Man Bored of the Chair

…reflections on inhabiting social infrastructure…

Photo Cliff Scholz. Photo of my desktop was featured in this post .

As I write this, I am sitting on the carpeted floor in front of a beat-up old coffee table. This has been my primary work desk for about ten years now. Ergonomically it’s perhaps a little less than ideal since my elbows are slightly below the level of the laptop I use. But if I sit with my ankles crossed under me as I am now doing, this raises my elbows up to nearly level with the keyboard. And I can only do this for a while before my feet go to sleep. Sometimes I sit in seiza position with my heels under my hip bones. I can’t do that as long, but it’s a nice change sometimes. Mostly I sit cross-legged.

A few weeks ago some friends gave me a large, separate standup computer monitor, so my eyes are level now with the screen I’m looking at rather than looking down at my laptop screen. This is a big improvement. Thanks, guys!

But don’t look for me to be getting a regular desk and chair anytime soon. I’m adamant about not sitting in a chair while I work.

Sitting in chairs does things to people. Not good things. But maybe let’s start with the benefits of sitting on the floor. Probably the biggest thing about sitting on the floor on a regular basis is that it improves hip flexibility. Your feet are closer to the level of the hips, and this changes the whole posture of sitting.

Ever notice that the martial arts styles featuring those flashy, head-high kicks they like to show in kung fu movies arose mostly in cultures where people traditionally do a lot of sitting on floor mats, futons and low cushions? Not a coincidence. Hip flexibility is key to executing those high kicks. It’s key to other things having to do with the body as well, because the body systems we were taught to separately name as skeletal, muscle, respiratory, digestive, reproductive, and so on — in reality these all have to function together. That’s why taking a walk or breathing more deeply can improve digestion, for example. The systems connect. Same true here. There is more to this than I can go into in depth and other folks are better qualified, but all of this matters, a lot, when we consider what living in a culture of chairs does to people.

Further, every time I need to stand up from this position, I am doing something we in this culture call “a strengthening exercise”. This is particularly true if my hand does not touch the ground while rising. My martial arts teacher said that in the cultures that gave us kung fu and karate, using the hand to assist when rising from a seated position on the floor is considered “lazy”. Although he was sensitive to the needs of people showing up at all fitness levels, he trained students not to touch the ground when rising, if possible. This refinement of practice results in stronger legs and improved coordination and balance.

So why am I choosing to share this today, the second day of 2025? Well, for starters, connecting with the previous essay, sitting on the floor (or ground) is a “free” path for personal development, and these free paths tend to fall into a cultural blind spot simply because, well, they’re free. Plus, chairs are everywhere and sitting on the floor is abnormal in this culture. Laxatives? Normal. Impotence and treatments for it? Normal. Hip and knee replacements? Normal. Sitting on the floor? Not so much. Think there’s a connection? Yes, I do. Not a universal cause, but a connection.

In my previous post I elaborated a bit on how what I call the “commercially colonized mind” tends to devalue and erase from our awareness things that are free and to elevate and emphasize the value of commercial products and paid-for services. Hey, I can relate because I’m caught up in this culture, too. It’s telling, for example, that I paid to be in the places where I encountered sit-on-floor subcultures. Whether in a martial arts dojo, yoga studio or sweatlodge, I had placed myself in subcultures where sitting on floors is encouraged if not required. In effect I had hired official “permission givers” in the form of teachers to reinforce the new practice. And it no doubt helped that other people were sitting on the floor alongside me, and with that social support it didn’t seem so outlandish. But the floor, my friends, was always there, and sitting on it costs nothing extra. You want a more intimate conversation? Get down on the floor with whoever you’re talking with. It often helps. Maybe because it helps us show up as whole people, and isn’t that the goal? Must we prop ourselves up all the time?

Eventually, sitting on the floor became a habit, and I acclimated to this shift in the culture conditions I’d created for my own growth. Imagine how strong we’d all be if we had to swing on a vine like Tarzan to get into our homes every day. Same idea. Actually, that’s a pretty good idea.

I could bring this essay in for a landing and close here, but as y’all have probably figured out by now, I always like to take these kinds of topics to another, deeper level. So here goes.

Chair sitting is just one aspect of culture that is so universal it’s become nearly invisible and thus goes unquestioned. But hang out with a baby or a toddler. It’s best to get down on the floor with them; that’s one of the ways they keep us young. They like the floor. They haven’t been in this culture long, and they move differently. Babies will suck on their toes if they want to and then flip over and crawl like salamanders. Being a baby is a workout, an ongoing daily floor routine. Then what usually happens is, a lifetime of chair-sitting shapes us into something a lot less flexible, at which point being on the floor starts to feel uncomfortable.

And it’s not just the body that gets shaped by living in a culture of chairs, the mind goes with it. Physical habits become mental habits. On a poetic level, all the things chair sitting suggests metaphorically just by being what it is, including even the normalization of artificial “legs” for the able-bodied, are right there in the open. Chair sitting promotes a kind of floating, semi-fetal position as normal posture for human interactions.

And in a strange inversion, chairs became symbols of authority. Think royal thrones, judge’s benches, and the “faculty chair” sitting at the head of the table. They’re ridiculous, of course, sitting there in their funny hats and clothes. It’s theater. But don’t you dare say so. Then again, chairs are also used to subordinate and control. As children we go off to schools where, at least when I was growing up, if I got out of my chair I better ask permission or at least have a reason. In a typical schoolroom, keeping children in their chairs is a basic crowd control tactic. I guess that’s good training for spending one’s life in an office cubicle. And in either setting, here’s your medication if you start to find it intolerable.

But here’s the bigger idea: All of our cultural infrastructure has effects like this that shape us in mind and body. For example, I’m a latecomer to the second generation that grew up being conditioned to stare at screens. First my father’s generation grew up going to movie theaters, then came television, then computers and video games and mobile phones with screen displays. And thing is, it’s less about what’s on the screens than that we spend so much time staring at them. It affects brain development. It affects us physically with the “couch potato” effect. It even affects brain chemistry. It’s addictive. And as for TV and now social media, these things often seem to function as a vehicle for mass trance induction and mental conditioning.

For example, if you see this essay as a piece of writing “arguing against chairs,” well, that’s the kind of response I tend to see among folks who watch a lot of TV news. There’s only two positions: “for” and “against.” This mental habit is built into any typical news narrative. If we allow our minds to settle into that for a while (call it the ‘uneasy chair’), it’ll invisibly shape thought processes just as chairs invisibly shape the body. Until it’s time for artificial joints, I guess. Then it’s visible. But even then, people don’t see the connection. As for the either/or, us/them, black-and-white, all-or-nothing habits of mind that I see so much of these days, well, in my view these work great if the goal is to disable a person’s capacity for thought. Now who would want to do that?

Thing is, reality is not binary. It’s not just chairs versus floors. There are all kinds of different ways to sit, whether on a floor or in chairs, or couches, you name it. All of this is just so much cultural infrastructure. Take car culture, which in many places renders pedestrians suspect (unless walking a dog or wearing a sweatsuit, the international Uniform of Fitness). Or consider universal mobile phone use, which affects so many social situations as everyone is excused to pick up their electronic devices at regular intervals. And the list goes on with all kinds of things we take for granted: money, for example, even language and fundamental technologies like metal. Yep, I read in a book by Vine Deloria, Jr. called The World We Used to Live In that Native American shamans were known to avoid contact with metal because of the negative effect it had on their shamanic abilities. Strange to think the tradeoffs of technology started at the end of the stone age. Most people probably don’t even think of metal as a technology.

Can we begin to see what all this is and what it is doing to us? And second, can we choose a better way to inhabit all this stuff, working with it in a way that gives us more agency in shaping ourselves, consciously, toward our own desired purposes?

I mean, isn’t it good to know we’ve got choices? And yes, the choices tend to be invisible, too, as invisible as the floors we walk on can in time become invisible for sitting… until maybe our child or grandchild reminds us. But we can learn to see, and we can learn to share what we see, and then maybe better paths forward will be easier to find.

That’s my hope, anyhow.

Happy New Year, everyone!