“You will get antsy. And that’s okay”: Robby Silk wants to make sitting an extreme sport

The goal of extreme sitting is to sit down, preferably in some remote, inhospitable wilderness, and then do nothing. For as long as you can. Ideally, Robby says, for the arc of a day. From sunup to sun down. “This is why, in my Rules, I’ve banned cell phones and timepieces,” he says. “You have to disconnect. You have to gauge the time by the rhythm of the day. Watch the sun as it makes its way across the sky. To spend a day where the only thing you need to know is where the sun is. When it goes down, you can get up. The sun tells you everything you need to know.”

When was the last time you watched the sun for an entire day? Or gauged time by the length of your shadow? For most of human history, this was a pretty uncontroversial and indeed necessary way to live. It helped people plug into the rhythms of nature. But as technology progressed, we became less connected to the sun. Extreme sitting is, partly, about re-establishing that lost circadian rhythm. But it’s also about other things, such as patience, discipline, pain and boredom.

“There is a bit of self-discipline to it. There’s some austerity to it. But it’s also meditative,” Robby says. “It’s really all about taking the time to take in the scene, this beautiful spot, and to enjoy the stillness, and to discipline yourself to the stillness. You will get antsy. And that’s okay.”

Endurance events like this are not entirely unprecedented. There’s the Dutch sport of Paalzitten, or pole sitting, for example, which became popular in the 1970s. If we’re being technical, humans sitting uncomfortably for long periods of time goes all the way back to the ascetic discipline of stylitism, or column-sitting.

St. Simeon Stylites the Elder (c. 388-459), for example, allegedly sat on a small platform on top of a pole for 36 years. ‘Flagpole sitting’ even became a recreational American fad in the 1920s, before the Great Depression stamped it out. Bill Penfield in Strawberry Point, Iowa, once sat on a flagpole for 51 days and 20 hours, until a thunderstorm forced him down.

Robby Silk was born in Indianapolis, although his family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, when he was two. He spent 17 years in Florida and wrote a book about the Everglades. In 2018, he settled in Denver, Colorado, where he now works as a travel industry journalist covering the flight beat: new routes, new airlines, industry trends.

Robby’s fascination with extreme chair sitting goes back to a six-month journey through Israel in 1995. Robby was reading a book at the time, The Haj, by American author Leon Uris. In it, there’s a scene where the protagonist stumbles across a Bedouin man, sitting all alone out in the desert, awaiting a delivery.

“When’s the delivery coming?” the protagonist asks.

“Could be today. Could be tomorrow. Could be next week,” the man says.

“So what will you do?”

“Just wait.”

The passage struck a chord with Robby. “I was in my early 20s then, and this idea really resonated. This world that was timeless, that someone could have that much time, a rhythm that was so different from our own. And this was 1995, remember. Life is obviously much faster now.”

Robby got the idea that he would try something similar himself. He would sit alone in the desert, on the summer solstice, and “just wait.” In June 2000 he gave it a crack, but the attempt was unsuccessful. “I didn’t do any prep, I didn’t pick a good spot, there were bees around, I didn’t have the right chair and, to say this in a polite way, I’d eaten the wrong dinner the night before. I only lasted a few hours,” Robby admits. “I thought, well, that was that.” It was another 20 years before he gave extreme sitting another chance.

This time, Robby picked his spot with care, arriving in Joshua Tree National Park a day early to scout locations. He invited his friend, the filmmaker Peter Wick, to come and document the event. The adventure eventually became the short film, Silk Finds What He’s Looking For. “That’s when I started running with the idea, so to speak,” he says. “I wrote up some draft rules. Then COVID hit, and I thought, this is the perfect sport for the socially distanced era.” Robby managed his longest sit ever that day: 14 hours and 27 minutes, from sunrise to sunset.

Since then, he’s taken his trusty folding Helinox camp chair pretty much everywhere. Robby has sat among the red rock mesas of Sedona and stared at the towering monoliths of Colorado National Monument. He even did a brief sit on Cuverville Island, Antarctica, a rocky spit of land in the Errera Channel, surrounded by gentoo penguins and foraging skua birds.

“I was hoping they’d let me go out and sit,” he says. “I’d brought my chair, but these Antarctic cruises obviously have very strict rules about what you can bring onto the land. But they were fine with it. The weather was mild—about freezing. I had a small time window, so I sat from the first group ashore till the last group ashore. About three and a half hours. I was sitting 20 yards in front of the trail, and people would holler out to me. I could hear them whispering, like, ‘Check out that guy in the chair.’”

It’s a common reaction. Sitting alone and doing nothing, without technology or distractions, is so aberrant these days that it almost feels like an attack; a silent judgement on our modern, time-poor way of life. The same way you feel guilty and slightly resentful when you see another person reading quietly on a train. The most common question people have is: why?

“You need to take from it what it is,” Robby says. “It’s almost a throwback, an opportunity to disconnect and feel at one with all the stuff we don’t usually feel connected to.”

For that reason, Robby recommends extreme sitting in beautiful, remote wilderness locations, rather than, for example, your own backyard (“After 30 minutes you’d be like, ‘What am I doing?’”). You also need a good, comfortable folding chair, and basic practical equipment like a hat, sunscreen, water and snacks. Try to pick an exposed spot, out of the shade, but be sensible about it. Extreme sitting might be extreme, but personal injury, dehydration and death are not the ultimate goals. It’s more of a quiet form of protest. A way to unplug from technology and reconnect to the slow pulse of the natural world.

Still, Robby says he imagines a future where people push the art of sitting further and further. A worldwide movement of motionlessness.

“My sit in Joshua Tree was 14 hours and 27 minutes, with a high temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit [38 degrees Celsius],” he says. “Someone next time might shoot for 107 degrees. I envision a community developing that would seek out more and more challenging locations to sit, in much the same way climbers are always in search of the next unclimbed peak.”