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The Concentric Life
Paul Skallas
February 19, 2026
I was watching the latest round of Silicon Valley AI panic this week. Software developers now openly admit AI is their equal at doing their job. CEOs of AI companies are calmly predicting the end of white-collar work within two years
@financialtimes Is there a difference between super-intelligence and artificial general intelligence? CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman joins FT editor... See more
or scared governments will be using the AI tools to further control their population.
@dwarkesh_sp Can We Prevent Authoritarian States From Weaponizing AI? - Dario Amodei
Who knows what will happen. Some predict mass layoffs. Others predict AI will make everyone wealthier. Or something even weirder can happen. Technology is unpredictable. Photography changed the direction of painting forever. No one predicted that.
We thought the smartphone would create more localism. But it turned out it just made everyone around the world the same.
We assumed the smartphone would accelerate political change. What it actually did was multiply protests while limiting revolutionary action. Documenting an event replaced doing something about it. The smartphone converted revolutionary energy into passive documentation.
While the CEO of Anthropic described a future where machines do everything, his body was doing the opposite. Slouched. Shoulders rolled forward. Spine rounded into a soft question mark.
Meanwhile, the interviewer, Dwarkesh Patel, has his chest open, shoulders back, spine upright. Good eccentric sitting posture.
But I don’t blame Dario. We’re the most folded people in history. Earlier generations bent forward for parts of the day, then returned to open space. Since the smartphone and always-on internet, the fold follows us everywhere, into leisure, into bed, into every spare minute that used to belong to expansion. No population has ever spent this many waking hours in a single contracted geometry.
The Modern Concentric Posture
IIt’s not quite fair to call us sedentary. It’s more accurate to call us folded.
You fold into the car seat for the commute. You fold into the desk chair at work. You fold into the airplane seat when you travel. Even relaxation is a contraction, unwinding means collapsing into a soft C-curve on the couch, chin pinned to chest.
And when you go to the gym to fix it, you double down. Bench presses converge the arms toward the sternum. Crunches pull the ribs toward the pelvis. Squats close you off. For cardio you ride a bike or jog, your limbs are locked in a narrow corridor.
It is all concentric.
This is what I think creates that "fit but feel dull" feeling. There are times when you’re in the best shape of your life. High energy. Good bloodwork. You look great in the mirror. But something is off. You walk around feeling vaguely compressed, like you're carrying something you can't put down. Not tired exactly. Not sick. Just feel not quite right.
Modern fitness has no category for this. It only measures output, VO₂ max, steps, lifts, body composition. If the numbers are good, you're healthy. But the numbers don't measure how you feel walking down the street. They don't measure whether your chest feels open or closed, whether you feel like you're taking up space or shrinking from it.
That feeling is what I think the concentric fold produces. It’s not injury or chronic pain. It’s more subtle. It’s just a body that has been in one geometry for so long it forgot there were others.
It happened to me.
I started to take it seriously after I put on a heavy backpack after work. I felt a wave of relief. The load forced my shoulders back and lengthened my spine. My ribcage widened. My body opened up.
But a backpack isn't a permanent fix. Eventually the load pushes your head further forward and you end up slouching against it. My body was starving for tension in the opposite direction.
The first step is just recognizing what posture you’re in during the day.
@_bryan_johnson_ posture check
But that’s not enough. What the body actually needs is eccentric expansion. The gym, it turns out, is just another version of the problem. Look at a standard gym floor, almost every machine and every popular lift runs on a linear track. You move up and down or forward and back.
What really helped is when I started incorporating exercises that specifically targeted eccentric movement, sprinting, hanging, jumping, carries. Not yoga, which I find too slow and boring to maintain consistently, although a few of the standing poses worked. I needed load and momentum.
What ended up happening is that my health metrics didn't change. I didn't lose weight. But I felt better walking around every day. The dullness lifted. Physically and mentally. I think when you do too many linear exercises your brain starts thinking linearly as well.
Old Men Walking
In almost every city, in almost every culture, you find older men walking slowly with their hands clasped behind their backs. Italy. Japan. Turkey. India. Nobody taught them. Nobody coordinated it. Nobody has ever fully explained why they do it.
@roseinhistory Meet the Italian Umarell 🇮🇹 Retired, hands behind the back, and professionally judging construction sites. In Italy, umarell is the nickna... See more
The most likely answer is it feels good. Your body ages and feels compressed, and one day the hands end up behind the back and there's relief. Try it yourself. Clasp your hands behind your back and the chest opens. The shoulders rotate outward. The spine lengthens. The chin lifts. Something releases that you didn't know was being held. You’re in an eccentric posture.
The reason it feels good is because your body is a system of pulleys. If you spend your whole life leaning forward, to work, to eat, to drive, the pulleys on the front of your body get short and tight, while the ones on your back get long and weak. Eventually, the "front" of you is so tight that it feels like you're being pulled into a fetal position. Putting the hands behind the back is the simplest possible counter-pull.
There's a beneficial side effect too.
Without the arm swing, the hips and trunk have to work harder just to stay upright. Every slow walk around the park becomes a low-grade stability drill. You can squat 200 pounds and still lack the rotational stability to handle a 10-pound awkward reach without injury.
Although, I do wonder if newer generations will adopt this posture when they get old. I doubt it. The hands-behind-back posture reads as old. It looks like your grandfather. In a culture that worships youth, nobody under sixty is going to voluntarily adopt the body language of decline, even if it's the healthiest thing they could do.
1) The Posture of Defeat: Why is the internet a theater of outrage and anxiety? Perhaps because we are accessing it from a posture that our nervous system reads as defeat.
2) The Mechanical Squeeze: Everyone seems to have gut issues now, they are debating fiber and fermented foods while sitting in the exact position guaranteed to make the gut dysfunctional regardless of what they eat.
3) The Eccentric Correction: The antidote is a set number of exercises that do the opposite of what your chair does. Hang, skip, sprint, carry heavy things.
