I am sitting with my shoulders scrunched, my feet up on my desk, and my rear end tilted so that I am as close as one can be in a chair to lying down. In a pasta police lineup, I’d be elbow macaroni. “Did you nag me about posture when I was young, back in the sixties?” I asked my mother recently. “Evidently not,” she said. Remarkably, I am not among the estimated eighty per cent of Americans who suffer from back troubles. So far. Can I continue to get away with my saggy posture forever?

“The answer is no, and here’s why,” Robert DeStefano, a chiropractor who works with the New York Giants, told me. “It might take years for bad posture to rear its head, but the effects are cumulative. You might feel fine, fine, fine for a long time, and then you go to bend down and pick something up and your back goes into spasm.” The choice was clear: work on my posture or never bend down to pick anything up again. (I’m thinking about it.) Shani Soloff, the founder of The Posture People, a company of physical therapists based in Stamford, Connecticut, was less dire. After examining my conformation, over Zoom, she said that, “while you like to fold in on yourself,” I had other bad habits that kept me from being hobbled; namely, constant fidgeting and frequently visiting the refrigerator. (My theory is that because I’m short I try to stand as tall as possible in conversation with others.)

“The key thing is that you want a setup where you can change your body position every twenty to thirty minutes,” Tasha Connolly, a physical therapist, told me in a video chat. She explained that a prolonged hold of any position overstretches certain muscles and shortens others, and that that can create asymmetries. A few years ago, the news was full of warnings about the “sitting disease.” Sitting, everyone said, was the new smoking. A study reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2017 found that subjects who interrupted their sitting every half hour reduced their chance of dying by fifty-five per cent. Not long ago, with the reputation of chairs in ruins, standing desks became fashionable—that is, until new studies showed that prolonged standing was just as bad as sitting, leading to muscular fatigue, varicose veins, and a doubled risk of heart disease.

Let’s start at the beginning. The story goes that when Plato was asked for a definition of a human being he came up with “featherless biped.” This prompted Diogenes the Cynic to present Plato with a plucked chicken. Not to be outwitted, Plato modified his definition. “A featherless biped with flat nails,” he said. My point is not that philosophy in the fourth century B.C.E. was a sport for smart-alecks who had a thing for poultry but that standing on two feet, which became habit among our ancestors seven million years ago, according to Ashley Hammond, of the American Museum of Natural History, is a defining aspect of the true human condition. This milestone may have also marked the beginning of slouching, the phrase “stand up straight,” and backache.

More recently, as the coronavirus continues to keep us mostly indoors, working in improvised offices where ergonomically unsound ironing boards, coffee tables, and laps pinch-hit as desks, our sloppy ways of sitting could be taking a toll. Parked in front of a computer, we tend to tuck under our tailbones, candy-cane our spines, scrunch up our shoulders, and crane our necks forward like wilted sunflowers. According to many experts, for every inch that the head lists off kilter, the force impinging on the neck and the back increases by ten pounds. A survey among seven hundred and seventy-eight software workers in lockdown last spring found that shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain had doubled. Bad posture has been blamed for indigestion, constipation, high blood pressure, cracked teeth, infrequent orgasms, negative thoughts, and difficulty performing arithmetic calculations; somewhere, someone has probably implicated it in the Presidential-election results.

Before we work on improving our internal scaffolding, it would be useful to define the ideal. If you are a soldier, G.I. Joe sets the standard, according to Sergeant First Class Erik A. Rostamo, the U.S. Army’s Drill Sergeant of the Year. What if you’re a civilian? When viewed in profile, the average human spine, a stack of twenty-four articulated vertebrae and nine fused ones on the bottom, should be shaped like a seahorse, curving gently inward at the neck (cervical) and lower-back (lumbar) regions and outward in the middle (thoracic) region. These three curves help us maintain balance, facilitate flexibility, and serve as shock absorbers. (Wouldn’t you rather be going down the stairwell as a Slinky than as a pretzel stick?) The curves are supported by muscles. An exaggerated curve—called kyphosis in the upper back and lordosis, or swayback, in the lower back—can lead to discomfort and, in extreme cases, can reduce mobility. Seen from the front, you should be more or less symmetrical. A balanced alignment of your spine, referred to among the posturati as a “neutral spine,” exerts the least amount of strain on muscles, tendons, and the skeleton, allowing us to function efficiently.

Toward this end, when sitting, you should have your back touching the chair’s back, derrière scooched into the crook of the seat, shoulders relaxed, legs uncrossed, knees bent at a right angle, feet on the floor, and head erect (it helps if the computer screen in front of you is at eye level and an arm’s length away). When standing, you should have your feet shoulder-width apart and parallel, knees gently bent, arms hanging nonchalantly by your side, stomach pulled slightly in, and shoulders relaxed and pulled back. If this is too many body parts to keep tabs on, perhaps one of the many pointers I found on the Internet will help: imagine there’s a string attached to the top of your head, pulling you upward; walk as if you’re wearing a cape; fantasize that you are being interviewed by Beyoncé and hold yourself accordingly; or pretend that someone’s punching you in the stomach (maybe Beyoncé?).

It’s time to buckle up into a posture corrector. You wouldn’t be the first. The duchess Consuelo Vanderbilt (1877-1964) wrote in her memoir about the “horrible instrument” she was ordered to endure as a child to enforce a plumb stance, describing it as “a steel rod which ran down my spine and was strapped at my waist and over my shoulders—another strap went around my forehead to the rod.” Even more adorable is the neck swing. Invented in France in the eighteenth century, this tackle-and-pulley system, fastened to the ceiling on one end and on the other to a headpiece worn by the user, supposedly stretched the spine and not supposedly left the user dangling with only her toes touching the ground. Today’s so-called posture correctors are spa-like by comparison. The majority fall into two categories: restrictive braces, harnesses, shirts, and bras that encourage the alignment of your torso; or small electronic gizmos, the size of brownies, that ping or vibrate at the inkling of a slump. Amazon sells dozens of varieties; posture is an approximately $1.25-billion industry. Many of the physical therapists, chiropractors, and osteopaths I talked to said that these aids are fine to use in the short term, helping you identify postures you should be emulating. Others regarded them as Rembrandt might a paint-by-numbers kit: gimmickry that gets in the way of learning technique and that might foster dependence.

Tony Pletcher, a Seattle physical therapist, is concerned that these quick fixes could lead to muscle atrophy. “When our bodies are provided constant external support, we often actually lose the ability to perform these movements on our own,” he said in an e-mail. Anil Nandkumar, who works at the Orthopedic Physical Therapy Center, at Hospital for Special Surgery, mentioned that eight out of every ten patients ask him about the correctors, and said, “Long story short, I usually do not recommend these correctors to patients, because they are ‘passive’ tools.”

I chose fifteen devices and sent them to people I know who want to improve their posture. The group included a man who was still traumatized by being punched in the back as a child by his alcoholic mother, whenever she observed him slouching. Another volunteer was motivated by the memory of a seventy-five-year-old actress she’d once seen at Saks—her cosmetically altered face made her look youthful, but when she turned around a severe hunchback exposed the Dorian Grayish truth.

The most common type of corrector on the market is the upper-back brace for clavicle support. This looks like a backpack without the pack, or like an emotional-support-animal harness, and tends to be made from a black stretchy synthetic material. It is worn over or under one’s clothes, with adjustable straps that exert a backward tug on the shoulders, and after prolonged use, according to my volunteers, makes the wearer’s armpits ache. Beginners are advised to wear the brace for five to fifteen minutes a day, and then incrementally progress to an hour or two. Vi Weeks, a college sophomore, appreciated the three inches she estimates she gained in height when her Selbite Posture Corrector ($9.98) was busy doing its job, but, when the brace was off, her spine reverted to its previous convexity, despite the product’s claim to effect “long-term muscle memory.” David Kim, a dermatologist, wore his ComfyBrace ($19.97) on four consecutive workdays, for nine backbreaking hours a day. His once admirable carriage had deteriorated after years of hunching over his patients. Of his brace, Kim said, “It definitely made me more cognizant of my posture. I feel like my lower back was less tired and achy toward the end of the day.” Will Ameringer, an art dealer in Palm Beach, found himself looking at his watch after only ten minutes of wearing his VOKKA corrector ($27.99), whose padded, shield-shaped panel runs the length of the back and looks sturdy enough to joust in. “The directions warn that your back and shoulder muscles ‘may feel stretched.’ They’re not kidding,” he said. “A bit jarring on the kidneys, too.” Ameringer gave up after a week. “It’s designed to pull your shoulders back while pushing a metal plate against your lower back,” he said. “The problem is that it does one or the other.”