21 October

The history of chairs is actually very interesting. Originally chairs were more ceremonial things, reserved for royalty or people in high church office. If you look at some of the old paintings of kings at court for example, they were about the only people sitting in a chair. To this day many in Asia and the Middle East still sit on the ground to do everyday things like eat. The average Westerner finds that very uncomfortable, and that tells another story about how maybe chairs have not been good for us. They’ve maybe helped to weaken us physically. We all spend our formative years at school largely confined to chairs, and physically Westerners are pretty slob-like, unless they exercise. People who sit on the ground to eat rarely need to exercise.