Comfort is the softest shackles
Comfort is the softest shackles
Your butthole is fine the way it is
“The softer the chair, the harder it is to get out of it.”
–Derek Sivers
There are enough Stoic-bros to remind you that “the obstacle is the way,” “the only way is through,” and that “you need a little friction.” Instead of another cold plunge sales pitch, here’s a dose of Scared Straight. Comfort is a curse—a pair of velvet handcuffs—and it promises to doom us all.
Comfort is liberation from pain. Sounds groovy, but pain takes many forms beyond the physical. Boredom, longing, struggle, uncertainty, and grief all register as pain to your mind grapes. We can imagine a world without them—a place called The Comfort Zone. In The Comfort Zone:
There is no boredom, so no one is inspired to create
There is no longing, so no one seeks connection
There is no struggle, so no one tries to change the world
There is no uncertainty, so no one needs to learn a thing
And the absence of grief in The Comfort Zone doesn’t mean there’s no loss—it just means no one cares about it. So, no one knows the meaning of love.
In The Comfort Zone, there’s no debate or conflict or hurt feelings. But all progress relies on humans who dare to say something “wrong” before it’s eventually redefined as “right.” The Comfort Zone is the comformity zone. A One-World World1. The Comfort Zone is empire.
Comfort is why modern life sucks. You weren’t meant to navigate life from a prose position with a palm-sized computer. Comfort is banal: work from home, delivery toothpaste, snackable content, lo-fi beats, athleisure, the numbing soma of social media, whatever hole this serum is supposed to fill:
Perhaps we will choose discomfort again. I suspect the universe will choose for us. It gets worse before it gets better. There is a world beyond the The Comfort Zone and that is nature herself. A realm of chaos and darkness that gives zero fucks about your comfort. She may be the only antidote to our collective curse.
From Defuturing, A New Design Philosophy by Tony Fry, 2020