I spent the Gordanier Christmas sitting cross-legged on a footstool, which had Jackie and a few other of Thomas’s relatives gaping and wondering “How can you do that?” My response was to mumble something about it being more comfortable. No, really! I’ve always loved my grandmother’s extra-firm cushions, and I’ve never slept so well as I did on Japanese floor-based futons. But it turns out that conventional notions of what makes a seat comfortable are actually quite bad for us — and, in the long run, uncomfortable.

I got this idea from Galen Cranz’s book, The Chair: “The assumption is that sitting at the edge of a seat upright, without support, is too tiring to sustain. But in other cultures, people sit upright by the hour. I wondered why we couldn’t do that. A radical thought kept surfacing: we can’t sit upright simply because we have grown accustomed to being supported by chairbacks. Because we lean against the backrest, the many layers of muscle that comprise the torso get weakened” (p. 95). This has far-reaching effects on our health: chair-sitting is a leading cause of back pain, as it puts pressure on the spinal disks and in turn stresses out the nerves and muscles of the lower back — even moreso than physical labor. The “C-shaped slump” that chairs force us into creates a hump in our spine as we lean backwards but stick out our necks, and it also compresses the diaphragm, squishes the organs, and reduces blood circulation, leading to acid reflux and varicose veins. Chairs seem so innocent that it’s almost amusing when we find out that “the head of a Norwegian furniture company has confessed that he felt guilty about making his living from producing chairs after he learned about the health problems they create” (p. 100). (You can read an interview with the author here.)

This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Walking and running barefoot is better for our posture, too. Less padding in both cases allows our bones, whether in our feet or the sit bones of our butt, to find a stable connection with a firm surface that supports us. Better than chair sitting is to perch on stools (especially tall ones), kneel, squat, recline, sit cross-legged, or stand. In fact, it’s even better to change your position every so often — walking or lying down (on your back with your knees up) is the best way to relieve back pain. Funny that these are also the sorts of recommendations for staying minimally fit, using your muscles throughout the day like we evolved to do?

So are we doomed to revert to the naked apes we are under all our culture and technology? Does nothing truly improve our lot in life, or are the improvements — like true medicines hidden in witchcraft — so tangled up that we can do nothing but futility oscillate between unhappy extremes? Chairs have been used since the Neolithic, but this does nothing to ensure they’re more “natural” for us to use. We may have to face the fact that our bodies are optimized for imperfection and change, and that there is no single optimum strategy for how to live. Which is a horrible thing for a perfectionist like me to realize.

Nonetheless, it looks like the jury is in on chairs, at least: they’re bad. So my New Year’s resolution is a strange one: don’t use them! I won’t lean back into their siren-song of comfort wherever I have the option of strengthening my autonomous sitting skills. Go forth and squat!