Chairs

The most important element of any sitting room is the ability of its occupants to achieve a state of total relaxation. Very rarely is an uncomfortable assortment of sitting apparatuses the highlight of a sitting room one would judge to be of any reasonable level of quality. For this reason, the average sitting room is interspersed with various pieces of furniture with thick, soft padding and cushions on top of which plush pillows are placed. All of it, regardless of visual style or appeal, is meant to provide anyone who wishes to take a seat with the upmost comfort. However, with relatively few exceptions, the average person whose goal is to relax will always choose one particular piece of furniture to occupy over all the others: a sofa.

In many ways, a sofa is the ideal place to relax. Its occupant may sit up or recline to whatever degree they wish to and support themselves with the stiff sofa back or arm or with softer pillows. This gives the sofa not only an unparalleled level of comfort, but also great versatility. One can stretch across the entire length of a couch, in which position they can relax, destress, or sleep, or one can sit more upright, allowing multiple people to share in its comfort, each of whom can sit in a wide range of positions.

The same can not be said of chairs. The average chair requires its occupant to sit in an upright position, which may be acceptably comfortable, but it is not a position which readily suggests total relaxation. It makes a person feel constrained, as they unsuccessfully adjust their posture to achieve greater comfort which the chair can't offer. After moving back and forth, ramming into each arm and having placed their rump in every possible location in between, a person will eventually exhaust the narrow range of positions the chair offers, and become saddened as they resign themselves to the limited comfort they can achieve in their disappointingly designed seat.

Without peak comfort, it is tremendously difficult to achieve peak relaxation, and this fact is often exploited by the users of chairs. When a person wishes to work on something other than recreation, they tend to sit in chairs, where they have marginal comfort, but would find it more difficult to skive off than if they were seated on a couch or bed, where the temptation exists for them to simply lean back and recede into a world of blissful relaxation, free of work or deadlines. The chair removes this temptation by making its occupants prefer to distract themselves from their mild discomfort and focus on the next most readily available thought, which, in many cases, is work. This tendency is exploited by the average person whose goal is to complete a task, but also by workplace managers, who offer their workers a place to sit in the form of a chair; they keep the workers in discomfort to maximize their productivity.

The chair, therefore, despite its limitations in the sitting room, can be considered a useful tool. Much in the same way coffee stimulates a tired person, the chair narrows their attention. Obviously, this is not a perfect solution to the problems of distraction and laziness, but it is a significant improvement on most other furniture.