Michael Easter on Overcoming the Comfort Crisis

The Art of Manliness - Podcast Index

Michael Easter, a writer and professor known for his book The Comfort Crisis, discusses the necessity of embracing discomfort. He reveals how modern conveniences can hinder our mental and physical health. Easter shares his transformative experience participating in a challenging caribou hunt in Alaska, where he confronted intense hunger, solitude, and boredom. He delves into the Japanese concept of misogi, advocating for personal growth through facing life's difficulties, and highlights the evolutionary benefits of solitude and introspection.

Highlights

• Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
  Key takeaways:
  • Life can feel harder even though we've got it pretty good today because the human brain evolved to make relative comparisons.
  • Problem or comfort creep can make relative comparisons harder, leading to problems in our lives.
  • Marcus Elliott, a sports doctor, uses science and data to help NBA players prevent injuries and develop their skills.
  Transcript:
  Speaker 1
  Yeah.
  Speaker 2
  And that idea of like sense of meaning or purpose, you know, you hear people reporting how life just seems harder. Now it's like, ah, I'm just everyone's tired. I'm so tired. But it's like, you know, it's weird. It seems things feel harder, even though it's actually if you compare it to the whole length of human history, it's pretty easy. What do you think is going on there? Why does life feel harder even though we've got it pretty good today?
  Speaker 1
  Yeah, that's a great question. And there is a scientific reason for this actually. I talked to researchers at Harvard psychologists and there's this idea that the dorky name for it is called prevalence induced concept change. And I tend to think about it as problem or comfort creep. Essentially the human brain evolves to make relative comparisons. It's this brain mechanism that saved us energy. So we don't when something new is sort of introduced to our lives that improves our lives, we adapt to it. And we don't sort of look back and think, oh man, we're making great progress. This is great. We kind of look back at the last thing and think, oh man, now that's totally unacceptable to us. Basically what happens is we have as we have more comforts introduced to our lives, we don't necessarily become more satisfied with them. We just sort of lower our threshold for what we consider comfortable. This also applies to things like problems. So once we've solved the problem, we don't actually think in our brain, oh, I have fewer problems right now. We just go looking for the next problem to solve. So we sort of end up with the same number of problems except our new problems are progressively more hollow. So you can think about this as almost the science of first world problems. We keep on moving the dial into comfort and convenience and having everything done for us. And we don't think, oh man, 20 years ago, I didn't have a cell phone. Wow, this is amazing. Instead it's like, man, Instagram has crashed. This is the worst thing ever. We freak out, right? This is like put at scale to everything in our lives.
  Speaker 2
  All right, so yeah, doing hard stuff can put some first world problems in perspective. So in your quest to like, you know, figure out, explore the science of being uncomfortable. And one of the first guys you talk to is this sports doctor. He works with a lot of pro athletes, NBA athletes, NFL stars to help them prevent injuries. But he's also got this idea that he took from Japanese culture called missogies. So he tells about this, the sports doctor and his idea of missogies.
  Speaker 1
  Yeah, so this guy's name is Marcus Elliott. He's a far out character. So he's a Harvard MD and he decides he doesn't want to be a doctor. He's going to go into sports science. And his first job is with the Patriots. They were at the time this is in the early 2000s. They have this crazy high hamstring injury rate. It was like 21 a year. And he applied, you know, real science to sports, which hadn't really been done before. And he dropped their injury rate to like three year. Then he was like a performance director for the for the MLB. And now he has his own facility where he has contracts with the NBA. So basically every NBA player incoming NBA player comes through there and he does all this really technical scientific stuff where he tracks their movement patterns and, you know, Applies it to this big algorithm. And he can basically tell you, okay, you have this specific movement pattern. When we see that in a player, that means the player usually will have a, say, 60% chance of tearing an ACL that season. But he can also tell you like, hey, this is a skill you're really good at compared to everyone else. Let's develop that because we think it could help your game. So I told you all that to basically tell you this guy is obviously very into science and data, et cetera. But he also knows that, you know, not everything that improves not only athletes, but humans in general can be measured. And so he started doing this thing that he calls Musogi and it's based off this Japanese myth. It's essentially a big physical challenge and conducted in nature. And there are only two rules. And the rules are that it must be truly difficult, which he measures essentially by saying you should have a 50-50 shot of finishing it, true 50-50 shot. And then the second rule is that you can't die. And that part's pretty straightforward, right? So and ideally, the challenge is a bit kooky. So for example, one year him and some athletes, they got this 85-pound rock and they walked it five miles underwater in the Santa Barbara channel. And then they've also done stuff like, okay, we're going to strap, pack, store our back, we're going to drive out to the mountains and we're just going to pick the farthest peak we can See and we're going to try and hike to it in a day. They've done things like they stand up paddleboard across the Santa Barbara channel after only having stand up paddleboarded a few times. So the whole idea here is that you're putting yourself in a position doing something physical in nature that is going to be very truly challenging for you where you only have a 50% shot Of making it. And what he's trying to do is mimic these past challenges that we used to face as we were evolving. You know, as humans evolved, we had to do true challenges in nature all the time. And these were things that our environment would usually naturally show us. So this could be things like having to go on a big hunt or maybe you're trying to migrate down to your summering grounds and you're going over a pass and like a gnarly storm hits. Maybe it's a tiger lurking in the bushes. Nowadays, we don't face these type of challenges. And back in our past, when we would go through these, we would sort of learn something about ourselves and dig deep and become a more confident and confident person. But nowadays, we don't really have challenges. Like you can never be challenged in life and you can still have plenty of food, you'll have a comfortable home, you can probably have a decent job, you have a family, which seems totally Fine and it is, but at the same time, let's say like you have this, you know, big potential that's this big circle. Well, it's like most people just live in this sort of dinner plate size circle within that. They never really go out and see what exists on the edges of their potential. And by not having any idea of like what's out on those edges, you really miss a lot in life and you miss learning something about yourself that can really help you in life. So he believes that by doing these things like the so he, you kind of have this innate evolutionary machinery that gets triggered when you go out and you do these hard things and you really Explore the edges of your comfort zone. Time 0:06:18