Over the last few days (it’s a long podcast) I listened to this podcastabout “The Comfort Crisis,” which, if you give it any thought is kind of a funny title in the “crisis” times in which we live. The original death and taxes quote is from Benjamin Franklin – “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes” – should be amended to add crises. There is always another apocalypse coming right along.
It’s not a bad podcast, probably nothing anyone with a couple of functioning neurons does not know. We have modified our environment so completely that most of us have completely lost the ability to suffer mere discomfort.
Comfort is such a funny thing. Virtually everywhere you look someone is exhorting us to “break out of our comfort zone,” or “do something difficult.” Most of these exhortations are pretty lame: is trying a new recipe really taking you out of your “comfort zone?” If it is, you need more help than that offered by feel good media posts.
The thing about comfort is that humans appear to be evolutionary programmed to seek comfort out. You’ve got to admit, avoiding hunger, fatigue, cold, wet, thirst, pursuit by a mastodon, is a pretty good way to stay alive and pass on your genes. But comfort is such a creeping thing and if you really want to keep expanding the zone in which you can function, you can’t just do some difficult thing and then call it good. Because over time, a pretty short period of time considering, the thing that you did that made you uncomfortable becomes quite comfortable as your skill improves.
The first time I paddled my sea kayak on the open sea I was modestly fearful. Keep doing that for a few months or a year, and soon you have to go out of your way to find conditions that will introduce the same level of fear. And that is actually hard to do, because you’ve got comfortable.
The best illustration of this comes at the end of the podcast where the host (Peter Attia) and the book author (Michael Easter) are talking about rucking. Rucking is the new fitness thing on the block but rucking is simply bush-walking, hiking, scrambling, walking to the grocery store and carrying your shopping home, things we’ve all been doing for most of our lives: walking about carrying extra weight. Again, I am not denigrating “rucking” but bro’ it ain’t new.
The irony of the discussion (start at around 1:54), the two podcasters talk about rucking and how you really should buy a particular pack specifically designed for rucking, because, when you drill down to the essence of this, a specific “ruck pack” makes rucking more comfortable.
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