Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis

What made you decide to write about comfort? Isn't comfort a good thing, Michael? What is going on? You have a problem with comfort? The comfort crisis? Is it really a crisis? I argue that it is a crisis. One, I don't have a problem with comfort. I do have a problem with always being comfortable, always leaning into comfort, which is what we're doing now. Yeah. So if you think of the average person's daily life, they wake up in the soft bed, temperature-controlled home. They shuffle over to the microwave, microwave a breakfast burrito that came in from who knows where and is made with who knows what. And then it's like, I go to work, I drive to work, I sit behind this screen all day. I don't have to move at all or put any effort into this day. And then it's back to bed in front of the TV. And you just rinse and repeat that. At no point in daily life, I would argue, are people really challenged or really uncomfortable anymore? Like we were in our past? Some people, of course. David Goggins is still alive and well. Yes, David Goggins is still alive. He's right now. And so he's like the type of person, you see what happens when you start to push against that, right? When you kind of have this moment where you go, maybe I'm a little too comfortable and you start to sort of investigate, okay, what is it with discomfort? How can I get into some discomfort and what can that do for me? And then at the extreme end of that is Goggins. Yeah. Well, it's for folks that just like, say if you work in an office and this is how you make a living and you have to do that commute and there's no other options and this is what you do. Like for them to hear this, they're like, yeah, yeah. Okay. So what? What now? Well, I mean, the answer is not to totally overhaul your lifestyle, right? I mean, we have amazing lives right now. The fact that we don't have to go out and hunt for food or put physical effort into every day is great. But at the same time, I think, and I argue in the book, the comfort crisis, that we need these moments that push back at us and we need to sort of investigate these discomforts that we used to face in our evolutionary past. So for example, two, that's the percent of people who take the stairs when there's the choice of 2% people who take the stairs when there's a choice of an escalator. 70% of people, more than 70% now are overweight or obese. Only 20% of hunger, sorry, only 20% of eating is actually driven by physiological hunger. 80% of it is just, I'm bored. It's noon, I guess I'll eat or I'm stressed out. We exercise more, we exercise 14 times less than our ancestors nowadays. Our ancestors just by virtue of trying to survive, you mean? Yeah, exactly. So they didn't exercise, right? Like our hunter-gatherer, they never did chin-ups. Exactly. That was life to them. Yeah, exactly. They were just trying to get by. Yeah, and we spend 95% of our time indoors as well. And we know that there's benefits to getting out and moving more. We know there's benefits to being outside. We also know that there's benefits to truly being challenged in life. It's like I said before, you can basically never be challenged as you go through life in a real sort of fundamental way. And you'll probably have a decent life. But if you think about potential and human potential, let's say that human potential is this big circle around us, right? Now, most of us live in this sort of dinner plate sized place. We never go out and explore the edges of our potential by trying to get uncomfortable and doing things that are maybe a little outside of our comfort zone. We can just kind of exist in this sort of soft space that we've created for ourselves right now. And of course, there are people who get out and into those edges like the Goggins of the world, like the Cam Haines of the world. But I think most people don't really go out and see what they're capable of. No, I don't think anybody's going to push back against this book. Yeah. No, I don't, which creates kind of a dilemma for you. Is there comfort in just writing about discomfort? Right? Is there a debate here? Because I don't think there is. I mean, I think what you're saying is like irrefutable. I don't think anybody can say, well, there's nothing wrong with being sedentary and having your body turn into jello. Well, there's nothing wrong with living a boring life with no stress at all and well, stress, but mental stress, no actual physical adversity to overcome, which stresses out the body, but actually relaxes the mind, which is, which is, that's the, that's what people are missing, right? That's the, that's the, when you actually physically exert yourself, it actually calms the mind. And I think there's probably direct correlation. Although I haven't done any studies, I would imagine there's a direct correlation between physical inactivity and mental depression. I would, I would have to imagine that there's at least some crossover there. Yeah, there absolutely is. I think that exercise, the study show that grow the, it grows the hippocampus, which is an area that tends to be shrunken in people who have depression. So this is why the APA now advocates that psychiatrists recommend exercise to a lot of their patients. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.