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Introduction
“In our pursuit of better living we’ve allowed comfort to calcify our natural movements and strengths. Without conscious discomfort and purposeful exercise – a forceful push against comfort creep – we’ll only continue to become weaker and sicker.”
Michael Easter started his journey toward this conclusion after reassessing his own life as a journalist and university lecturer in a wealthy country. A Sunday morning hangover convinced him to turn his life around, as it does for many. He recovered from alcoholism and, in spite of experiencing extreme discomfort in the process, gained a new clarity and self-awareness. His attention then turned outward.
“I awoke in a soft bed in a temperature-controlled home. I commuted to work in a pickup with all the conveniences of a luxury sedan. I killed any semblance of boredom with my smartphone. I sat in an ergonomic desk chair staring at a screen all day, working with my mind and not my body. When I arrived home for work, I filled my face with no-effort, high caloric foods that came from Lord knows where. Then I plopped down on my overstuffed sofa to binge on television streamed down from outer space. I rarely, if ever, felt the sensation of discomfort. The most physically uncomfortable thing I did, exercise, was executed inside an air-conditioned building as I watched cable news channels that are increasingly bent on confirming my worldview rather than challenging it. I wouldn’t run outside unless the conditions were, well, comfortable. Neither too hot, too cold, nor too wet.
What could cleansing myself of all these other comforts do for me?”
Connecting the Dots
Easter studied the links between the comforts in our lifestyle and harmful health effects. He cites research showing impacts like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression and anxiety. Beyond the occurrence of these physical and psychological problems, more people struggle with lack of meaning and purpose. What’s changed? Conspicuously, the material condition of people in wealthier countries has reached a level that people from the nineteenth century might have attributed to magic. The level of physical comfort is unprecedented in human history and a very recent development that we’re not biologically built for. Easter provides some evidence for the old-school folk wisdom that people freed of usual problems will lower their identification threshold and find new ones. It makes even more sense now that people who no longer need to engage in physical activity to survive won’t, and consequently, will suffer resulting health effects. What’s more novel about the book’s argument than promoting exercise is advocating for the extreme opposite of excessive comfort.
Easter argues for the exploration of one’s full potential and laments that most will never fully achieve it. More broadly, Easter argues for occasionally doing things that push one to their limits (while making sure not to die) as he did in taking on an extreme hunting trip in the Alaskan Arctic tundra. Throughout the book, Easter discusses the rediscovery of boredom and its ability to help us refocus as well as the mastery of hunger and other appetites (most feelings of hunger aren’t “real” hunger). The author also encourages the contemplation of our own mortality and recommends engaging in simple, naturalistic diet and exercise regimens. A notable mention amongst them is rucksacking as a superior form of endurance cardio and strength training familiar to our ancestors, current military service members or even those on a long camping / hiking adventure. And as we noted at the beginning of this post, lifestyle creeps back without persistence and vigilance in pursuing these purposeful discomforts!
A Durable Sentiment
It’s easy to write off The Comfort Crisis as a sophisticated repackaging of the “people today are soft” trope. The old trope rather fascinates us. Roman historians in the later empire were sure that their patria had been brought low because Romans had slipped into luxurious degeneracy. The idea of civilizational decay due to comfort was so persistent before the 20th century that, amusingly, serious thinkers of the 1890’s asked whether the USA was suffering the same fate.
The world we currently inhabit is in many ways, a product of the blood, sweat, tears and dreams of our ancestors - people of past centuries who broke their back in fields without modern farm implements, who had to fetch water from a well in the middle of winter, who went hungry if a harvest failed and who never knew when a foreign army might show up in their village. Ironically, we who wield the antidotes to the majority of their suffering seldom feel gratitude or joy for it. Tragically, freedom from want and freedom from fear can’t make us happy or even durably healthy.
On the bright side, our material abundance gives us the flexibility to make the proper adjustments – if we can summon the will. It’s hard to change individual behavior at scale, especially for habits that are best adopted in youth. The obvious place to start is the K-12 education system. Current incentives for American students skew toward pleasing parents with academic or athletic achievement. Parents who value discipline can advocate for their children to be taught moral / practical education. Virtue taken to excess can become a vice. In the case of comfort, the average person can experience this directly through a long vacation. Activities you look forward to during the entire workweek lose their luster when done for enough days in a row. It’s been a revelation in our own lives during the pandemic. Greater opportunity to enjoy comforts at home have diminishing returns and share characteristics with other vices, especially in being addictive (i.e. our explosive growth in screentime) and destructive to the individual and loved ones. It’s great to have a persuasive critique of these forces in our lives, and even better to have some exciting alternative paths to explore. We may not be visiting the Arctic for a hunt anytime soon, but we will get our hands dirty and embrace some discomfort!
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #26: The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, by Michael Easter