It really is amazing how soft everyone is now
Seriously, comfort is killing your happiness
The airport is a great place to be reminded that comfort does not equal happiness. Customers get everything they want, and only seem more annoyed as a result. No amount of TV screens with streaming movies, free little snacks, and fancy apps seem to get people to stop whining, and that’s not going to change by making the journey easier. The more you give someone for free, the more they expect, and our modern culture has grown so soft that we’re literally being poisoned by pleasure-seeking.
I recently saw a very frustrated couple at my gate complaining openly and loudly that our plane was going to be delayed by an hour. I watched them mewl to each other about how these airlines need to get it together and deliver what they promised because they paid good money! Wide-eyed, heavy sighing, hands to the ceiling levels of exasperation.
About five minutes later, we all get another update that the flight was now going to be departing on time and to continue to the terminal. Both shockingly and unshockingly, the same couple was equally as frustrated at this new circumstance. Now, in the face of getting exactly what they wanted from the beginning, they were upset with the emotional whiplash of having unexpectedly felt frustration. Instead of being grateful, they wanted vengeance for having had to experience fleeting discomfort.
The problem with comfort is that it gets normalized so quickly. Getting everything you want poisons your ability to have gratitude, because it gets to be routine pretty fast. Why would you be thankful for what you consider normal? By only ever demanding pleasure, you’d be surprised at how terribly you’re directing your life to be. It’s just our reality to have been given brains that crave novelty, and we have to work with that system by throwing a little pain into our pleasure soup.
In the digital age, most basic problems have been solved. The majority of people on Earth (and like 99% of people who cruise Substack) have enough food and water to survive. The problem is that our brains want to find problems and solve them. It is both the curse and blessing of being human. Sunbathing forever is not what you want, it gets boring. You need challenges and goals more than limitless daquiris.
What do I mean our brains want problems?
Our brains, in bodies that are constantly trying not to die, are designed to focus on the things that could kill us. By focusing the hardest on avoiding potential dangers, we stand the highest likelihood of not dying. The tradeoff of maximizing survival in a previously harsh world is that biologically, we’re not primarily built to enjoy life. We’re primarily just built to not die so that we can continue to pass our genes. The sections of the animal kingdom (which you are a part of) who survived the best, passed along their chemical composition, regardless of whether they were an apex predator or lived underground. Even the baddies of the animal kingdom still had to not die. Cheetahs developed spots as camouflage, polar bear livers are poisonous to us but keep them from starving, and sharks have flexible skeletons to help absorb blunt force trauma. Defense is just as important as attack.
When it comes to our big, beautiful human brains, the bummer is that more nice things does not equal more happiness in your brain, at least not for more than like five minutes. The hardware just doesn’t work that way. Unless you get nicer and nicer things forever, but then you end up in a ‘his yacht is bigger than mine’ scenario. Fortunately, this physiology is fairly easy to work with because we can accept that our brains are going to focus on the negative state, then use that negative state to our advantage. If you’re not going to be happy, at least be sad in a cool direction. Pick a struggle that makes you a cooler person, that’s the gist of being happy.
Since I like fancy names and making my life sound more dramatic than it is, I call it a Noble Arc: choosing to bring a challenge into my life, oriented towards developing into a person that I am prouder of. It’s the muscle burn in getting jacked, the denying myself a little sweet treat to save up for gemstones, the pain of a calf stretch to get the relief that comes after. Suffering as a debt towards my future self having a better position.
Your brain is going to want to whine anyways, it is an endless void of desire. If all you do is keep pushing stuff into the hole, eventually it’s all so boring that it’s impossible to be excited anymore. Oh, another new Netflix special, same as the past 100. We all have made comfort and pleasure so routine that it’s boring and now we’re upset because we’re so happy that we don’t even know we’re happy. It just feels normal.
The Age of Abundance has quickly become an Age of Yearning, a purposeless ho-hum of instant gratification. Life feels grey and we want so desperately to feel something again! Yet we maintain our pleasure barometer at 100% day after day, and are surprised when our little coke addict selves need bigger and bigger hits to feel the same thing. Odysseus is not written as a description of his retirement, but as a tale of his perils. Biographies don’t focus on the cool cars they bought after getting rich, but the Noble Arc they took to achieve success. Your own life is bland in real-time because there is no heroic struggle, only comfortable pretend struggles. To find fulfillment, you have to go out, find some dragons, and battle them. You have to be less comfortable.
Only then will you have something to be grateful for. Only then will you have a ‘sad’ so that when you look at ‘happy’, it has something to be comparatively different from, and thus appreciated in contrast.
I have a specific way of creating my Noble Arcs, involving extending my time horizons, charting my growth, and being hyper-intentional. If that interests you at all, subscribe, because I’m sure I’ll write about it eventually.
In the meantime, if you feel like your life is a sea of grey sameness, go pick something really hard and somewhat painful, and do that more. If you don’t know what to do, just ask yourself if you’ll end up cooler if you do it for a year. If yes, then do that.
If you’re just getting into being cooler and don’t know how, here are some good ones:
Lift weights, with a real program that you’re following.
Go volunteer at an animal shelter and try to increase community involvement.
Start a small online business and learn how to advertise.
Buy an old lawnmower and fix the engine.
Go to a language meet up every week and bring everyone homemade snacks.
It doesn’t matter what you specifically do, it just needs to challenge you. Please, force yourself to be less soft. I promise you, you’ll be so much happier.
With love from me to you,
Alec
I like this concept! It's funny, I've actually been thinking about something similar, lately, trying to work out how (if even possible) we as humans can achieve happiness when our brains are wired for survival. I'm not sure about the gage of a worthwhile pursuit being "coolness," though. While we are social creatures, coolness implies our value comes from social approval, which would therefore mean that happiness comes from social approval. But I understand what you're getting at—the satisfaction comes from the personal growth. (P.S. I added an em dash, just for you 😜)
Great minds think alike! Yeah, coolness was a loose gauge here haha. We should chat about it sometime though, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be cool and how it's the people who are the most internally defined and confident that everyone else chases after.