The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

by Michael Easter

Take, for example, someone posting a selfie to Instagram. The person is clearly motivated to want to know how her followers will react to her photo. Then Instagram triggers her with a notification that someone has commented on her photo. Did they like it, or is it a snarky comment? She then has the ability to check the comment immediately. She can’t not open her phone. And then, of course, she ends up checking her likes and comments all day, each time falling into an Instagram blackout where she scrolls her feed to find perfectly edited photos from a frenemy or conspiratorial posts from some glue sniffer she knew back in high school. All the while she’s also seeing a ton of advertising, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is worth about $100 billion. A rule: If you’re not paying for a digital service, YOU are what the company sells. The corporation games the system to take as much of your attention as it can in order to sell it to the highest advertorial bidder.