Decades of advice about upright posture have not produced fewer sore backs. The research has quietly moved on, and what replaced it is easier to actually do.
Slouched sitting is not inherently damaging. Studies comparing sustained upright sitting with sustained slouched sitting do not find meaningfully different pain outcomes. Your back does not care as much about the angle as the clock.
What it does care about is duration without variation. Any position held long enough becomes uncomfortable, including the correct one. The fix that actually works is changing position on a timer rather than correcting the position you are in.
So the advice we give now is specific and small: get up every half hour, walk for a minute or two, and vary how you sit rather than how straight you sit. Nobody needs a posture corrector, and nobody needs to be reminded to feel guilty about how they look at a screen.
If you have tried that and pain persists past a couple of weeks, that is worth an assessment. Sometimes it really is the chair, the workload, or something else entirely — but it should be found rather than assumed.
