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

by Michael Easter

“The reduction of life expectancy is a very serious indicator that means there are many underlying factors that are undermining well-being,” he said. “I think that external conditions may be improving in the United States.” He pointed out that our economy is strong and that we have many opportunities and creature comforts. “But the internal conditions in the United States may not be. Because well-being is really a by-product of the interaction between a person’s external and internal conditions. And you can become very brittle and make fatalistic decisions without your internal conditions well maintained.” His work shows that happiness has less to do with external comforts than many Westerners think. And Western scholars agree. Researchers at Stanford noted, “An extraordinary finding that’s been replicated over and over is that once you get past the 25 percent or so poorest countries on earth, where the only question is survival and subsistence, there is no relationship between gross national product, per capita income, any of those things, and levels of happiness.”