I like to sit and lay on the floor. Ever since I was a kid, I preferred sitting on the floor to furniture and I’ve carried that into adulthood. I’ve been sleeping on a Japanese-style futon for many years for similar reasons.

Office chairs have generally been fine. I’ve tried all sorts of models, even kneeling ones, and none of them stood out as something I wanted to spend a lot of time in. The standing desk trend reached me in or around 2012, I think. I found it valuable to both sit and stand as many other people have. I’ve used a standing desk ever since (though typically paired with a traditional chair).

A few weeks ago, something snapped in my desk chair and a sheared off bolt head fell out of the bottom of it. The recline function was suddenly unstable and the chair was shedding metal bits of various sizes for a few days. After reading some horror stories about chairs disassembling themselves in kinetic ways, I decided I would just avoid the chair altogether.

After a few days of standing, I noticed that my floor mat was sort of falling apart and not very functional. I ordered a new mat that also has various raised surfaces as opposed to the simply flat mat that I already had. This gave me all sorts of standing and stretching positions.

I haven’t been super comfortable standing the entire day but I’ve been able to stand for long periods of time. I seem to be favoring standing on my right leg, which can cause some fatigue so I’m working on my posture. I think it’s good to mix up standing and sitting positions when possible.

In my office (née, living room), I regularly sit on a zabuton near the standing desk. I have a folding floor desk that I slide under the couch when it’s not needed. I’ve settled into switching back and forth between the floor and my desk. This has worked out well for my consulting work because I use a laptop to accomplish mytasks, which is easy to take back and forth. It hasn’t panned out nearly as well for my personal computing or console gaming.

For personal computing, I use a desktop PC. It’s had an interesting side effect of making me take more breaks from games and the Internet so I suppose that’s a good thing. I ended up moving my PS4 off the desk during this time and onto the TV so I could use it to watch movies. I can’t use my leverless controller with it now the way it’s positioned but I’ll figure out a solution in the future.

I’m not sure I’ll bother replacing the chair. Between the standing desk, the zabuton, and the floor, I seem to have enough options. If nothing else, it’s forced me to move around more and that’s probably a net positive.