
Sitting Up: A brief history of chairs - pepys
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/08/23/sitting-up/
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white-flame
There's an expression as you get older, that the floor gets farther away. I
highly suspect that this is due to chairs. Imagine how much more accessible
the floor would be to you, and how much easier it would be for you to get down
to and up from the floor, if you did it in the regular course of the day
instead of using chairs.

Similarly, many people past their childhood years couldn't imagine climbing a
tree, stating that they're too old to be physically capable of doing so. Yet
if you climbed a tree every day of your life, I suspect it would be routinely
easy well into your 30s and 40s.

It's not age by itself that's at fault, it's the avoidance of certain physical
movements that atrophies our abilities, caused by things like chairs and
taboos about child vs adult behavior.

~~~
degenerate
I'm in my 30s and still climb trees with my close friends when nobody else is
around to pass judgement. It's too much fun.

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gumby
This article made me think of the cultural path dependency in software design
as well. Some comes from metaphor (e.g. desktop) which took (is taking) a long
time to die, while the "small number of tools that do one or two things well,
strung together" philosophy of Unix has not spread (and arguably, with
examples such as systemd, is dying).

I will easily sit on a rock while hiking (better than the dusty or wet ground)
but at home happily sit on the floor to read, talk, play etc. How do non-
floor-sitters play with their small kids? Peoples' physiology is the same, but
they have adapted their environment -- I presume there is some mechanism or
affordance for this that I am not aware of. (Oh, and I use a chair when using
my laptop, like now).

> Deep squatting is favored by people in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin
> America,

My mother has never talked about her childhood in WWII very much but one
observation she has made several times over the years how distinctive it was
to her that the Japanese soldiers would squat in a group for hours having a
meal, or meeting, or just relaxing. Out of perversity I taught myself to do
that as a kid but never developed the strength to do it for an extended period
and now cannot do it at all, though I am seemingly quite flexible and strong.

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agentgt
The headline picture of the article reminds me how amazingly uncomfortable
sitting on the floor is for most people in the developed countries. In college
I had some friends from India and Pakistan and they could just sit on the
floor for hours. Many of them preferred the floor and would do it in study
groups.

In 15 minutes I would just give up and either standup or lay flat on the
floor. I can stand up all day but sit on the floor for 15 minutes is awful.

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Luc
I recall Fernand Braudel's 'The Structures of Everyday Life' having a chapter
about the evolution of chairs and their spread around the world. It's a good
series of books.

[https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Everyday-Life-
Civilization...](https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Everyday-Life-Civilization-
Capitalism/dp/0060148454)

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wcummings
Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit
on a chair and, if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together.

