It starts innocently. Your wrist hurts a little after a long day. You Google "ergonomic mouse." You click on a Wirecutter article. You read a Reddit thread. You watch a YouTube video by a man with a standing desk and a ring light who speaks with the evangelical conviction of someone who has found the One True Way to sit in a chair.
Three months later you own a trackball mouse, a split keyboard you cannot yet type on, a sit-stand desk with a programmable memory function, a monitor arm with more articulation points than your actual arm, and opinions about lumbar support that you are willing to share at length with anyone who makes the mistake of mentioning their back hurts.
You have become the person you once mocked. This is that story.
Stage One: Denial
You are fine. The pain in your wrist is from sleeping on it wrong. The stiffness in your neck is because you forgot to stretch. The ache in your lower back is because you are — what, thirty-five? Thirty-seven? — and this is just what happens now. Bodies deteriorate. It is the human condition. You do not need special equipment. You need to be less dramatic about sitting in a chair, which is an activity that humans have been performing for millennia without requiring a seventeen-step setup guide.
This phase lasts between six months and two years, depending on your stubbornness. I lasted eighteen months, during which my wrist progressed from "occasionally sore" to "I cannot open a jar" and my neck developed a permanent tilt that my barber helpfully described as "the question-mark posture." I was fine. I was absolutely fine. I just needed to stretch more.
I did not need to stretch more. I needed to stop using a flat laptop keyboard for twelve hours a day while hunched forward like a question mark. But denial is a powerful drug, and the ergonomics-industrial complex had not yet found my vulnerable moment.
Stage Two: The First Purchase
The gateway drug is always modest. A wrist rest. An ergonomic mouse. A laptop stand that elevates the screen to something approaching eye level. Something that costs under three thousand rupees and allows you to tell yourself that you are being sensible rather than becoming that person.
My gateway was a vertical mouse — one of those things that looks like a regular mouse tipped on its side, so your hand rests in a handshake position rather than a flat one. The logic is sound: a pronated wrist compresses the carpal tunnel, and a vertical grip relieves that compression. The experience is disorienting: for the first three days, I could not hit a menu button without overshooting by two centimetres in every direction. My cursor moved like a drunk navigating a corridor.
But by day four, the wrist pain was gone. Completely gone. And this is the moment — the moment the first purchase works — that the rabbit hole opens beneath you. Because if this one simple change could eliminate pain you had been living with for eighteen months, what else are you doing wrong? What other suffering are you enduring unnecessarily because you are too proud to admit that the way you sit in a chair might be the problem?
You are now in Stage Three. You just do not know it yet.
Stage Three: The Research Phase
You discover subreddits. You discover YouTube channels dedicated entirely to the question of how to sit. You learn phrases like "neutral wrist position" and "the 90-90-90 rule" and "active sitting" — this last one referring to the practice of sitting on a ball or a wobble stool, which is either a breakthrough in ergonomic thinking or an elaborate prank, depending on who you ask.
You begin measuring angles. The monitor should be at eye level, with the top of the screen at or slightly below your natural eye line. Your elbows should be at ninety degrees. Your thighs should be parallel to the floor. Your feet should be flat. There is, it turns out, a correct way to sit in a chair, and you have been doing it wrong for your entire adult life.
The research phase has a specific emotional texture: righteous indignation mixed with the zeal of the recently converted. You look at other people's desk setups with the horror of a building inspector examining a condemned structure. Your colleague's monitor is at chin level. Your friend's chair has no lumbar support. The person across the co-working space is using a trackpad — a trackpad — as their primary pointing device, and they have been doing this for years, and they apparently feel fine, which you now understand to be a temporary condition that will end in tendonitis and regret.
You do not say any of this out loud. You are self-aware enough to know that unsolicited ergonomics advice is the social equivalent of telling someone their posture is bad. Which it is. But you keep that to yourself.
Mostly.
Stage Four: The Setup
Here is the rig, described with the specificity that this phase of the condition demands.
Mouse: Logitech MX Ergo trackball. Not a vertical mouse anymore — the trackball is the level beyond. Your thumb moves the cursor while your hand stays still. The learning curve is brutal: two weeks of feeling like you have never used a computer before. The payoff is complete: zero wrist movement, zero wrist pain, and a smug sense of superiority over everyone who still drags a mouse across a pad like some kind of Neanderthal. The thumb gets sore for the first month. This is normal. You are retraining a digit that has spent its entire life pressing spacebar to now perform precision pointing tasks. It adapts. It always adapts.
Keyboard: A standard mechanical keyboard, tented slightly with a foam wedge underneath the back edge to create a negative tilt. The negative tilt is the thing nobody tells you about — conventional keyboard feet tilt the keyboard toward you, which extends your wrists. Tilting it away from you keeps the wrists neutral. This one change, which costs nothing, is worth more than every ergonomic keyboard on the market.
Monitor: Mounted on an arm, positioned so the top of the screen is exactly at eye level when you are sitting straight. The arm cost more than the monitor. This seems wrong, but the arm will outlast three monitors and it is the single best purchase I have made for my posture. A monitor on a fixed stand is a monitor that is in the wrong position — it is only at the right height by accident, for people of exactly one height, and you are almost certainly not that height.
Chair: This is where people spend the most money and get the least return. The chair matters, but less than you think. The thing that actually matters is whether you adjust it correctly. Seat height: your feet should be flat on the floor with your thighs parallel to the ground. Armrest height: your elbows should rest at ninety degrees without your shoulders hiking up. Lumbar support: it should hit the curve of your lower back, not the middle. Most people set it too high.
Desk: Sit-stand. The honest review: I stand for about ninety minutes a day, in three thirty-minute blocks. The productivity influencers who claim to stand for six hours are either lying or have different knees than mine. The real value of a sit-stand desk is not standing — it is the transition. Changing position breaks the static load pattern that causes most desk-related pain. The best position is always the next one.
Stage Five: Acceptance
You have become an ergonomics person. There is no going back. You notice monitor heights in the background of video calls. You wince when you see someone typing on a laptop in their lap. You have a foam roller under your desk and you use it, without shame, during afternoon calls when your camera is off.
The thing that nobody tells you at the beginning of the rabbit hole — the thing that would have saved me thousands of rupees and dozens of hours of research — is this: the single most ergonomic thing you can do is stand up and walk away from the desk for five minutes every hour. No trackball, no monitor arm, no chair, no desk, no gadget of any kind will compensate for eight consecutive hours of sitting. The human body was not designed for static positions. It was designed to move, and the best ergonomic intervention is the one that reminds you to move.
I have a timer on my desk. It goes off every fifty minutes. When it goes off, I stand up, I walk to the kitchen, I make a cup of chai that I do not always need, and I come back. This habit, which costs nothing and requires no equipment, has done more for my back and neck and wrists than everything else in this article combined.
But I am not getting rid of the trackball. The trackball stays.