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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.

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.
While I don't climb trees anymore, I gave up my chair at work and now I just stand all the time (except meetings). The first couple weeks were very hard on my feet, but after then it wasn't that big a deal.

I suspect this is similar to going to the floor regularily.

Also, many of us spent the first 20 years (just when our bodies grow) of our life sitting.

On the other hand, we're still growing taller...

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.

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.

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...

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.