Last week I woke up with excruciating back pain. I’m 34, so that wasn’t too much of a surprise. This is the age that this kind of thing starts happening to you. What was surprising was how much worse it got every time I sat in my office chair.
I’m lucky enough to have a home office, and it’s a very cozy place to work and play games on my PC. At least, normally it is. Last week, after a long day of blogging, I sat down to play Overwatch with a few pals, but about midway through my first game I realized there were tears in my eyes. Putting any weight on my hips made lightning bolts of pain shoot up my back. Sitting down on my heated blanket on the couch or lying on my side were tolerable, but sitting on a hard surface inevitably led to pain. So much pain that I haven’t been able to work in my office for over a week.
While working from the couch isn’t exactly a tragedy, it does clearly stop me from getting work done. Why would I work when the heated blanket is so cozy and I’m so sleepy? The hardest part of running my own business is holding myself accountable for falling asleep in front of a three hour YouTube video essay.
While I’m probably due a trip to the doctor for my back — and could definitely add a stretching routine into my day — my friend and office chair aficionado Chris Person has suggested that my biggest problem is my chair. I got this chair on Amazon a few years ago, and while it was a big upgrade from the dining room chair I was sitting on, at this point it’s wobbly and uncomfortable. And looking back at my week of not working in the office, it’s clear that sitting on that chair exacerbates whatever problems I’m already having.
I sat in this chair last night for my weekly Overwatch games with pals, and it gave me back pain in those two hours I was sitting. I woke up with back pain from the chair. And that’s not even counting how having a chair that causes me physical pain is preventing my from playing a lot of really good video games: Dwarf Fortress, Final Fantasy XIV, Baldur’s Gate 3… all of these games are currently off limits because I can’t fucking sit down. This chair is an evil device and I need to put it in a dumpster.
Chris Person is also DMing my Facebook Marketplace links for cheap Steelcase chairs — he recommends the Leap V2 — so hopefully soon my problems will be over. But please take these words of warning: a bad chair can basically ruin your entire life.
