Why I Take the Stairs
In 2012, Casey Neistat made a movie for Nike, wearing the newly released Nike Fuel Band, a solid and frankly uncomfortable looking wristband that clicked shut around your wrist and displayed on its dot matrix display a single number tracking your activity. In an ode to activity, Casey Neistat embarked on an expedition to various cities and regions around the world, all interconnected by a multitude of commercial flights.
Throughout this journey, he encountered, as I do, and perhaps you as well, a multitude of stairs and escalators. Every time he did, he chose to take the stairs. I’ve followed in these footsteps, choosing the escalator’s more primitive ancestor everytime I’m faced with an altitudinal challenge.
What explains this aversion to the escalator? Firstly, a little of the past. In 1859, Nathan Ames patented the “revolving stairs”, a set of stairs that, simply put, revolved. No model was ever built. Thirty years later, in a sudden burst of creative genius, Leamon Souder successfully acquired a patent for his “stairway”, a “series of steps and links jointed to each other.” Again, no model was ever built. In 1892, George A. Wheeler took it upon himself to stop this absurdity of unconstructed patents, but failed to do so, patenting a third version of the escalator which was again, never built.
The escalator was born amidst the graveyard of ideas, that godforsaken place where grandiose futures have been thrown aside in favor of financially stable pathways to death. When the escalator was first finally constructed in 1896, it represented another victory in the all too human mission to optimize the human experience to its most efficient reality, where time and energy spent in useless places, like walking up stairs, was reoriented to activities that actually mattered. What these activities that actually matter are, however, remains to be discovered.
Escalators are useful, I must admit. When I have too many bags to realistically carry, or when one day my age presents a real obstacle to climbing various flights of stairs, I will gladly accept the value of the elevator, the same way I accept the value of planes, trains, and automobiles. However, for those that are perfectly capable of walking up the stairs, there is no excuse.
You don’t save time going up an escalator. Most times, walking up the stairs at a leisurely pace matches, if not surpasses, the speed at which those on your right are gaining altitude. What it does save, however, is effort. Hurrah! Next time you see someone take the stairs, sneer at their inferior optimization skills, how they uselessly spend effort which you put to better use by writing your Pulitzer Prize winning novel which you’re surely writing, right?
Don’t pretend like escalator users are utilizing some sort of effort calculus that allows them to achieve greater things. To take an escalator means nothing more than an acquiescence to the fact that staying still is much more comfortable than moving. What’s this love of commodity, this sickness that afflicts so much of the human population? Commodity is nothing more than the anaesthetic that keeps ideas in that graveyard, that keeps people from activity. It’s a python which, while constricting you, manages to simultaneously convince you that this lethal squeeze is, to be honest, quite warm and cozy. Commodity is the weighted Snuggie that keeps you from acting, while its manufacturers, immune to its charm, take advantage and act.
Next time you see steps and an escalator, note the two choices presented to you and look past their deceitful exteriors to what they truly represent. “Live dangerously” as Nietzsche says. “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius”, and if there’s no Vesuvius in sight, but rather an escalator, take the stairs.
