Name: Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis
Uploaded: 2021-05-11T18:18:48.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Michael Easter on The Comfort Crisis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-11. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- What made you decide to write about comfort?
Isn't comfort a good thing, Michael?
What is going on?
- Well-- - You have a problem with comfort?
The comfort crisis, is it really a crisis?
- I argue that it is a crisis.
One, I don't have a problem with comfort.
I do have a problem with always being comfortable,
always leaning into comfort, which is what we're doing now.
- Yeah. - Right, so if you think
of the average person's daily life,
they wake up in the soft bed, temperature-controlled home,
they shuffle over to the microwave,
microwave of breakfast burrito, right,
that came in from who knows where
and is made with who knows what,
and then it's like, I go to work, I drive to work,
I sit behind this screen all day.
I don't have to move at all or put any effort into this day,
and then it's back to bed in front of the TV,
and you just rinse and repeat that.
At no point in daily life, I would argue,
are people really challenged or really uncomfortable anymore,
like we were in our past.
- Some people, of course. - Some people.
- There's, David Goggins is still alive and well.
- Yes, David Goggins is still alive. - He's running right now.
- And so he's like the type of person,
you see what happens when you start to push against that,
right, when you kind of have this moment where you go,
maybe I'm a little too comfortable,
and you start to sort of investigate,
okay, what is it with discomfort?
How can I get into some discomfort,
and what can that do for me?
And then at the extreme end of that is Goggins.
- Yeah.
Well, it's for folks that just,
like, say if you work in an office,
and this is how you make a living,
and you have to do that commute,
and there's no other options,
and this is what you do.
Like, for them to hear this,
they're like, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so what?
What now?
- Well, I mean, the answer is not to totally overhaul
your lifestyle, right?
I mean, we have amazing lives right now.
The fact that we don't have to go out and hunt for food,
or put physical effort into every day, is great.
But at the same time, I think,
and I argue in the book, The Comfort Crisis,
that we need these moments that push back at us,
and we need to sort of investigate these discomforts
that we used to face in our evolutionary past.
So for example, two, that's the percent of people
who take the stairs when there's the choice of--
- Two percent?
- Two percent, people who take the stairs
when there's the choice of an escalator.
70% of people, more than 70% now,
are overweight or obese.
20, only 20% of hunger, sorry,
only 20% of eating is actually driven
by physiological hunger.
80% of it is just, I'm bored.
It's noon, I guess I'll eat, or I'm stressed out, right?
We exercise more, we exercise 14 times less
than our ancestors nowadays.
- Our ancestors, just by virtue of trying to survive, you mean?
- Yeah, exactly.
- Yeah, so they didn't exercise, right?
Like our hunter-gatherer, they never did chin-ups.
- Exactly, that was life to them.
- Yeah, they just were trying to get by.
- Yeah, and we spend 95% of our time indoors as well.
And we know that there's benefits to getting out
and moving more, we know there's benefits
to being outside.
We also know that there's benefits to truly
being challenged in life.
It's like I said before, you can basically
never be challenged as you go through life
in a real sort of fundamental way.
And you'll probably have a decent life.
But if you think about potential and human potential,
let's say that human potential is this big circle
around us, right?
Now, most of us live in this sort of dinner-sized place.
We never go out and explore the edges of our potential
by trying to get uncomfortable and doing things
that are maybe a little outside of our comfort zone.
We can just kind of exist in this sort of soft space
that we've created for ourselves right now.
And of course, there are people who get out
and into those edges, like the Goggins of the world,
like the Cam Haynes of the world.
But I think most people don't really go out
and see what they're capable of.
- No, I don't think anybody's gonna push back
against this book.
- You don't?
- No, I don't.
Which creates kind of a dilemma for you.
Is there comfort in just writing about discomfort, right?
Is there a debate here?
'Cause I don't think there is.
I mean, I think what you're saying is like irrefutable.
I don't think anybody can say,
well, there's nothing wrong with being sedentary
and having your body turn into jello.
Well, there's nothing wrong with living a boring life
with no stress at all and, well, stress,
but mental stress, no actual physical adversity to overcome,
which stresses out the body but actually relaxes the mind,
which is, that's what people are missing, right?
That's the, when you actually physically exert yourself,
it actually calms the mind.
And I think there's probably a direct correlation,
although I haven't done any studies.
I would imagine there's a direct correlation
between physical inactivity and mental depression.
I would have to imagine that there's at least
some crossover there.
Yeah, there absolutely is.
I think that exercise, the studies show,
they grow the, it grows the hippocampus,
which is an area that tends to be shrunken
in people who have depression.
So this is why the APA now advocates that
psychiatrists recommend exercise to a lot of their patients.
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