Did you ever hear the one about the brazen bull? As execution methods go, it’s one of the more gruesome methods you’re going to come across. The apparatus involved a hollow, bronze statue of a bull with a panel door on the side so that the condemned could be stuffed into the belly of the bull. Once the condemned was locked inside the bronze bull, a fire was lit underneath the statue which caused the person inside to literally be roasted alive.

Agonizing, no?

If there were a 2012 equivalent to the brazen bull, look no further than the office desk you may be sitting at right now as you read this article. While not nearly as brutal, the modern office desk might be considered one of the quieter methods of self-conscripted execution. Just look at the number of fitness magazines that have run stories about the fatal perils of sitting at an office desk for eight hours (or more, if you’ve got that special kind of rotten luck) and you’ll find stories about how it makes you sick, makes you fat, makes you weak, and even makes you dead.

All that time spent sitting and staring at a computer while your fingers engage in a zombified Riverdance across your keyboard is one of the worst things you can be doing to yourself. A study by the University of Hong Kong even found that people would be better off walking around and smoking than sitting all day and doing nothing. More, a quarter of all deaths of people aged 35 and up were caused by a lack of physical exercise.

Death-by-desk job is becoming such a white collar health epidemic that there are now exercise regimens designed specifically for people who stay velcroed to their office chair all day. Seriously, your hours spent toiling at your desk job isn’t going to result in a fun retirement party; it’s going to result in one chilly dirt nap, and probably sooner than your retirement pension would kick in, too.

Are you freaking out yet? If you are it’s obviously not enough because you’re still sitting there reading this. As an incentive to get your ass up and moving, have a look at this infographic about how your desk job is systematically filing years off of your life. When you’re done, do yourself a favor and go walk around for a bit. If nothing else, it’ll keep the blood in your legs from calcifying before the end of your work day.

Created by: Online University