The Clumsy Interloper

Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter has penetrated my daily thoughts and made me critically examine my relationship with comfort and hunger. Consider the spoils of modern living – the climate controlled dwellings, the vehicles that transport us anywhere we wish, the array of food delivered to our doorstep, the handheld devices that contain the entirety of recorded history, an endless repository of entertainment beamed into our living rooms – and then square that with a surging epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide in the United States. The primal struggle to rise everyday, strike out to find food and sustain life amidst unforgiving conditions has been replaced by Temperpedic mattresses, prepackaged Hungryman dinners and Netflix binges. We have not adapted to this exorbitant glut of comfort yet and it shows.

Humans have evolved to seek comfort, safety, warmth and extra food. When our ancestors felt discomfort – whether it be hunger, cold, pain or stress – their drive for comfort kicked in and they would take action to combat this normally dire feeling. During the infancy of human history comforts were nominal and fleeting. There was a constant internal determination to push past physical limitations to find food, build shelters and flee from predators. Today our environment has changed but our innate genetic desire for comfort hasn’t.

Consider this timeline:

• 2.5 million years ago Homo habilis evolved to walk on two feet and use stone tools.

• 1.8 million years ago Homo erectus lived in social hunter-gather societies and harnessed fire.

• 700,000 years ago Homo neanderthalensis built homes, made clothes and mastered hunting with stone tipped spears.

• 250,000 year ago Homo sapiens developed complex tools, farming, language and currency.            

• Only within the last 100 years we have seen the introduction of cars, computers, television, air conditioning, smartphones and ultra-processed foods.

As Easter highlights, these comforts have been around for 0.004% of human evolution. Early humans lived hungry and uncomfortable lives which spurred them to innovate, expend effort and persevere through difficult circumstances to seek out tiny slivers of comfort. Today our senses are dulled by television, pills, smartphones and calorie dense comfort foods and we are detached from the things that make us happy and alive. It turns out our comfort zone is actually killing us.

Enter the Misogi (miss-oh-gee) which means “water cleansing” in Japanese. It is the Shinto practice of purifying the mind, body and spirit through physical and mental challenges. When you undertake a challenge that has a high failure probability, you expand the boundaries of possibility. If something sounds crazy or impossible, then you are on the right track. If you are a non-runner, sign up for a half marathon. If camping outside is the last thing you want to do, spend five days hiking the Appalachian Trail. If you’ve always wanted to write a novel, set a goal to write 3 pages every night until it is complete. Once your limits have been tested, you will begin to feel the joy and gratitude that comes with attaining that goal. Creature comforts dim in comparison to the satisfaction of doing hard things.

After you read Comfort Crisis (which you should immediately) then I encourage you to find a Misogi that is really fucking scary and commit to it. The bubble is not protecting you, it’s holding you back.