly while your boss has a loud conversation, or on the downlow while you avoid making an important phone call because for whatever reason you have to psych yourself up to make a phone call – stand up. You can’t see the screen anymore, can you? And that is why science is wrong.

I have some questions for Public Health England and their co-commissioners, including Active Working’s Gavin Bradley and PHE deputy director for health and wellbeing Dr Ann Hoskins, and those questions mainly boil down to this: yo, have you ever worked in an office before? Like, even for a single atomic second? Because the idea of being on your feet for two hours a day is mad. And the additional idea – again, suggested by the British Medical Journal study – that this figure should rise to four hours a day does not even belong in this universe.

There’s always one of these going around, is the thing. We are meant to spend two hours a day rising to four hours a day on our feet: fine. Stupid, but fine. Unworkable, but fine. But then we’re also meant to spend 20 seconds every 20 minutes having an eye break. We’re not meant to huff toxic fumes from out of the vents at the back of printers. We’re meant to sit up exactly straight for eight hours without slumping. Trap our feet into those special weird backless chairs. Revolve our wrists around so we don’t get RSI.

Essentially – if you listen to science – we should spend our entire working days enacting a series of rites and chants to summon up the ancient spirits of office work – converted wood nymphs, mainly, wood nymphs called John who know how to work the photocopier, wood nymphs who know where the only box of red pens is – at which point we throw ourselves on the mercy of the office spirits and beg them. “John”, we say, “John, please: do not mangle our bodies just for working here.” I ask PHE, I ask them: when am I meant to do my work, though, throughout all this?

The conspiracy theorists among you are probably thinking this is just a thinly disguised attempt by the standing desk lobby. And we’ve all seen one, we’ve all looked across an office and seen someone at a standing desk, just standing there, like it’s nothing, and then we’ve looked back at them a week later and looky-looky: they are sitting down again – a thin and transparent attempt to sell the concept of standing desks to a wider market. I agree with you, conspiracy theorists. This has “Big Desk” written all over it. But the point is humans are inherently lazy and adverse to change and this is never going to happen.

Remember that day you tried taking regular eye breaks? I do. I set alarms and everything. I made it to 4pm until I cancelled them all and went back to eyeballing my laptop like I was trying to start a fight with it outside Yates. What about that afternoon where you tried not to slouch? It just doesn’t take, does it?

And this is the thing: if we weren’t inherently lazy, we wouldn’t work in offices. Office work is, widely, inessential, it’s just a lot easier than chopping trees down or digging a pit. Office work is the next key step in our evolution: humankind’s inevitable end game is basically just to grow and spread into sort of comfortable gelatinous pillows, designed to flop on the floor like a fat cat and peck out small and irrelevant digits into a spreadsheet with our long, bony fingers. And that’s OK. I, for one, can’t wait to grow a fatty beanbag in my own back, and wallow in it contentedly until retirement age.

Stop trying to make us stand up, science. Embrace, instead, our inevitable doomed and early death.