The Comfort Crisis

The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter is one of my favourite non-fiction books. It just really speaks to a topic I’m passionate about and have been thinking on for a very long time. It is written intertwined with an adventure of the author in the snowy mountains, juxtaposing his rough but natural experiences to the comforts of everyday life.

Similar messaging to Antifragile, Digital Minimalism & The Obstacle is the Way.

Some of my favourite highlights:

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people are at their best-physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounderafter experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day

I just had to take a look at my everyday life. I was comfortable, quite literally, every single moment. I awoke in a soft bed in a temperaturecontrolled 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 mind and not my body. When I arrived home from work, I filled my my face with no-effort, highly 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

as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.

“But people vastly overestimate the consequences of failure today. Failure now is that you fuck up a PowerPoint presentation and your boss gives you a bad look.” The human mind is programmed to overestimate the consequences of something like screwing up a PowerPoint, because past social failures often got us kicked out of the tribe, after which we’d usually die at the hands of nature,

There should be some amount of stress that gives you optimum psychological and physical well-being.

Compared to the people who’d been sheltered their entire lives, “the people who’d faced some adversity reported better psychological well-being over the several years of the study,” said Seery. “They had higher life satisfaction, and fewer psychological and physical symptoms. They were less likely to use prescription painkillers. They used healthcare services less. They were less likely to report their employment status as disabled.”

He told me that when you undergo a new, stressful experience like misogi, you’re transferring short-term memories into long-term memories-what just happened to you and what it led to, and what you should do next time you face a similar situation. “In general, this is because memory is about the future," said Fields. “We retain experiences that may be of survival value at another time.” » I asked Seery specifically about misogi and mentioned the reports of Elliott, Parrish, and Korver. “That dovetails really nicely with how I think this stuff is working,” said Seery. “There should be a common psychological process that leads to these benefits. “If I develop fitness by swimming, I’m still going to be fit when I run,” he continued. “I may not be a top-form runner, but the cardiovascular endurance will be there. Likewise with this toughening process. It should give me this internal capacity that leaves me better able to deal with many things.”

New situations kill the mental clutter. In newness we’re forced into presence and focus. This is because we can’t anticipate what to expect and how to respond, breaking the trance that leads to life in fast forward. Newness can even slow down our sense of time. This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids. Everything was new then and we were constantly learning.

money doesn’t seem to overcome the rural/urban happiness gap. Studies show that even dirt-poor people who live in rural China report being happier than infinitely wealthier Chinese city-dwellers

Kanazawa calls his idea the Savanna Theory of Happiness, and the general rule of thumb is, the higher the population density wherever a person is, the less happy they’ll likely be.

Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.”

My own habits? I typically average three daily hours. Gross. Let’s say I live 60 more years and keep up that pace. I’ll have spent seven and a half years of the rest of my life looking at my phone. And let’s face it: I’m not using the device to read literary classics, learn a new language, or wire money to widows and orphans. I’m using my phone to google the answer to any half-baked question that leaks out of my gray matter or watch the social media mobs decry whatever they’ve deemed the “microaggression” of the day. Or, you know, “‘Cuz YouTube.”* beweiloricile 93 Smartphones are not only stealing our boredom, they are also shoving society dangerously close to, as screenwriter and satirist Mike Judge calls it, “idiocracy" status. For 2.5 million years, or about 100,000 generations, we had nothing digital in our lives. Now the average person spends 11 hours and 6 minutes a day using digital media. That’s from cellphones, TV, audio, and computers. Smartphones only stand out because they’re newer, actively steal our attention with notifications, and are accessible at anytime. But the average person still spends double the time watching TV than they do on their smartphone.

Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more. The 11 hours and 6 minutes of attention we’re handing over to digital media isn’t free. It’s all spent in focused mode. Think of this focused state like lifting a weight, and the unfocused state like resting. When we kill boredom by burying our minds in a phone, TV, or computer, our brain is putting forth a shocking amount of effort. Like trying to do rep after of an exercise, our attention after rep rep eventually tires when we overwork it. Modern life overworks the hell out of our brains. Our collective lack of boredom may be causing us to reach nearcrisis levels of mental fatigue. Research shows that the onslaught of screen-based media has created Americans who are “increasingly picky, impatient, distracted, and demanding,” as one media analyst put it. These terms fall under the umbrella of “insufferable.” And overworked, undermaintained minds are linked to depression, life dissatisfaction, the perception that life goes by quicker, and increasingly missing the beauty of life that only presents itself when we allow our mind to wander and be aware of something other than a THE COMFORT CRISIS screen.

A recent study of the kids in Torrance’s study found that creativity was a threefold better predictor of much of the students’ accomplishments compared to their IQ scores.

In the early 1980s, as Japan was becoming more urban and tech focused, the country’s forest agency created a nature-based wellness program. They even coined a marketing term, shinrin-yoku, which translates to “forest bathing.” The program essentially promoted sitting or walking in the woods and “taking in” nature. The Japanese government told its citizens to improve their health by forest bathing. They even created parks across the country to do so. Japanese scientists then started to probe whether the tax-funded program had any positive impact. They’ve since published a flood of studies on shinrin-yoku-and pushed biophilia from hypothesis to hard science. 113 One of these Japanese studies found that people who spent about 15 minutes sitting in and then walking through nature experienced all kinds of drops in the measurements that doctors care about. Blood pressure readings, heart rates, and stress hormone levels all went down. In another study, people with the highest levels of stress felt a significant drop in anxiety, depression, and hostility after only two hours in the woods

“People think that meat and fresh cucumbers just fucking magically appear. And, let’s face it, pop nutritionists can get a lot more clicks and sell a lot more books by convincing people that food is toxic. “But,” he continued. “I think you’re really wondering about junk food. Does that sound right? People conflate ‘processed’ with ‘junk.” > » “Yes!” I said, relieved to be out of the hot seat. “Processed food is not always junk, but junk is usually processed. I do think junk food is unhealthy, but it’s not because sugar is ’toxic’ or any of that nonsense,” he said. “It’s mainly because it’s more calorie dense, less filling, and is more likely to lead someone to overeat and gain weight. And being overweight or obese is one of the largest risk factors for disease.”

The researchers found that when people do eat for reasons other than real hunger, they’re far more likely to binge past fulfillment into a dazed-and-doughy state of psychic sedation.

He told me to embrace the suck.’ Now, yeah, I’m hungry sometimes. It is what it is. I’m OK with being uncomfortable now. I remind myself that I’m safe, have food, and will eat when it’s time to eat.

Which is why we are now, Sapolsky said, getting done in by ourselves. By the tales we tell ourselves about what we need to achieve and when and why and in relation to whom.

Existential philosopher Martin Heidegger said, “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life-and only then will I be free to become myself.”

Research from Australia found that the top regrets of the dying include not living in the moment, working too often, and living a life the person thinks they should rather than one they truly want to. » “Whereas those who have thought of their death and prepared for it,” said the lama, “they do not have those regrets. Because they have often not fallen so much into those delusions. They have lived in the moment. Maybe they have accomplished a lot, maybe they have not. But regardless it has not affected their happiness as much. …”

About 80 percent of Americans will experience back pain sometime in their life. A quarter of people say they’ve had it in the last few months. It’s the most common place people experience pain, and the most frequent reason people see a doctor or take a sick day from work. Back pain costs our economy $100 billion every year. Back pain sometimes comes from something a doctor can scan, see on an image, and diagnose. Like an injured disk, tumor, osteoporosis or fracture. But 85 percent of it is labeled “nonspecific,” which is unseeable pain that appears from the ether. Scientists at Harvard estimate that 97 percent of this nonspecific back pain is caused by the way we now live. By captivity in our modern environment.

“I abhor sanitizer,” she said. “And, trust me, you’re going to survive if you don’t shower. In fact, it can be beneficial.” Harvard Medical School stated that a daily shower with antibacterial soap “upsets the balance of microorganisms on the skin and encourages the emergence of hardier, less friendly organisms that are more resistant to antibiotics.” And also, “frequent baths or showers throughout a lifetime may reduce the ability of the immune system to do its job.”