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

by Michael Easter

Nearly a third of us now have diabetes or prediabetes. More than 40 million Americans have mobility problems that hinder them from getting from point A to B. Heart disease kills a quarter of us. These are all medical issues that were essentially nonexistent until the twentieth century. People today are also suffering more and more from diseases of despair: depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide. Overdose deaths in the last two decades are up more than threefold, and the average American is now more likely to kill themselves than ever before. Evidence suggests that suicide didn’t happen throughout nearly all of human history. My high school graduating class of 400, for example, has lost anywhere from 1 to 3 people each year to overdoses or suicides since we earned our diplomas. These diseases of despair caused the US life expectancy to fall in 2016, 2017, and 2018. There hasn’t been a life span drop like this since the period from 1915 to 1918, when World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic united in a symphony of death. So, yes, we don’t have to deal with discomforts like working for our food, moving hard and heavy each day, feeling deep hunger, and being exposed to the elements. But we do have to deal with the side effects of our comfort: long-term physical and mental health problems. We lack physical struggles, like having to work hard for our livelihoods. We have too many ways to numb out, like comfort food, cigarettes, alcohol, pills, smartphones, and TV. We’re det...