Rustic Cyberpunk

When was the last time you sat on a wooden chair? I did it this afternoon and it was a religious experience. Having my buttocks nestled in woven nylon and plastic all day in mass-produced abominations called "office chairs" really don't seem to have the same effect. Even if the thing has no cushioning, there's really no substitute for a well-contoured piece of dead tree of the right kind.

Most "wood" furniture I can find these days, including tables and chairs, seem to be made of termite residue squeezed into planks, covered in a thin veneer of lies, and pumped full of sticky poison. The material is averse to even tiny levels of moisture; It can't withstand the stuff covering 71% of Earth.

Mars is crying.

Particle board is terribly cheap, of course. Which makes it great for mass-produced landfill material. I'm not sure when exactly the tipping point was, but somewhere along the way, we started accepting powdered milk and powdered wood as lifestyle products in lieu of what they really were. Tithes for consumerism at the church of mass-production.

I can appreciate that trees are a slow-growing limited resource, but how much more friendly are wooden granola bars compared to intact fibers? Is there at least a better way to compact and bind the stuff that doesn't fall apart from the stuff we excrete with every breath? Or won't kill us with cancer in 15 years?

I was also looking at bamboo furniture, but I'm not too comfortable with the resins used to bind them together either. Why is glue so attractive?

I'm not sure what the solution to the death of furniture is, but when I build my cabin, anything made of particle board shall be strictly forbidden on the premises. Doesn't matter if it's some other soft wood, but it has to be dead cells of a living organism as-grown.

I wonder if antlers dropped in the woods make viable armrests.