The Comfortable Life is Killing You

If you’re constantly fleeing friction, you’re dying.

There’s no hope for a fruitful existence if you refuse to face the inevitable uncertainties of life. The more we shield ourselves from uncertainty, the more vulnerable we become. Each safeguard deepens the very void we seek to escape.

In taming the world, we have tamed ourselves

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946):

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by ... See more

Anxiety, as Rollo May also pointed out, “is not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence.”

Progress has delivered everything except the will to endure it.

Absorbed in comfort, we are restless. Drowning in excess, we are hollow. The statistics confirm what our souls already know: despair has metastasized, anxiety has become our natural state, and in the absence of real suffering, we have made a spectacle of our own discontent.

Man has achieved his present position by being the most aggressive and enterprising creature on earth. And now he has created a comfortable civilization, he faces an unexpected problem... The comfortable life lowers man's resistance, so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth... The comfortable life causes spiritual decay.

Studies show that physical stressors like exercise or fasting trigger adaptive responses in our cells, boosting resilience and longevity. Mice exposed to mild stressors (e.g., temperature changes) outlived their pampered counterparts. Apply that to humans: a 2021 study in Nature Aging linked regular physical challenge—hiking, running, lifting weigh... See more

Purpose emerges from striving against resistance, not from settling into ease. Get uncomfortable, uncivilize a bit, push your body, and do hard things, mentally and physically.