How to Conquer Our Addiction to Comfort

When you read what I’m about to say, your first thought will probably be something like, “Oh fuck you, Will.  Eat every dick in the world and play in traffic, you dramatic buzzkill asshole.”

But try to hear me out, because this is important.  Here it is:

You don’t have a right to be comfortable.

Stop rolling your eyes!  I told you to hear me out!

Okay, let’s back up a little bit, and get around to what I mean by this.

Usually, when we turn to comfort, we’re either (whether intentionally or not):

1) Not taking other people into consideration
2) Not doing anything productive or
3) Not existing as a part of reality.

Which is okay.   You’re allowed to be a selfish, lazy douche every once in a while.  Every vice ever created–comfort included–is completely fine in conscious, controlled moderation, and all of them are horrendous when we become addicted to them.

And that right there is the problem: Humans have always liked comfort, sure.  But because the entire universe full of comforts like echo chambers, Oreo delivery, and naked ladies now fits into our pockets, we have unprecedented, instant access to every comfort we could ever want.

And as a result, our love of comfort has become a culture-wide addiction.

The problem with any addiction is that it becomes a singular pursuit.  When you’re addicted to meth, that becomes your life.  As long as you’re high, everything is fine.  No longer do you need to worry about getting in shape, working towards your dreams, trying to find love, helping the world, stopping your toddler from playing in traffic or, you know, quitting meth.  You’ve achieved the feeling you’re seeking, and that’s all that matters to you.

That’s exactly how an addiction fucks up your life, and it’s exactly what has happened with us and comfort.  Whenever anything is slightly difficult, or unpleasant, we turn to our comfort sources like pacifiers, because we now have 10 billion types of pacifiers all around us at the click of a button.

Because of our newfound access to comfort, we’re never forced to toughen up.  We’re never forced to be bored.  We’re never forced to be uncomfortable.

As a result, our addiction to comfort has rendered us ignorant to the rest of the world, the other side of the political spectrum, and anything beyond what a headline says.  It has made us fat, lazy, single, poor, and unaccomplished.  It is responsible for nearly every ongoing global catastrophe that we decide we don’t want to hear about and therefore do nothing about–from the destruction of the human living environment, to the national debt, to the growing usage of the word “YAAASS.”

So I say this with a dead straight face, and without the slightest hint of hyperbole–our addiction to comfort is a virus.  It’s a nation-wide epidemic, and if we don’t start treating it as such, and we continue down the path I just described, we will be unbelievably fucked in the future–both as individuals, and as a world.

Now you may be thinking, “I’m not addicted to comfort.  What does that even mean?  It’s not ripping my life, or society apart.  Fuck this guy and his pale drama queen ass.  I’ll be as comfortable as I damn well please.”

By now, most of you have learned about political bubbles.  If your behavior indicates any political preference online, sites like Facebook will surround you with news sources that reinforce what you want to hear, meaning you get no news or opinions from people who don’t already agree with you, unless you actively seek it out.

What does this have to do with comfort?  Well, ask yourself: why don’t we seek out opposing news and opinions?

The possibility of being wrong makes us so uncomfortable, that opposing views become our own personal horror movies.  It’s like we’re being chased by Michael Myers, but instead of holding a knife, he’s holding a sign that says, “Actually…”.

Truthfully, we’re kind of thankful to Facebook for telling us what we want to hear over and over.  The bubbles ultimately exist because we want them to.

The results of this are, of course, disastrous.

Avoiding the other side prevents you from hearing things from a perspective that might report on something you won’t otherwise hear, or make a valid point.  It prevents you from hearing how somebody else is processing things, or where they’re going wrong, thereby preventing you from really understanding where they’re coming from.

This makes us believe more and more that “the other side” is a bunch of stupid assholes, because that’s the most comfortable way to process, “Somebody disagrees with me.”

It divides us, keeps us ignorant, and makes Thanksgiving even worse than we thought a holiday based around dry turkey, cranberry sauce, and genocide could possibly be.

But make no mistake–our bubbles go far beyond Facebook algorithms.  We also carry our bubbles around with us at all times.  Your bubble can be Candy Crush, your cable news network of choice, or running away with your ears covered screaming, “LA LA LA LA,” but we all have something we turn to in order to avoid parts of reality we want to censor.

People bitch about college safe spaces, but they are simply the most literal version of a universal problem.  Everyone–of all genders, colors, ages, and levels of fuckability–retreats to their safe space (or bubble) when they’re uncomfortable.

And by the way, this goes way beyond politics.  We use our bubbles to deflect everything from someone discussing our faults, to being proven wrong, to an Instagram post about some girl with abs doing well in life.  We all have our things.

We have accepted as a society now that if something isn’t comfortable for you–if it’s too offensive, degrading, boring, contrary, or has too many references to foreskin–the solution for you is to get away from it.  Simply avoid this section of reality–even if it means you’re not acknowledging  the fact that your boyfriend constantly smells like strange perfume and fuckmist.

As a result, instead of fixing personal or worldwide problems, we watch these problems deflect off of our bubbles and collide with the rest of the world.  They melt ice caps, balloon debt, and render us unable to evaluate our lives until we’re already eating dead rats in a dumpster.

And it all comes back to our addiction to comfort.  It comes back to the idea that we feel entitled to feel nice and cozy all the time, and so we retreat to our bubbles guilt-free whenever anything threatening happens, and solve zero problems.

We laugh about having bad attention spans all the time.  “Lol, I have ADD–oh look a squirrel!  Haha!”

(Which by the way–A+ comedy, buddy!  Terrific!  Hysterical every single time!)

We’re completely bombarded with stimulation every day, and as a result, we have zero tolerance for anything that doesn’t stimulate us.  This makes explanation, nuance, and often just basic reading really fucking hard for us.

Because we suck more at taking in basic information, we receive outlandish, exaggerated, and disgustingly oversimplified information now, because that is the only way our spoiled ass brains will pay attention to it.

This is why news has become infotainment–because you assholes won’t watch it otherwise (and by you assholes, I mean me).

This is why there is an epidemic of “THIS IS WHAT THE HEADLINE SAID SO THERE IS MY OPINION LOL I AM TERRIBLE.”  Because getting into any details at all is hard and therefore uncomfortable.

This is why pseudoscience is able to be passed around–because there is no fucking way any lay person is reading an actual study, so they’re stuck reading their echo chamber’s absurd interpretation of it.

It’s why cable news tries to make every news story ever feel like it’s life or death–because otherwise it won’t stimulate you and you’ll fucking ignore it.  We need something to freak us out in order for us to pay attention to it.

It’s why, in many ways, we know less than ever despite having more access to information than ever.

It all comes from the fact that if something doesn’t stimulate us, somewhere deep inside, we think it therefore doesn’t deserve our attention, and we feel no sense of responsibility to make that extra effort to shove it into our brains.  As a result, our brains are filled with snippets and headlines, and almost no facts.

It all comes down to our addiction to comfort.

This is also why we suck at adulthood.  We’re the most anxious generation ever despite having great lives, because we’re so concealed from reality that as soon as some version of it outside of our bubble hits us, it’s devastating.

It’s also why we don’t take action enough–be it political, professional, or personal.  We’d rather be comfortable than make progress, or do something to effect change, or tell someone how we really feel.

Sitting is just so much nicer than all of that, you know?

So let’s keep a tally.  So far our comfort addiction wrecks our ability to take in information, helps us avoid interacting with reality, enables our cowardice, makes adulthood feel unattainable, keeps us ignorant to everything that wouldn’t immediately appeal to us, makes us less tolerant of real diversity, and makes us lazy, shiftless, pile-of-human-garbage assholes.

And I’ve got some bad news for you.  The longer that we do nothing with respect to the virus we’re all infected with, the worse it gets, and we’ve already been doing nothing for a long time.

So we’re all pretty fucking sick right now.

The good news is that until it leads to the earth bursting into flames, or the country being blown up (which it eventually will), we still have time to fix it.

But we need to get the fuck going.  Let’s look at how to do that.

1) Acknowledge the problem in yourself and others.

The next time someone talks about loving to watch Jimmy Fallon play Monopoly with Gwyneth Paltrow because “It helps me just forget about my problems,” instead of enabling their addiction, consider saying something like, “You forget about your problems?  That sounds like a terrible idea.  What is wrong with you?”  I’m not going to say you should also spit on them in disgust, but feel free to improvise however you see fit.

And when we find ourselves avoiding a news story because it’s bothering us, or turning to the dog Instagram for 30 minutes because we were bored for five seconds, or having a trash-TV-a-thon because we’re tired after a long day, we need to recognize what we’re doing to ourselves, and that we’re making our lives worse.

2. Ditch the Pacifiers.

Look, I know I’m the ten billionth person who has said this, but we need to hear it, so here it is: we have to put the phones down.

We fucking have to, dude.  Not all the time.  You don’t have to not have a Twitter account, or not text your 2 am booty call, or not post dank memes on Facebook for your grandma to unintentionally like.  You just can’t turn to it like a pacifier at the slightest hint of boredom or sadness.

This goes for all of our pacifiers–whether it’s Twitter, gossip, or titties.  You have to, several times a day, be reaching for your comfort source, fucking stop yourself, and live your life in our uncomfortable land of awkward silences, boredom, and…ugh…human interaction.

Get used to this as a part of reality again.  Accept that you have to go through this, and it will start to not seem so terrible.

3. Force yourself to pay attention.

Our attention muscles have turned to fucking Jell-O, but they can be repaired if we put our brains through a little bit of boot camp.

A lot of this is just comes down to reading more, paying attention to the real world, and actively listening to people. When we practice existing in reality more, we’ll get better at it.

4. Change Your Perspective.

The answer to your problems is not in what feels good, but what is best for you.  So instead of approaching each moment with, “What do I want?” you must instead ask, “What would be best for me?”  Seek out what would be the best, smartest course, instead of the course that feels good on your tongue, in your brain, or on the tip of your dong.

This is how we attack our entitlement.  We hammer the idea into our head that life is not about us being comfortable.  It’s about working hard, doing good, and giving a shit, and tossing in a pinch of comfort when we really need it, so that we can get back out there and kick some more ass.

We can rebuild ourselves.  We have the technology.   The cure for this virus is already in our own heads.  Our ability to understand, think more, and not become fused to our couches is within our grasp, and it starts with reminding ourselves of one very simple fact:

You don’t have a right to be comfortable.