I bought a boring looking office chair from an ergonomic furniture store about 10 years ago. I spent about $600 and it’s still just as good as it was when I bought it.

That’s a sharp contrast from the shitty $150 chairs I would keep buying from Costco and having to replace because the foam or seat started to collapse after a couple years.

Plus gaming chairs seem intended to be as uncomfortable to sit on as possible. They’re horrendous. The cheapest Ikea office chair for 130€ is worlds better than the priciest gaming chair you can find, since they all share the car seat form which is supposed to protect you during impacts, not be good for your back.

When I started working at home due to COVID, I decided to buy a new chair. I was tired of having shitty chairs with “genuine leather” (aka leather spray paint) that would peel off over time. So I looked into chairs and landed on a nice gaming chair. Sure, it’s ugly, but it’s gotta be comfy right? Nope. Sitting in this thing for hours at a time has quite literally translated into a pain in my ass. I had to eventually get a seat cushion to sit on, because it was killing me otherwise.

In hindsight, I should have just gone with a traditional office chair.

Ironically as someone who is physically very large, (I’m well over average height, and like 250lbs) gaming chairs are some of the only chairs that I can comfortably spend hours sitting in. Every single ergonomic chair I’ve tried has been garbage, and I’ve tried the ultra expensive ones through my job. Hell, I’m sitting in one right now as I type this. But ergonomic chairs all suffer from the same issue, that they’re built with the average body size in mind.

I far prefer my Arozzi gaming chair, because it’s one of the only chairs I’ve used that has actually been comfortable for extended periods. The seat cushion is foam, but it has a mesh “sling” underneath which stretches. So I get the firmness from the foam, but the flex of the sling. So it doesn’t go flat over time like cheap foam-on-plastic/wood chairs, and it doesn’t fit my ass in weird ways like mesh ergonomic chairs. And the entire seat is designed with bigger people in mind, so the armrests are a little bit wider, the back is taller and actually reaches my head, etc.

Allow me to sell you on my gaming chair that cured my back pain. I got a secret labs chair in 2020 because it was the only chair under a grand that could arrive in less than 3 days. It replaced a Herman Miller I used at work.

The Herman Miller can only be sat in one way. It’s very light so climbing around it is just going to tip. You pretty much have to use it in the hr approved ergonomic position. Doing that for 8 hours a day just hurts. My gaming chair however is heavy enough that I can press my legs against the wall, or kneel on it without wobbling, or crosslegged. I can also sit with my neck on one handiest and my feet across another. Sometimes I lie with my legs at the head resting my head at the seat cushion.

The best sitting position is the one you don’t stay in long, my gaming chair lets me do that and my back just stopped hurting. When the chair starts to age out I do plan on looking at ergo chairs as well, there seems to be a market for “weird chairs” that enable uncinventionak sitting but they seem to go a little too far as well, I do want to sit normally as well sometimes too. Gaming chairs really seem to hit my requirements of heavy, tall, wide and large armrests.