Slip-on shoes that don’t require you to bend over are one more product designed to enfeeble you.
This is about a hot new shoe that on the surface makes it easier for people but really makes their lives harder and more diminished.
The Skecher no-bend, slip-on shoe.
What could be wrong with that? Plenty. No more bending is a problem, not a solution. That shoe limits our ability to deal with sickness, pain and death; and in fact, our ability to take on the world.
In his book “Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health,” Ivan Illich criticized modern medicine in much the same way.
“The medical enterprise saps the will of people to suffer their reality,” Illich says. By “suffer” he means “cope.” He calls this loss “cultural iatrogenesis.”
Simply, what’s supposed to liberate and heal often does the opposite.
That’s what the new Skecher shoe does, too. But big deal, it’s just a shoe. A small thing. Well, life is essentially a collection of little things, so little things mean a lot.
Let’s see how.
A Slick And Enticing Idea
“No more bending,” Skechers’ slogan about the shoe says. “Just step in and go.”
That idea is slick and enticing on the outside but a pathology creator on the inside. Not liberating, but debilitating.
It’s a crutch that inhibits the understanding of ourselves by encouraging our weaker, unadventurous side. Disguised as self-help — “look Ma, no hands!” – it’s really an enfeebler.
Let’s explore the shoe’s Trojan Horse qualities in two ways. First, by showing why bending is essential, something to be encouraged despite pain rather than something to be glided over and pretended about.
Second, because the harmful consequences of the no-bend shoe are like the harm of social media, with the same kind of one-sided happy talk celebrating the good and minimizing the bad.
The smart phone, Meta/Google, and that easy-on shoe are part of the same package.
Bending Is Essential, Despite The Pain
Bending improves posture, eases pain and gins up mobility. More so, bending is the real essence of life. A baby’s first move from the womb to the world is bend to straight.
It’s the first exercise physical therapists give people with joint replacements to bring them back to life. Bend one way, then the other. It hurts, but it helps.
Bending is more than physical. It’s an emotional catalyst. Think about getting up in the morning. You’re stiff and sore, maybe because you are an athlete who competed the day before, a middle-aged woman with a creaky back, a 20-something waking up with a wedding party hangover, or a kūpuna whose creaks are as much a part of her life as the 4:30 p.m. dinner she eats every night at senior living.
There is something affirming and psychologically positive about that first step of the day unaided. “I still got this.” “I can still do it.” “Damn, it hurts. Let’s go!”
By now, it’s fashionable and parent-friendly for kids to have no-lace shoes. The power of Velcro. I understand. They’re late for school, homework nowhere to be found: one less thing to worry about.
But remember the satisfaction you felt as a young child when you could finally get those bows and knots just so and tie your shoes? Tip-toeing toward affirmation and independence one step at a time.
What about people who can no longer — or hardly — bend at all? For sure, the slip-on is comforting and even essential. For them, that shoe is an enabler, perhaps even a life-saver, helping them be a person with disabilities, not a disabled person.
But let me tell you a story told to me by a physical therapist rehabbing my knee. Her elderly father had gotten fragile enough to sometimes need a walker or a wheelchair. Every day, she discouraged him from using the mobility device, especially the chair, until he made an effort on his own.
I have to admit, she was kind of a drill sergeant. But her point is a good one. Affirmation and independence are worthy at any age, from the 7-year-old who forgot his lunch but tied his own shoes, to a retired old person in senior living.
Skechers describes itself not as a shoe company but as a “foot technology company.” Its shoes aren’t simply comfortable. They contain “comfort technologies.”
Both social media and Skechers use the language of technology to emphasize their goodness and slide over the badness their products create and enhance.
Skechers is the Mark Zuckerberg of shoes.
Zuckerberg: “Facebook was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. “
“Facebook is about real connections to actual friends.”
Both enterprises gloss over or completely ignore the bad effects. Both use the protective bubble of technology. And in each case, one of the bad consequences is dependency and enfeeblement disguised as liberation.
For all the liberating Meta/Facebook and smart phones have done, all the connections they have made easier than ever, the other side of this ease and availability is dependency.
There are many studies that show the harm of social media, especially on adolescents. Much of it has to do with an increase in mental and emotional problems.
At its root, the effect is dependency, and that goes well beyond a 13-year-old scrolling in her room.
Since the advent of social media, people gather less outside the home, woman have become lonelier, children have fewer friends outside the house.
Another way of putting this: People have become more dependent on devices. It’s a learned and in many ways an addictive dependency.
For all the liberating Meta/Facebook and smart phones have done, all the connections they have made easier than ever, the other side of this ease and availability is dependency.
“All I need to do when I first get up in the morning is check my phone and slip into my no-bends. Ah, this is the good life. In my room.”
Happy talk and happy feet.
Look Closer At The Shoe’s Pitchman
Howie Long, the excellently articulate Fox Sports football analyst and Hall of Fame former football player, was a terrific defensive lineman.
He still looks great, much younger than his 65 years, as he glides into those no-bend Skechers on TV ads.
Take a step back in his life. Imagine how sore he must have been as an active player waking up Monday morning after a Sunday NFL game. Hard to bend? That was probably not even the half of it.
Hurt or not, he got up and went to work because he had a job to do, a job he loved. That‘s what an elite athlete does. Face the world. Go get ‘em bro. Do your job.
The discomfort was not a sad part of his life. It made his life possible.
You’re not Howie Long. (I’m sure not. I weighed 128 pounds my senior year in high school when I crossed the frozen Milwaukee tundra as a chesty baritone horn player in the marching band.)
But young or old, you or me, people in general, there is a little Howie Long in all of us. Don’t let the deceptive little things take that away.
Bend your knees, don’t bend your will.
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