The Curse of Comfort
If you wanted to Harry Potter one of your enemies, “May you live an extraordinarily comfortable life” would be a great curse. Granted, it doesn’t sound as terrible as, “May your nether regions be perpetually itchy” or “May you become obsessed with dressing up like the other sex,” but it’s still far worse than most people would think. Once you become comfortable enough, you become unable to bear hardships, lazy, unaccomplished and you stop putting in effort. All you want to do is lay back, relax, and keep that mildly pleasurable feeling you get from vegging out on your couch and being distracted going for as long as possible. Your goals? Dreams? Heck, even just those things you always wanted to do? Done, unless you always wanted to sit around doing nothing in your own home. In fact, it may even be worse than that. Let’s discuss a controversial personal theory of mine.
Have you ever heard that birth rates are plunging all across the globe? It’s true:
In fact, in many countries, including the United States, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate, meaning that we’re having so few kids the population is dropping. Many people have speculated about what’s causing this and you can even read about that in more detail here at Culturcidal.
However, I have one overriding theory that explains why we’re seeing this happen, particularly in countries that are becoming more prosperous. We could sum that whole theory up in a word: Comfort.
How could comfort be causing it?
Well, believe it or not, many decades ago athletes were encouraged NOT to have sex the day before a big game because it was believed that sex would sap some of their vital energies and that would mean that when it came right down to it, they wouldn’t be able to go as fast and perform as hard when it counted in the field. Well, legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel was asked if he told his players not to have sex before a big game and he said, “The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It's that they stay out all night looking for it.”
That’s the thing about sex in particular and relationships in general; it takes a lot of effort. It’s slogging through a dating app, getting a date, having them no-show you, having a person who seems interested disappear because they’re talking to 7 different people and aren’t that into any of them, going on another date and having it suck, then finally having a good date. But a good date doesn’t mean you’re in a relationship. You have to go on many dates. You have to skip your favorite restaurant to go eat at one they like better. You help them move their furniture into a new apartment. You have that awkward meeting with their parents. You have to pretend to care when they tell you about something dumb that happened at work. You’re doing something with them when you’d rather be at home. It goes on and on and on… and don’t get me wrong, there are lots of great parts to being with someone, too, which is why you put up with all that. That’s the nature of relationships. It’s give and take. It’s taking someone else’s needs and putting them on an almost even playing field with your own. Heck, at times, what they want even has to come first.
If that’s true for relationships, it’s doubly true for kids. At least until a certain age, kids can’t survive without you and long after that they desperately need your attention and guidance. Most dogs live somewhere around 10 years, and you can leave them home by themselves when you go to work. You go to jail if you do that with a young kid and they’re typically going to be alive long after you’re gone.
Of course, a career can take up EVEN MORE time than a lover or a child, particularly if you work for yourself. Do you know many times I stayed up late working, put in time on my vacation, or skipped doing something fun to deal with some kind of crisis when I ran my own business? I can’t say for sure, but I can tell you it happened a lot – and that’s pretty typical. If you want to get ahead in the business world, you are going to have to work your butt off even when you don’t feel like it.
The same goes for any type of athletic endeavor. Deadlifting? Squatting? Moving heavy weight? It hurts. Running a marathon is painful. Martial arts? Football? Gymnastics? Getting good at any of them is anything but comfortable. Saving money, maintaining friendships, and accomplishing… well, ANYTHING, it’s going to be UNCOMFORTABLE.
Life is full of unpleasant conversations and things you don’t want to do. Big things like quitting a job, putting down a pet, and ending a relationship. Little things like eating steak and broccoli when you want pizza. Getting up early when you don’t get enough sleep or going to a funeral.
For Americans today, including all of us, there is nothing easier than falling into a late-stage capitalistic, have it your way, enjoying yourself to death lifestyle where you don’t even have to leave your house to enjoy delicious food, be wildly entertained, and even get some sexual stimulation via pornography or romance novels. Unfortunately, as pleasant as the lifestyle can be in the moment, over the long haul, that way lies sadness, stagnation, and failure.
All the things most worth having in life lay on the other side of discomfort, struggle, and suffering. That’s why it’s a good idea to do things sometimes JUST BECAUSE they’re difficult. That’s why it’s a good idea to do hard things. That’s why it’s a good idea to build some discomfort into your routine. If you can’t handle suffering, problems, hardships and most importantly, discomfort, you’re not going to have a good life.
Well said, John. And, since we’ve long past the time when more than a fraction of us care about the long term future of our country and western civilization, the million dollar question is what, if anything, we can do about it.