2024 Book Review #8: The Comfort Crisis

A TMI review …

I don’t usually read predictable, research backed, clearly written “self help” books, much less purchase them, as I find these can usually be summarized in just a few lines, and that artistry, originality and creativity I admire and seek out in books are often missing.

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self was given to me by my mother this past Christmas.

I asked her why she gave it to me but she hasn’t responded yet. If it’s not of her current concern, her emails tend to be fewer and further in between these days.

Does she believe I need to reclaim something I used to have, and if so, for what purposes?

I’ll be visiting soon in the south of France so I could ask her. I often think of my childhood as a suicideless Suicide Virgins, where I was barely allowed to walk a few minutes away from our house in a comfortable neighborhood in Washington D.C., due to some still unresolved fear she seems to have of the dangers for young people to venture. Maybe there was unprocessed trauma from her own childhood I haven’t exactly figured out yet.

As a teenager, I was allowed to go to one party a year. Doing anything fun and social outside of sports was usually forbidden. Television viewing was severely limited, until as the youngest in the family I was able to relax those rules.

I wanted to study literature in the south of France where I got accepted to do so but was told I should go study journalism in Canada instead, closer to the home front.

After studying some more, working and being unemployed in Paris for a few years, still just a hop across the ocean, I never felt freer I must say than when I finally set out to go live in Indonesia, so far away, so many time zones away that I could redefine myself on my own terms, with my own mistakes, follies and self motivated pursuits.

During those years of eating nasi goreng and living in flop houses, tasting cobra’s blood, blacking out on a bungee jump and nearly drowning while surfing, living a lot of what is recommended in this book actually, such as avoiding processed food, being in tune with nature and rediscovering full on boredom, such as having to wait for hours under a torrential downpour until the city bus showed up, and many other facets of life we bubble wrap ourselves from in our temperature regulated, phone addicted, car driving, time saving, comfortable lives many of us seek out here in the US of A.

Having kids though, including losing Zizou to the sky, and having a second round of two boys, is far from comfortable, as children do have that inherent magic of being wild. Sometimes I wonder though if the life I’ve constructed and fully settled into here out west in Reno, Nevada, is too comfortable for them? As they grow older, I’ll have to think on that one. Will I at some point reach my comfortability breaking point?

In Comfort Crisis, beyond the running visualization of to the edge of the world daring hunts and voyages, there is academic backing and then daily basics which are good reminders, such as not putting earbuds in during walks to allow the mind to reset and think more creatively.

In a YouTube video promoting the book, the writer, a former contributor for Men’s Health magazine, has in the visible background books by Hunter Thompson, one of my favorite writers, who to me has more to offer in terms of inspiration and an uneven auteur voice railing against the absurdities of the structures we impose upon ourselves.

For the pursuit of happiness though, and not committing suicide as Thompson tragically did, the Comfort Crisis is a much better guide.

As I write these lines, I hear my two young ones screaming at each other, so I will recommend they go play outside, and walk with me for at least a few minutes as the sun sets along the railroad tracks right behind our home in Reno.