The Dark Side of Making Life Enjoyable

The insight I describe below is one of the best lessons I’ve learned in my life.

In your 20s and 30s, you figure out what things you like, you hate, you are good at, you are no good at, and so on. Some random examples:

• You find out that you really don’t like participating in team sports. So, you avoid those.

• You find that you enjoy home improvement. So, you seek out projects to improve your home, doing them yourself.

• You discover that you have no talent for learning a musical instrument. Fine; do something else.

• You discover that you love debating highly intellectual topics. So, you engage in discussion on Substack.

• You discover that you don’t like non-monogamy. So, you have monogamous relationships.

• You love taking care of little kids. So, you have a house full of children.

• You hate learning new languages or dealing with the difficulties of translation. So, you avoid going to countries where almost no one speaks your language.

In short, you’re figuring out how to make your life more enjoyable. Needless to say, this is a great thing to do.

Even so, the dark side is that if you continue down that road a long time, even successfully, you will most likely become addicted to presence of comfort and lack of discomfort: physical, material, emotional, and intellectual. And that ends up making you weak and even foolish.

Before I get to the examples and defense, some foreshadowing: I disagree profoundly with what the wellness influencers say about the “value of getting out of your comfort zone”. I think they are doing it completely wrong, for reasons I’ll get to below.

Examples of being addicted to the presence of comfort or absence of discomfort:

• You get addicted to your current, comfortable, material standard of living—in the sense of your amount of income, your amount of savings, and your spending patterns. If your income was halved, it would strike you as an utter disaster. You hesitate to give much money to the poor because you’re addicted to your patterns of spending money.

• You get addicted to your current, comfortable relationship dynamics. If your partner cheats on you, or there is a death in the family, you are likely to almost panic, at least temporarily. If there is an uncomfortable conversation on the horizon, about some highly emotional issue with a loved one, you shy away from it.

• You become addicted to your opinions regarding politics, religion, and morality. You no longer struggle with discovering uncomfortable insights that go firmly against your “tribes”, political, moral, or religious. You quickly disparage contrary views without careful consideration. You’re left-wing, and MAGA will teach you nothing; you’re a theist, and science won’t budge you; you’re politically conservative, and know that purple-haired woke 20-somethings have nothing to teach you.

• Finally, over the years your body probably grows fat and weak, losing muscle mass and gaining all sorts of fat.

All of these happened to me, and I don’t know anyone over 45 or so who has escaped them. For instance, most of my Facebook friends are addicted to intellectual comfort when it comes to politics, religion, and morality. They are very cozy in their preferred tribes, implicitly thinking they’ve figured those things out, at least approximately.

And how many of us don’t gain a lot of fat and lose a lot of muscle, after the age of 40 or 45, say? Some of us manage it, but not a lot.

I hope it’s obvious that arranging your life to make it more enjoyable is usually a great thing. Anyone who purposely arranges their life to be miserable will end up, well, miserable. My point is that virtually all of us carry out the “make life enjoyable” project in the wrong way—so we end up intellectually, morally, emotionally, and physically weak. That weakness bites us in the ass when life eventually throws us a curveball and we have to deal with significant discomfort.

About a decade ago I started paying attention to how I had grown addicted to material, emotional, intellectual, and physical comfort. I gradually saw the same thing in my relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Jeez . . . it hits all of us, to different degrees. No one is spared.

But just becoming vividly aware of it gave me the impetus to decrease it. Here’s a recent example from my own life:

Like I said above, it would be silly to avoid all comfort. I happen to absolutely ADORE junk food. Part of me looks forward to receiving a fatal disease diagnosis, just so I can eat junk food all day, given that the end is nigh. Over the last couple years I’ve been enjoying eating junk food. It’s awesome. About six weeks ago I bought a scale and discovered that I weighed 207 lb, the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life. I decided that enough was enough. So, I designed an exercise and weight loss plan that I thought would work for me (which of course doesn’t mean its details would work for you, although the general principles apply to virtually everyone).

Six weeks later, I’m at 188 lb. I’ve lost 19 lb. I figure I have 8-11 lb more to go, so I end up at 177-180 lb (I’m 5’11’’). I know I’ll piss people off by saying this, but the truth is that it hasn’t been terribly difficult—because I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. Most people hate dieting because it involves a ton of discomfort. They are totally right about that. They search and search and search for shortcuts, for magic formulas, for hacks, to minimize the discomfort. I do not have any shortcuts or magic formulas, so don’t ask me for them. But if you can adopt a mindset that doesn’t give a shit about mild discomfort, so you don’t spend time, attention, and energy fighting it but just accept it, then losing weight is not terribly difficult (for most of us; obviously there are exceptions for medical reasons).

When I said there is a “dark side” to the project of making your life more enjoyable, I didn’t mean the project has its limits. Perhaps it does, but I’m not saying so. In fact, I think that if you pursue the project well, and are aiming for the long term, then learning to live with short-term discomfort is the best way to make your life more enjoyable in the long term. In short:

If you want to maximize the presence of comfort and absence of discomfort in the long run, then make sure you have plenty of short-term periods of discomfort and lack of comfort.

The reason is this: (i) tragedy is definitely going to hit you, over and over, (ii) your life will be more enjoyable if you can handle those tragedies well, (iii) handing them well requires strength; and (iv) relentless pursuit of the absence of discomfort and presence of comfort makes you weak and foolish.

Regarding (i), some of the following events, or quite similar ones, are going to happen to you eventually:

• you get divorced

• your father gets dementia

• you get a chronic illness that lasts for decades

• you find out your spouse has undiagnosed mental illness

• your sex life becomes almost nonexistent

• your son is arrested for drunk driving

• your sister-in-law is killed in an accident

• your brother goes bankrupt

• your favorite uncle is arrested for child molestation

And so on. That shit is inevitable, if you live 70 or so years. When it happens, if you have long been addicted to the presence of comfort and the lack of discomfort, then your subsequent weakness and perhaps foolishness won’t serve you well in the aftermath. You’ll end up like those idiots who lose their minds when cops pull them over for minor traffic infractions or other penalties (just watch the videos of these people melting down; they’re amazing). It’s much better, for enjoying your life, to have had plenty of experience with discomfort and lack of comfort, so that you can deal with the inevitable tragedies.

The hard part is getting yourself comfortable with being uncomfortable. How does one pull that off?

That’s the BIG QUESTION. I’ll get to it below. First, a top-10 list of basic points about the project of making life more enjoyable:

1. Pursuing comfort and avoiding discomfort are quite different things. I might spend a great deal of energy pursuing comforts—but I don’t give a shit about the discomfort in my life. I’ll probably end up with a quite varied life, rich in highs and lows. Conversely, you might not pursue comfort very much but you do everything you can to avoid discomfort. You’ll probably end up with a pretty mild life, with far fewer highs and lows. Which kind of life is more rewarding depends on the details of your personality.

2. Comfort and discomfort come in degrees. Maybe mowing your lawn sucks for you, but that’s mild discomfort. Summoning the courage to confront your spouse about the lousy state of your marriage will be wildly more uncomfortable. Eating your favorite junk food is mildly comforting. Having regular, loving sex with an incredibly gorgeous person whom you love and who loves you back might be incredibly comforting.

3. The same thing will be mildly uncomfortable to one person and highly uncomfortable to another person. Etc.

4. Clearly, some people’s lives are mostly uncomfortable—and have been so for many years. They probably haven’t grown addicted, to any significant degree, to the presence of comfort or the absence of discomfort. And they aren’t in a position to take on any new sources of discomfort.

5. It’s tough to know the degree to which one is addicted to the presence of comfort or absence of discomfort. My guess is virtually all of us are strongly disposed to underestimate the degree of addiction we have. The woman across the street from where I’m living this spring sometimes brings my newly emptied trash cans from the curb to the entrance to my garage—because she considers it unsightly to have trash cans near the curb. She does this only a few hours after the trash cans have been emptied. My guess—and that’s all it is—is that she lives a really boring life, filled with stupefying comfort, and the incredibly minor visual discomfort of trash cans seems like a big deal to her. I suppose the vast majority of us have similar odd quirks that are somewhat foolish. But my point here is that her behavior might be the result of too many years of comfort and lack of discomfort.

6. In my experience, most people I know—and who read these words—have a lot of comfort and not much high-degree discomfort in their lives. They underestimate their addictions—and usually never even consider that there are at least four categories: physical, material (income/savings/spending), intellectual, and emotional.

7. Again: nothing I’m saying here is meant to suggest that we gotta become fucking Marines, or Navy Seals, and grow to love and seek out discomfort as much as possible—so we can be tough dudes. That’s silly.

8. Also again: discomfort still sucks. It’s discomfort. I don’t like dieting. It sucks. I don’t like being hungry any more than you do, and I don’t like depriving myself of cookies, Doritos, and chocolate-chip pancakes either. Hell no. One should not slip into denial about the badness of discomfort.

9. Opportunities for being mildly or significantly but not extremely uncomfortable—opportunities that when taken could improve your life in the long term—aren’t hard to find. They’re probably right under your nose.

10. Some people try to distinguish discomfort from being uncomfortable. I’m not fussing with that stuff.

When people hear me say these things about comfort/discomfort, they nod their heads and agree. But then they go back to their lives and fail to see the degree to which they have become addicted to comfort/lack of discomfort. They say things like “Oh my God, our bathroom just HAD to be remodeled. It was a disaster”. This is horseshit. The bathroom was working fine. They just had grown addicted to a certain material standard of living. Or when they are confronted with the request to give money to the poor, their addiction to their current financial situation prevents them from acting. Or they shy away from the difficult conversations that would improve their relationships with their spouse, children, parents, coworkers, or bosses. They don’t take seriously political views outside of their tribes, left-wing or right-wing. Their minds are made up when it comes to religion. And so forth.

It’s so easy—isn’t it?—to nod your head at good advice or wisdom but then ignore it in your life. I’ve done exactly that on multiple occasions, and I’m sure you have too.

So, again, how does one get oneself to be comfortable with discomfort?

I don’t know of any easy or (what is different) reliable method. But here are a few observations that I find helpful:

• What works for one person might be a disaster for someone else. So, don’t be too disappointed if you find out that what worked for me, or your sister, just won’t work for you.

• There are degrees of this. You can grow incredibly or just mildly comfortable with discomfort.

• Again, there are distinct areas for this: material, emotional, physical, intellectual. You might be great at being comfortable-with-discomfort when it comes to physical stuff but suck at it when it comes to intellectual stuff. Evaluate yourself on all four categories.

• Maybe you can motivate yourself to accept discomfort because you see in advance that it will be a big ego boost for you. You’ll feel superior to other people, once you’ve had some success accepting discomfort. You’ll be stronger than them. You’ll be the adult in the room, while everyone else is losing their minds and engaging in immature drama. You can weather the storms when others can’t. You won’t be guilty of tribal thinking.

• As the previous remark suggests, it’s not as though one must have a noble reason for growing comfortable with discomfort. You can lean into all sorts of motivations, if they’re actually going to work for you, regardless of whether they sound impressive to others or even to yourself. For comparison, I decided to lose weight not because of health or anything like that. It was pure vanity—and I knew it. For once, I decided to nurture and lean into my vanity.

• If you’re a guy, and you’re at least mildly motivated by masculinity, then perhaps you can convince yourself that “a real man” is a guy who can handle material, emotional, physical, and intellectual discomfort. If this works, great. If it doesn’t, fine.

Final point: wellness influencers take the wrong approach to “comfort is the enemy of progress” (to use one of their slogans). In fact, I think they undermine their own message (e.g., Michael Easter).

They give you a series of hacks, for eating healthy, for exercising, for improving your relationships, and so on. The hacks are meant to be shortcuts for reaching your goals (e.g., “Take the stairs instead of the escalator!”). They are designed to assist you in achieving your goals by minimizing the discomfort of the usual ways of trying to achieve those goals. They are giving you little ways of staying very close to your comfort zone so that you can step just a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Uh huh.

I think the right solution is perfectly general, adequate, and inadequate: get used to being uncomfortable, period. It’s general because it applies to a great many areas of life, physical, emotional, material, and intellectual. It’s adequate because it really does help considerably when you need or want to get something done that involves absence of comfort or presence of discomfort. It’s inadequate because it doesn’t work the way you want it to: it isn’t going to make the discomfort go away or diminish much. Stop looking for hacks that try to get around discomfort.