The Comfortable Life is Killing You

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.”

We ravage every quiet moment with noise—podcasts, social media, the nonstop churn of news—anything to avoid stillness. Silence has become our nemesis, so we desecrate it with a constant stream of distraction. We scroll and consume until our minds are overloaded and our spirit feels mutilated, hollowed out by the very content meant to keep us entert... See more

Jung warned that if the individual is discounted and subordinated by society, he is vulnerable to the influence of the state and other mass movements to manipulate him into serving their devious agendas.

“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”

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

A 2018 Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics study noted increasing diagnoses of anxiety and depression in young kids who are often treated with a regimen of pharmaceuticals.

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

In the words of Dr. Tom Finucane:

“In our pursuit of better living we’ve allowed comfort to calcify our natural movements and strengths. Without conscious discomfort and purposeful exercise—a forceful push against comfort creep—we’ll only continue to become weaker and sicker.”

Carl Jung, one of the most prolific psychotherapists of the 20th century, remarked that about a third of his cases were suffering from “no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.”

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.