Your Body Is Not Metric (and why modern buildings make your soul flinch)

Your body has never been metric.

Stretch your arms out to the sides. The distance from fingertip to fingertip is almost exactly your height. One to one.

Spread your hand wide: thumb to little finger is roughly nine inches.

Your foot is a foot.

Your natural stride is a yard. These are not accidents. They are the reason the old Imperial measures feel like coming home: because they were taken from the living temple of the human body. The system is anthropomorphic by design. It says, quietly but constantly, “You are the measure of all things.”

The metric system says the opposite.

It was born in the blood-soaked optimism of revolutionary France, when men who had just chopped off their king’s head decided they could chop God out of the universe too. They needed a unit that belonged to no tradition, no monarch, no cathedral. So they measured the Earth as if she were already dead: one meter became one ten-millionth of the distance from equator to pole. A corpse quadrant, sliced into neat, rational graves. The human body was deliberately exiled from the equation.

Modern architecture swallowed that exile whole.

Today every concrete panel, every steel beam, every sheet of drywall, every window module is born in multiples of 100 mm. Walk into any building erected after the year 2000 and nothing lines up with you. The ceiling is 2.4 m high because that’s what the precast factory pours most cheaply. The door is 900 mm wide because that’s what the forklift pallet likes. The worktop is 900 mm high because the supplier in Shenzhen already has the jig. Your eye level, your reach, your stride, your wingspan: none of these were invited to the meeting.

You feel like an afterthought because you are.

And so the walls wear Millennial Grey, the colour of a cost-benefit analysis that concluded delight is non-essential. Beige once said “I’m trying.” White once said “I’m pure.” Grey says, “We gave up.” It is the visual equivalent of airplane food: engineered for bulk purchase, fire ratings, and resale value.

Nothing more.

This is not aesthetics. This is theology wearing a hard hat.

Sacred geometry is not mystical decoration. It is what happens when you begin with the proportions Nature already wrote into your bones and let them propagate outward. The golden rectangle, the √2, the humble 3-4-5 right triangle, the vesica piscis: these are simply the human body talking to itself across scale. Chartres Cathedral, the Parthenon, a Georgian terrace in Bath, a Shaker cabinet: all of them are love letters written in ratios your nervous system already speaks fluently.

Walk into a room built on those ratios and something inside you unclenches without being asked.

Walk into a metric box and something inside you flinches. That flinch is ancestral memory recognising banishment.

Every time you pass through a 900 mm doorway, duck under a 2.4 m ceiling, or rest your elbow on a counter that forces your shoulders into a shrug, the building whispers the same revolutionary sermon:

“You are 1.78 m of interchangeable biomass.

Your comfort is a rounding error.

Your beauty is uncompetitive tender.”

We were told beauty is subjective and efficiency is objective, so we believed the lie and woke up in open-plan purgatory surrounded by acoustic baffles the colour of wet ash, wondering why existence feels vaguely shameful.

It isn’t.

Refuse the conditioning.

Demand doors wide enough for your full wingspan plus a generous heart.

Demand rooms whose proportions make your vagus nerve sigh the way it does when you lie in tall grass under stars. Demand works of art, carvings, frescoes, rose windows, and living surfaces that look straight at us and say:

“I see the divine image walking in, and I have dressed myself in festival clothes to greet you.”

Beauty is not decoration.

Beauty is the visible evidence that someone, somewhere, believed you were worth caring for.

The metric grid was designed to make you forget that.

Don’t.

A 10-Minute Reclamation Ritual You Can Do This Weekend

(No renovations required)

Your body is still the measure of all things.

Here are four tiny, free acts of quiet rebellion that bring the temple back into your metric box — starting tonight.

1. Measure yourself, not the room

   Stand tall, stretch your arms wide, and let someone mark your true wingspan on the wall with a piece of washi tape or a Post-it.

   Leave it there. Every time you pass it you will remember: the building is wrong, not you.
   

2. Create one golden-ratio anchor

   Take any rectangular object you love (mirror, picture frame, rug, scarf).

   Check if its proportions are close to 1 : 1.618 (phone apps like “Golden Ratio” do it in seconds).

   If not, crop a photo or overlap two objects to create the ratio and place it where you see it first thing in the morning. Your nervous system will unclench within minutes — clients report the feeling is almost embarrassingly physical.
   

3. Adjust you kitchen working height

   Modern kitchen work surfaces are typically 34–36 inches high. This is often too high to work ergonomically for most women (men are typically taller but can still find it problematic), forcing a chronic shoulder hike. Food was traditionally prepared on lower kitchen tables, which sit at a height of 28–30 inches, allowing tasks like kneading bread or peeling vegetables to be done comfortably while standing. Instead of a full renovation, you could buy a small table, or get a small stool to stand on by the main counter. 

   Within 3–4 days the chronic shoulder hike disappears and you’ll sleep deeper. I’ve seen it dozens of times.
   

4. Walk your true stride

   Tomorrow morning, walk heel-to-toe across your living room exactly as many steps as feels natural (no shortening, no stretching).

   Mark the distance with string or tape.

   That is your personal yard. Move the sofa, the rug, the coffee table so that at least one important pathway in your home is exactly that length.

   Watch how the room suddenly starts breathing with you instead of against you.

Do these four things and you will feel the shift in a few days.

Your vagus nerve will thank you, your dreams will thank you, and the Earth herself will recognise one of her children has come home. Your body is still the measure of all things.

Start acting like it.