Comfort

Looking back, I realize that all the times in my life where I've had real, meaningful change and development have been times where I've been somewhere in transition, somewhere foreign and out of the usual, or somewhere genuinely uncomfortable. I never realize it at the moment; I'm always cold, hot, exhausted, dirty, and focusing on nothing more than how long and how much effort it's going to take to get back to somewhere with a bed and a cheeseburger. That is all I can think about, because I don't have the in-the-moment attention style of Virginia Woolf, but a results-based way of viewing the world. If I slipped into a conscious willing of discomfort, then it would be the solution, but would also go against the deep grain of human nature.

Humans are the first sedentary creatures, and this gives us unique problems like technology and philosophy that no other species has the "luxury" for. Our stone age ancestors used our drive for comfort as a necessity. Wanting shelter, food, and fire fueled our drive for them, and those who could get it built upon their life, evolution, and success for centuries until we had taken care of our basic necessities and started building inventions and civilizations. But once we've reached our "modern" level of development, our quest for comfort becomes our downfall. The best example of this is widespread obesity, especially in this country. Early humans ate all they could get their hands on, always bingeing because they didn't know where their next meal would come from. As we started to lock down our basics, we developed agriculture and domestication, now to the point of our modern food industry. We don't have to hunt and gather anymore, but we still eat as if it were our last meal for a long time.

Sedentary culture means that we have the ability to sit down and write about things like this, and that there are things like this to write about in the first place.

But what am I going to have to do to attune myself to a life of voluntary discomfort and basic urgency? I already recognize its value after the fact, seek out these experiences before the fact, and miss them when I'm full, cushioned, and bored. The last piece in the tetrad is presentist, conscious actualization. I have no choice but to be up to the challenge.

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I was just reading an introduction to Moby Dick, and it had a quote from the book:

"The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality;... With all her might she crowds all sail off shore... seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!"

Herman Melville said in one metaphor what it took me an entire page to get across.

Or Thoreau, in Walden, in just one sentence:

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. "