Welcome The Latecomers

There's a specific kind of alarm-sounder frustration — the feeling you get when people finally start reacting to something you've been warning about for years. The instinct is to say, “What took you so long?” I want to make the case for the opposite.

The image I keep returning to is the Niagara River. Imagine you're in a boat drifting downstream. There's no change in the current you can feel, no sound of the falls — nothing to tell you anything has shifted — just a sign on the shore, understated as a speed limit: Point of No Return. By the time most people notice it, a few in the boat are already paddling hard for shore. If you're one of the ones who spotted that sign early, your job right now isn't to hold a grudge, it's to get every available set of hands paddling.

I made this argument over twelve years ago, thinking about climate change. Watch my original talk in the video linked below.

At that time, we'd been building and selling the Soul Seat for about six years, having gotten the patent in 2009. There were no dupes, no copycats — nothing remotely like it in the market, and "Sitting is the new smoking" hadn't entered the conversation yet. The Sit-Rise Test was brand new, and I was standing in front of an audience trying to describe a point-of-no-return signal that most of them hadn't felt.

Watching the video now, what strikes me most (besides noticing how young I was) is how the same structure applies to almost every cultural and health challenge worth caring about. Some of us sense the signs early, others climb on board very close to the falls, if at all. That isn't a character flaw — it's how change actually moves through a community.

This afternoon, I found myself thinking about those patterns again while celebrating the voters of Hungary, who just ousted their authoritarian government. For those of us who have been sounding the alarm about the rise of fascism for years, there's a temptation toward a kind of bitter scorecard. Resist it.

It reminded me of something from my years as a piano tuner. The only times that clients’ dogs actually bit me were on my way out the door — small breeds who'd been barking nervously the whole visit, finally finding their nerve once the danger felt survivable. There's something true in that image. Courage often arrives late. That's not cowardice. That's human. (And canine).

As people join the marches, the protests, the voter registration drives, don't spend one breath on one-upmanship. We are past the point where that's a luxury we can afford. Welcome everyone who has found their voice. We need them all — especially the latecomers — to complete the healing and reset the trashed norms.

I'm doing my best to apply the same logic to the products Ikaria Design has spent fifteen years building.

Our best sales years triggered dupes from around the world. At first that stung, but now I see it differently. We created a product category that didn't exist — criss-cross sitting as a serious alternative to the conventional office chair — and the copycats are proof it worked. Every low-cost imitation extends the landscape of normalized floor culture. We still don't have the widespread floor culture I imagined in that TEDx talk, but we're getting there. The latecomers to active sitting aren't diluting what we built, they're completing it.

The upstream signal we identified — that sitting disease is as much a cultural design problem as a physical one, that status and sedentary work became inseparable long before anyone named it — that insight doesn't lose its value when more people arrive at it. It gains it.

I'll admit I'm a latecomer myself to one important idea. The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education was born in the rubble of fascism — launched by mothers in the Italian town of Reggio Emilia after Mussolini had been chased out the door. It is, to this day, explicitly described as anti-fascist education. We are currently beta-testing our newest Soul Seat, designed for young children, in a Reggio Emilia school right here in our community. Things keep coming full circle.

So if you're just now rethinking how you sit, how you work, how you move through the day — perhaps even how you vote — you're not late. You're exactly on time. The current is what it is. What matters now is that we're all paddling.