Just about exactly a year ago, I ordered a new office chair. Or, at least, it arrived just about exactly a year ago; the actual order was a couple of months before that. My old chair was starting to fail after ten years of daily use, and I figured it was time to upgrade, and given the fact that I was working from home and spending 8 hours in the chair every day, I figured dropping a decent chunk of cash and going for a Secret Lab chair would not be an unreasonable use of my money. I have now sat in this chair for hours, basically every single day, for a year; if I were to estimate 1000 hours of sitting time (keeping in mind 40 hours a week from the end of January through April, mind you) that would probably be a conservative estimate. That picture is without any attempt to make the chair more presentable; looking at it now, I probably could have cleaned off the seat a bit, but you get the idea.

And here’s the review: a year later, the $600 or so I spent on this chair was worth every dime.

Storytime: this post, and I swear this is true, was actually inspired by a dream I had last night, where I, no shit, realized I’d had the chair for about a year and decided to review it again, only to discover that the seams were fraying everywhere and all of the leather was starting to peel and my expensive-ass gaming chair was starting to fall apart. And I was unhappy! I do not want anything I own to fall apart, especially when I haven’t even come close to getting my money out of it yet.

(My dreams really are this boring. Yes. I dreamed about the blog.)

Anyway, you may see on your own where the dream diverged from reality a bit; the biggest way is that there’s no leather on this thing, fake or otherwise, and as near as I can tell if I took a few minutes to clean the cat hair and (ugh) beard dandruff flakes off of it it would effectively be indistinguishable from a brand-new chair. It took me a while to figure out exactly how I wanted to set it up, as every single piece of this chair can be adjusted, but once I got there it’s consistently been the most comfortable desk chair I’ve ever sat in, even if I still am absolutely unable to recline in it like they keep doing in all the ads. There are definitely examples of Expensive Things out there that don’t live up to the hype– as an Apple guy, I would know– but this is not one of them. I’m glad I made the decision to buy it, and I expect to be sitting in it for a long, long time.