If it was hypothesized that idleness, according to Cato the Elder, was the father of all vices, today, could we perhaps hypothesize that comfort is the mother of all virtues?
Not necessarily, or at least, we rather believe that virtues also exist in vices and vices in virtues.
Those like us who deal with the design of interior design objects for everyday use, objects that represent material goods in which to invest in the long term, want to create products that are able to make vices positively active, while at the same time stimulating the balanced growth of virtues.
Products that are able to embody the inherent contradictoriness of the human being and therefore limit the so-called “anxiety of perfectionism” that is increasingly common and latent in the era of Baumanian liquid society.
Psychology teaches us that those who suffer this attitude are also often prone to having the Red Cross nurse complex for women, and the Good Samaritan syndrome for men.
The fact is that basically, we tend to become prisoners of our own desire to be virtuous, losing sight of the very concept of virtue.
Equal sentiment regarding vices: we are slaves to them if we find in them an apparent comfort, even if only momentary, which makes us lose the notion of time. And often, also of space.
To make them human, sincere and innocent sinners. To make them real. Ideals. Just like the truth is.
We build sofas, therefore seats, we do it in the most sedentary era ever and this could lead one to believe that our sofas stimulate more idleness than anything else.
Contemporary psychology suggests an ever-increasing search for positive idleness as introspection, necessary for the well-being of the individual. Starting from the first years of life. A sort of detox from perfectionism, a detox of implicit daily habits, a detox capable of generating harmony.
The new frenzy that invades our days and the long work sessions on the computer, strictly while sitting, require us to invert the idleness-vice paradigm into idleness-virtue and, in our case, sensitize us to deliver through our sofas, our armchairs and our relaxation stations, products that are places of virtuous idleness both from an environmental, aesthetic, functional, productive, qualitative, sensorial and temporal point of view.
We sit so much that this quantity needs to be seen and experienced with pride and only and exclusively, by resting one’s body on objects that have been created considering most of the postural, attitudinal, social, behavioural and relativity of taste variables.
In doing so, in our corporate world, where the comfort zone is the conditio sine qua non contained in every product, we apologize to Cato the Elder and from Garavini the younger, we postulate that “idleness is the mother and father of all virtuous vices“.
Thus spoke the coloured knight…
