The Daily Stoic - Comfort is the Enemy | Michael Easter Teaches The Benefits of Struggle

Episode Date: March 22, 2025

The daily comforts and conveniences that make life ‘easier’ might be the very thing keeping you stuck. In today’s episode, Ryan sits down with bestselling author and journalist Michael Easter to explore the power of discomfort, the dangers of modern excess, and how ancient wisdom encourages seeking out struggle. They discuss the paradox of comfort, the psychology of scarcity, and why stepping outside of our routines can make life richer and more meaningful.Michael Easter has made a career of traveling the world to uncover practical ideas that help people live healthier, happier, and more remarkable lives. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Scarcity Brain, and The Comfort Crisis. 📚 Grab signed copies of  Scarcity Brain and The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/Follow Michael Easter on Instagram @Michael_Easter and X @Michael_Easter🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hiring Indeed is all you need. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think,

to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. One of my favorite shows of all time is The Office. It is not a show I have watched. It is a show I am continuing to watch.

You know, when I'm stressed or when I can't focus, I don't want to pick up some new series on Netflix or whatever. I like to just go back and watch sort of comfort television in the office has always been that for me. And one of my all time favorite episodes of the office is the safety training episode, which I think the safety training of the office happens because Michael Scott like kicks out the ladder

from beneath someone or something. And so it's both sides of the office, the upstairs and the downstairs, and they're sort of going over all these safety things. And anyways, one of my favorite scenes in it is where Daryl, the warehouse worker, is confronting Michael about what he calls his nerf life. It's one of my favorite scenes.

You know what, I'll let me just play this real fast. Daryl, I did not walk out in the middle of yours, so I- Yeah, but ours was real, Michael. Yes. That's what we've been trying to tell you, Mike. It's serious down there. We do dangerous stuff, man. This is shenanigans, foolishness, nerf ball. You live a sweet little nerfy life sitting on your biscuit, never having to risk it. And I think of that idea of like a nerf life, that we live these sort of soft sheltered cocoon lives.

And I mean, look, I'm sitting in a chair right now in my nice office, I write for a living. It is very easy to get comfortable. It is very easy to eliminate the things that make life difficult. And this might seem like success and it is obviously in some ways, huge success. Like people worked very hard.

I don't mean like I worked very hard to have this office. What I mean is like humanity worked very hard over thousands of years to win these small cumulative victories over the environment, over disease, over dysfunction, over parts of the human condition, right? And so it's wonderful that we have this. It's wonderful that we could get to a point

where we are spoiled, but we are spoiled nevertheless. And that's where today's guest comes in. This is someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for a very long time. I believe it was Peter Attia who first turned me on to his stuff. And then one of my earlier assistants and producers of the podcast, Jane Brady Knight,

told me that she was a big fan and asked if she could connect us. And I said, absolutely, I've read his books. And as it happened, I believe Michael blurbed Brent's Sara Gordo book, Ghost Town Living, which was a suggestion I made, because I think Brent's story about moving to a ghost town in the middle of nowhere and learning how to work

with your hands and in so many ways live without many of the creature comforts that we take for granted, chopping your own firewood, repairing your own stuff, cooking your own food. That's what Michael is talking about. Michael Easter, today's guest, is a journalist, a professor, the author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain. I've read both of those books,

so I was very excited to make today's episode happen. And I had on my notes to tell him the story of this office quote. And then we got sucked into the conversation, talked about other things. So I decided to save it for the intro. And then it occurs to me that I am pretty sure I referenced this very same episode

in another interview with the podcast guest, because I think coming out of the safety briefing, Michael is so humiliated that he tries to exaggerate the difficulties of his life, talking about, you know, depression and so forth. And I think that's what leads Michael up on the roof to like pretend to jump off to get attention. And he's talking about depression and Dwight goes, Michael, depression, isn't that another way of just saying bummed out? And I mentioned that in my episode with Rainn Wilson and he thought I was saying that,

not that I was quoting Michael Scott back to them, which was a surreal and funny experience. And then Rainn Wilson said, yeah, you look like someone who would watch The Office, which I thought was hilarious. So all that came full circle to today's episode. We're gonna talk about this silent enemy, comfort entitlement, lifestyle creep,

in a very awesome episode with the one and only Michael Easter. Enjoy. I was reading this profile of Janet Malcolm, you know, the journalist last night? Yeah, yeah. She wrote the journalist and the murderer. Yeah.

I haven't read it, but I'm familiar with her. Oh yeah, have you read that? No, I haven't. I'll give it to you in the bookstore. It's like the greatest. Yeah, I haven't read it, but I'm familiar with her. Oh yeah, have you read that? No, I haven't. I'll give it to you in the bookstore, it's like the greatest. Anyways, it was talking about how, like people would ask her to do things or blurb things, or you know, all the things you get asked,

and she would always just, if she didn't wanna do it, she'd just be like, nah, you know? And I was thinking about it because it's like, that's kind of uncomfortable, but so is doing shit you don't wanna do. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, you're gonna be uncomfortable either way. So like choose your discomfort.

And that part of like cultivating the just like, yeah, I'm okay, sort of being me and doing my own thing is to be better at stuff like that. Yeah, and I think that it depends on your personality. Yeah. Like I generally am a people pleaser. Yeah. I like to make people happy. I have a personality where I'm just kind of like, you know, a little bit goofy like, eh, smile. I like everyone too. Like I can't name a single person that I'm like, I really, really dislike that person. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean that I know on a, like I can see people on the internet and be like, I really, really dislike that person. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that I know on a like, I can see people on the Internet and be like, this person's a dipshit. But also I'm like, you know, I bet if I like sat down with this person, we would find some commonalities. We'd have a good time. Yeah. And so for me that yeah, that's hard. But I've had to say no is hard. Yeah. Saying no is hard. I've had to get better at it. Or just be like, hey, like, can't do that right now.

Well, especially because early on, you want to be asked to do something. The whole point is to get in a position where people ask you to do stuff. Totally. Yeah, the first one you're like, hell yeah, I will. Yeah. Who's reading this book?

Only your mom? Yeah, I'll blurb it. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and then you just realize, oh wait, there's a cost to all the stuff that you say yes to. Yeah, totally. Yeah, well, it's weird. It's weird because it feels like you're being rude,

which you are when you're like, no, I'm not gonna do that. But like, again, it's like sort of choose who you're gonna be rude to. Cause you have like, you're being rude to yourself, you're being rude to the things you like to do, you're being rude to your spouse, you're being rude to your kid. Like you're just deferring who you're being rude to. things you like to do. You're being rude to your spouse. You're being rude to your kid. Like, you're just deferring who you're being rude to.

That's a great point. And I think it's like very context dependent too, right? Yeah. If there's an author who has written a book that deals with, I don't know, adventures and lessons from it, like that feels like a good fit. But sometimes people are like, hey, I wrote this book on pet care.

Would you blurb it? And you're just like, why me? Yeah. You know? And so that makes it a little easier to say no. Yeah. It's tough though. Yeah, totally.

I'm sure you get a bajillion. Yeah. I think I'm better at just pretending I didn't see it. Yeah. Like just ignoring it. Yeah. You kind of have to. Yeah.

Sometimes that's easier than replying and saying no because- Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So did you work out this morning? Tiny bit in the hotel room. In the hotel room? In the hotel room. What do you do in a hotel room? I did rear foot elevated split squats.

I just did a lot of those and some planks, just quick. And then at the airport, I'll just walk around carrying my bags. I do that too. I feel like I cover a lot of ground inside airports. Like I'll walk like a couple of miles, just wait. Like I'm like, I can sit here and do nothing. Yes.

Or I could get a three mile walk in over the next 45 minutes. Dude, it is one of the greatest travel exercise hacks. To just walk around the airport. In the airport. Especially if you have a carry on or something. Yes. I've gotten like six, seven miles when I've had a long layover. Yeah.

Like I can sit in this lounge or in this uncomfortable chair and just like BS on the internet. Right. Or I can just walk. And the walking also, I think gives me ideas, right? Sure. And you observe, you see a lot of interesting things. So yeah, I think, gives me ideas, right? Sure. And you observe, you see a lot of interesting things. So yeah, I'm just 100%, like I'm an airport walker. Yeah, I think like, obviously,

beautiful walks in nature are great. And if you can walk around outside somewhere wonderful, you should do it. Yes. But I think walks around parking lots, walks in the airport, walks as you're just killing time are underrated and also really good. And you're still getting most of the benefits of like, it's the body being in motion, not the context of where it's in motion.

Yeah, it's doing most of the value for you. Right. If the context was the most important thing, running on a treadmill would not work. Right. Yeah. So like, it all adds up. And I've pointed people to studies that show just incidental physical activity, like non-exercise. So researchers call it NEET.

That type of activity, that can add up over the course of a day to 800 calories burned in studies. So it's really, to me, the way that I look at physical activity is that we basically invented exercise after the industrial revolution at scale, because like we engineer these jobs into our lives that are sedentary. We go, wait a minute, these people who sit all day,

they seem to be getting sick. And these people who don't sit all day, they don't get those same sicknesses. So what do we do? All right. What we'll do is we'll just we'll exercise like in this building on this on this rotating band. And you just run on that. And that's how we'll make that up, which fine exercise is good.

Better than nothing. Right. But I think that in the context of how humans evolved, we were just moving all day. And it all had purpose. It was intentional. And so I think trying to figure out, how can I just weave activity back into what I would already be doing?

How can I take this thing that I have to do and maybe make it a little bit harder, especially from a physical perspective? I think that adds up like crazy. Like even phone calls. If I have a work call and it doesn't have to be on video, it's like, I'm just gonna take it while walking. Yeah, of course.

That's what I do too. I would estimate I have walked thousands of miles in my life on the phone. It's amazing. It's not always best for the other person, but it's much better for me. You know what I mean? Like maybe the service isn't as good.

Maybe they would have preferred it to be on Zoom, but I don't wanna be on the phone at all. So if I'm gonna be on the phone, I'm gonna get something out of it. That's sort of how I think about it. Exactly. I do find that the conversation, I'm better at talking and walking.

Ideas are a little different. But to your point, yeah, if your service drops, the other person's annoyed. Or if you like walk past someone with a leaf blower, you know, it's just like leaf blowers are the bane of my existence, dude. I hate those things. Yeah, I don't like the nanny state,

but I am all for the banning of leaf blowers or the banning of gas leaf blowers. I think it would make, I don't think that we would miss that as this, first off, leaf blowers are stupid to begin with. You're just moving like biodegradable, natural things over here versus over there, or worse, you're blowing it into a plastic bag that you then wait for it another gas-powered thing to come pick up and take to a Special area it's just like so dumb if you think about it. Mm-hmm

But yeah, I think it would be nice if they went away And I think the problem too is and I was talking to one of my good friends about this the other day It's not that they're so loud. It's that the volume changes go from it's it's not just it's and so it just is so distracting because it's like this if it was a constant thing it wouldn't be as bad but it's just these ups and downs and spikes and because they're moving around they're not in one spot right there going around and it's the worst Yeah, I think all the time there was a something this seemed to leb said once where he was like I Handed my bag. I got to the hotel. I handed my bag to the bellman and

Then got in an elevator. He met me with my bag out of the room I changed and then I went downstairs to the gym Yeah, and he's like I could just carried the bag up the stairs, you know? And I think about that all the time. Like, I'm trying to avoid exertion in one context and then scheduling exertion in another context. And that's kind of insane. It's totally insane.

Yeah, there's this photo I love and it's people taking the escalator to a LA fitness. No one's on the stairs. We're gonna take the escalator up there LA fitness. No one's on the stairs. We're gonna take the escalator up there to get to the gym. It's just like, that's just a metaphor for how we see activity now. It's this separate and distinct thing from our lives. It's not part of our lives.

It's this other thing. I like to swim and I think it's like, okay, so you put on this aerodynamic swimsuit, you're putting on the fins. So you're trying to make the thing you do less hard. I don't really get the point. Do you know what, isn't the point the resistance? If we're trying to reduce the resistance,

why not just walk instead of swim? Right, I applaud you for swimming. You don't like swimming? Swimming is hard. Why? You're not good at swimming or what you don't like? I would say both. I remember when I learned to actually swim, this was,

I was working at Men's Health and I had to do a story where I- Oh, like as an adult? Yeah, as an adult, dude. I mean, I could like flail and get from point A to point B, but to actually swim. I remember when I realized I was actually getting okay at swimming, was probably a month into swimming maybe four days a week for at least half an hour an hour. And I had this moment where I realized that I was thinking about something other than

swimming as I swam. You're not thinking about not drowning for a change. Exactly. I'm thinking about like my work day and it was like, Oh, I'm getting this. Because it's just like, yeah, that's not a thing for me. Exactly. I'm thinking about like my work day and it was like, oh, I'm getting this. Yeah. Because it's just like, yeah, that's not a thing for me. Interesting.

Yeah, I live in the desert. Yeah, that's true. Although people don't, I don't think people think like Texas great swimming, but actually that's great swimming. Yeah, I believe that. So I feel like there's a tension in your two books that I was thinking about.

So on the one hand, I totally agree. Comfort, people live these sort of soft lives where they avoid any form of discomfort. And then on the other hand, I feel like one of the things that I'm trying to work on less, or as I'm trying to work on having less of in my life is a scarcity mindset. Like in the sense of like, I need to get more comfortable being good

with how things are. Does that, do you know what I mean? Like, because on the one hand, that desire to feel discomfort, that desire to push yourself to never be satisfied, it's a motive force that's great. It's also a miserable force if you're not careful. How do you think about the tension between those two?

I think about it in terms of what are we being pushed into? So I think the big resistance that people actually face when it comes to what they want more of is it tends to be things that feel good in the short term but hurt us in the long run. Sure. So what do people struggle with? Junk food, checking their cell phone 50,000 times a day, social media, I don't know, gambling, insert anything that we would say is quote unquote a bad behavior. So I think that most bad behaviors become bad when they deliver this sort of short term satisfaction at the expense of long term growth.

Yeah. Right? Mm hmm. And in the context of the discomforts I talk about in the comfort crisis, these are things that are typically the opposite. They are uncomfortable in the short term, but they are beneficial in the long run. You're glad you did them later.

Yes. So exercise, classic example. Exercise sucks as you do it, as I just talked about with swimming. But then afterwards, you're not only glad you did it, but you improve. You're better for having done it. You're better for having done it. Whereas if I binge social media for an hour,

that was entertaining, I saw some good dog videos, but it didn't improve my life. And in fact, I might feel miserable after I go what? Yeah, I never put down my phone after scrolling and go, so glad I did that. Never happens. Maybe it happens every once in a while, but very rarely. Well, there's definitely things I'm glad I saw, but it's like you can have a good meal, but if you eat too much, right? And so it's like, there's definitely things I liked that I saw. And then I know I saw too much. You know what I mean?

I did it longer than whatever the minimum effective dose was. Which is what they're designed to get you to do. Yeah, exactly. And so I would say a lot of my work leans on sort of evolutionary arguments where the things that we tend to overdo today, overdoing them in the past would have been really beneficial. So if you come upon some food 100,000 years ago,

it made sense to just binge that food until you nearly vomit. Yes. You wait a minute, and then you binge more. Yeah. But today, in the context of insert junk food, insert simulation from social media, insert any other thing, buying stuff. Yes. We have so much of those things now, from social media, insert, any other thing, buying stuff.

We have so much of those things now, but we still have that sort of ancient brain telling us, no, more, now, faster, stronger. And that doesn't necessarily make sense now. We are planning a family trip to Greece this summer. I want to see some of the sites that I've talked about in my books. I want to do some research. And as we were looking at different hotels, I thought, you know what, let's just stay

in an Airbnb. Let's pick a bunch of different Airbnbs to stay in. We'll drive from one to the other. We'll get a sense of what it is actually like to be and live there. And we don't all want to be on top of each other. Two double beds in a hotel room or God forbid you have to buy some super expensive suite. So we're really excited to do that. And that's how we do most of our vacations because from cozy cabins to luxurious villas,

Airbnb offers the chance to live like a local to actually see and experience what that place is like, what it has to offer. And sometimes you meet cool hosts, sometimes you meet your neighbors. So if you're planning a trip and the idea of staying in a hotel doesn't sound like exciting, authentic experience, give living like a local a try and check out Airbnb. I'm Mike Bubbins. I'm Ellis James. And I'm Steph Guerrero. Give living like a local a try and check out Airbnb. You don't have to love sport, like sport, or even know anything about sport to listen. Because nobody has conversations which stay on topic, and it's the same on our podcast. We might start off talking about ice hockey, but end up discussing, I don't know, 1980s

British sitcom Alou Allou instead. Let's use the word nuance in your pitch for Alou Allou. He's not cheating on his wife, he's French. It's a different culture. If you like me and Mammoth, or you like Alice in Fantasy Football League, then you'll love our podcast. Follow The Socially Distant Sports Bar wherever you get your podcasts. The Socially Distant Sports Bar, it's not about asymmetrical overlords. James, podcasting from his study, and you have to say that's magnificent. Yeah, it's like you would come across a, you know, a berry bush.

It's very hard to eat so many berries that you get sick from a, you know, like to eat, whereas like you walk in and you grab whatever you can from a convenience store, you can stuff yourself, you can eat an inhuman amount of food very quickly before you even feel the regret, which you'll feel later versus like what you can sort of naturally overdo. Yeah, we've essentially concentrated the quote unquote good thing. So food is more calorie dense.

We've engineered it to be delicious. Even things like if you think of entertainment from social media, that is just like level 10 entertainment. And the random rewards are quicker and faster. Whereas if you think about nature, yes, it can be very entertaining. And there are random rewards. But they are slower and less intense. So we've really just jacked up the stimulating. Yeah, the potency.

Yeah, like you came across a marijuana plant 5,000 years ago versus what you would get from a weed dispensary now. It's like it might as well be a different thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it basically is. And what's interesting about psychoactive substances too is in the past, they had very low levels and we would often use them as a tool to enhance our lives.

Where the ceremony, like a special occasion. Right, right. A good example is cocoa leaves. Yeah. So people in South America chew cocoa leaves because it's kind of like a cup of coffee helps with altitude sickness. And then we figure out, oh, if we just like put these things through this crazy chemical process, we can get that good thing. Yeah. But like in this amount.

And now we have cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, there's a big difference between the hits you're getting from those things. Yeah. To say the least. Yeah, it's not great.

So there's a Mussonius Rufus quote. He's one of the early Stokes. And he says, when you do something hard, the labor passes quickly, but the good remains. The work that you put in, that's not like haunting you. something hard, the labor passes quickly, but the good remains. The work that you put in, that's not like haunting you, it quickly recedes into the rear view. But then the thing you got out of it, it stays with you. And then he says, but when you do

something shameful for pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame remains. And there's kind of this tension of like, when you do hard things, pretty quickly, how hard it was, you get over. But you get the value out of it. And then it's the exact opposite for like the easy things, or the things you shouldn't be doing or the urges you indulge. Yeah, that's that's to me, that is the great tension of living today.

Yeah. Is that we have more of those things that are shameful, let's say. Or ephemeral or whatever. Yeah, at our disposal. And we're sort of wired to take those short-term rewards because that used to keep us alive. And now they're just, they're everywhere.

We're not necessarily designed to do these things that help us in the long run. Exercise is a good example. It never made sense to exercise because you wanted to save calories. Like there's a reason that humans are inherently lazy. Yeah. Because we never had enough food.

You didn't want to work any harder than you had to to get it. If there was a human who liked to move for the sake of it a million years ago, they would have died off because they would have burned through all their energy and not had enough food. So we're all kind of engineered to avoid that. Yeah, running a caloric deficit is biologically insane. Yes.

Like that's what we're designed to do the exact opposite of that. Yeah, and now we pay more money to get less food in the form of diet foods, right? Right. Or we pay someone to allow us to go to a place to burn off the excess that we have. Yeah, treadmills, for example,

were originally created as a torture device for prisons. Yeah, you would get sentenced to the treadmill. Yeah, because it's awful. And then someone goes, oh, well, we got this problem with people not moving. What if we just like, what if we took this prisoner contraption and just put it in a building

and called it a 24-hour fitness? I got a business idea. Yes. You're designed to conserve energy to be efficient with things. And so, yeah, I guess there's athletes and art. There's weirdos in the past. But as a biological imperative, you're not supposed to consume more,

or you're not supposed to burn more calories than you consume. That's just like the most natural, like people go, like people get mad about like nepotism or like inherited privileges. And it's like, that's the most biologically innate thing that there is. Totally. The whole point of life from a species perspective is to accumulate resources and advantages that you pass to your children. Yes. So you're not going to have that much success convincing people not to do that.

You can create a society that redistributes effectively, that sort of undermines our hoarding impulse. But by definition, we are going to hoard and try to pass advantages off to people who are related or part of our tribe. That's what we do. Yeah, totally. It's exactly what we do. Yeah. And I think to something that I talk about a lot in scarcity brain is this idea of random rewards and how we're drawn to them.

What really got me thinking about this is living in Las Vegas and there's slot machines everywhere. Now this behavior, it doesn't make sense. Yeah. Right? You know, the longer you play that slot machine, the more money you lose. Like the house always wins. Yes.

And if that weren't true, there wouldn't be bajillion dollar casinos lining the Las Vegas street. But people play those things all day long, like all day. And slot machines, there's this crazy stat I read. Slot machines make more money than, sorry to tell you this, it hurts me to, books, movies, music combined. Yeah. Slot machines really lean on this idea of, I call it the scarcity loop. So there's like these three parts. There's opportunity, unpredictable rewards,

and quick repeatability. So opportunity, you have an opportunity to get something of value. Unpredictable rewards, you know you'll get that thing at some point if you keep doing the behavior. But you don't know when. You don't know how good it's going to be. So like with the slot machine, you play, you could lose, you could win a dollar, you could

win a hundred dollars. The variability is what makes it exciting. Yes. And then quick repeatability, you can immediately repeat that behavior. And so I think today we've taken that system, which helped us survive in the past by finding food. Finding food is like opportunity to find food and survive. You don't know where the food is,

you don't know if you're gonna kill the animal, you don't know how big the animal is gonna be, and you gotta repeat that for life. And we've put it into systems like slot machines, cell phones, dating apps, even shopping apps lean on this system. And it's just like the ultimate system to get people to just do things over and over and over.

Well, look, like I have made relationships on social media that have changed my life for the better. I have learned things that I wouldn't have gotten in some other context. It has been good for my career. The vast majority of the time though, it's been a waste of time, you know? But there is the idea that when I scroll down

and then it pops back up and it repopulates with new stuff, that could be one of those times, right? It could be a tweet or an idea or a thing that changes my life. I know the odds of that are infinitesimal, but it could be, it could be one of those times. And that's what makes you go back over and over again. And yeah, I think anytime you can break out of those loops,

like you go, like one of my nearest resolutions is I'm not going on Reddit ever again. So I quit Reddit and it's like, sure, I probably missed some things that would have been good, but I also missed all the things that weren't good. I missed all the, you know, I never sat down and did the hit ratio, right?

I never said, hey, for every 100 things I see, you know, one of them is good. Is that actually like a target rich environment? Probably not. All I'm thinking about is that the variable reward that sometimes you get it. And then it's easy just every time I pull up my computer, oh, I'll check that really fast.

Oh, I'll check that really fast. And then you break those loops and as it recedes into the distance, you're like, why did I ever check that ever? You don't notice the thing you're missing because you're not actually missing. It's cumulative positive impact in your life was basically nothing.

And the huge chunk of time that it was taking you find more productive means for hopefully. Yeah. And I think there are ways you can use that system to do more of what helps you. Yes. So I gave the example of finding food. There's a lot of random rewards in nature. So if I go, I live on the edge of the desert, if I go for a trail run, there's a ton of

randomness in nature. Yeah. I might see a snake. I might see a bighorn sheep. Sunset, sunrise. Yeah, totally. And so, but along the way, as I'm maybe going to see this thing or that thing or have some crazy experience, I'm moving, I'm getting exposure to sunlight, I'm like having

interesting thoughts that aren't just like what's the next dog video that's coming my way. Yes, yes. And I get a lot of benefit from that. Yeah. So it's like how can you take that system and apply it to something that helps you given that we know that people, and it's not just people, it's all species are inherently attracted to random rewards. Yes. Yeah, or there's a difference between scrolling social media, which has basically no positive benefit.

And then, the algorithm isn't all bad, right? So the algorithm on, say, Spotify, that's surfacing music to you, but you're doing it while you're doing something else, is different than a thing that demands all your attention. So if it requires you to sit in a chair in a casino to maybe get the one in one million odds of winning a small amount of money,

the default, the losing state is not good and the positive state's not that good. But exposing yourself to randomness or surprise or serendipity is really important. But yeah, where are you choosing and how are you choosing to do that? Yeah, exactly. Something I think about too is different random rewards

pull people differently. So why is it that I can go to a casino in Las Vegas and I put whatever, 20, 50 bucks in the machine and I'm like, I lose it. And I go, oh, that was pretty fun. And then I don't do that again for two months. Meanwhile, the lady next to me is just, she's been there since 8 AM. Yeah.

Yeah. I think the danger with technology that's getting smaller and more portable is that the slot machine is always with us. Yeah. So I have to physically go to the casino. Yeah. I no longer have to do that if my slot machine is like social media or reddit or whatever it might be. Yeah. And that takes a lot of your time and attention. Yeah. It's just always there. Well, I also think like I'm a big opponent of acquired tastes in the sense of like, if you try alcohol and it doesn't work for you,

you should count yourself very lucky. You shouldn't work on that habit. Do you know what I mean? When people are like, no, no, no, this cigar is disgusting the first time, but you gotta smoke a bunch of them. Like that seems like, again, it's like choose your heart. Like what is the thing, where are you working?

And the work people will do to acquire vices is always interesting to me. Yeah, totally. Like, no, you don't understand. You gotta endure a lot of unpleasantness to then get this habit that by the way, most people who have it still admit that it's not great. Yeah, exactly.

And like, what's the long-term benefit of that? It's basically nothing. Yes. Whereas exercise, you could make the same argument for exercise. Totally. It's like, no, this actually, we have plenty of data. This is going to actually really improve your life. Yes.

So what is the, if I do this over the long haul, does my life improve or does it get worse? Yeah. That's kind of a good question to ask. Yeah. And where are you putting work in? You know, like, I think people will put in a lot of work in different areas of their life. And then other things will go, that's hard, or that that doesn't come naturally to me. But it didn't come naturally to the

other people either. They just decided to in the way that you worked extra hours in the office to do X, Y, or Z. This person, yeah, they went to five sessions with their therapist that didn't feel like they were going anywhere, but they committed, you know, like, so where are you investing? What kinds of comfort are you trying to overcome? Because everything that sort of works

requires kind of getting over that hump in some form or another. Yeah, I think so, absolutely. So are you a runner? Where do you find, where are you seeking discomfort in your life? I definitely move a lot. Yeah.

I'm a mover. I trail run. I do a lot of rocking, which I rode about in the comfort crisis. I also have a garage gym where I lift. I try to spend a lot of time outside. Yeah. Regardless of the conditions, whether it's too hot, whether it's too cold, I also have a garage gym where I live. I try to spend a lot of time outside. Yeah.

Regardless of the conditions, whether it's too hot, whether it's too cold, which we don't get many too cold days in Vegas, but sometimes it does get cold. A lot of time outside. I also feel like I get a lot of value from researching in my books, which that's kind of a random reward thing. It's like, I'm reading a study. I'm like, oh man, this is just dense. This is like, I don't know if this is going anywhere.

And then you find like the one citation where you're like, oh, yes, that's the idea. Right? For me, that is the jackpot of the song machine. So that silence too is something that I definitely lean into. I wrote about this in my newsletter recently and there's a piece of it in the comfort crisis that humans have increased the world's loudness, I think it's fourfold. And there's only, I believe the number is 12 places in the lower 48 states where you can be in nature without hearing any human sounds for 15 minutes. Only 12 places. So we've really changed loudness.

Only 12 places. So we've really changed loudness. Yeah. And we now live in a ton of noise. And in the context of the past, loud noises were often scary. Yeah. It's a storm. It's a tiger. It's a rock slide.

So we sort of evolved to get stressed out over loud noises. Yeah. And now we kind of live in this low-grade loudness. And it is associated with a lot of health impacts. High stress, people who live in more noise tend to be more depressed, more anxious. They even have higher rates of heart disease because heart disease is so tightly linked to stress levels. And so when we remove noise, although it is uncomfortable at first because we're so adapted to noise, you tend to find that although people are uncomfortable at first, they tend to calm down over time. It's a more natural wavelength

to be at. The low grade noise with the punctuated with extreme noises is the unnatural place. Silence is the norm. In Helsinki, there's this church and it's called the Church of Silence. And it's sort of this non-denominational place right in the middle of the city and you walk in and there's just no sound. You're not allowed to talk. There's no music. There's no noise.

It's designed to be sort of sound deadening. It doesn't even have like one of those big sort of creaky church doors. Like you just walk in and you just go, two seconds ago you were in the middle of a busy city and then suddenly you're in complete and total silence. And you realize just immediately that there's something inherently holy about silence.

And that that's kind of one of the main features of churches too, although they might have sort of chanting or whatever, you're in this enormous, you know, high ceiling stone thing where everyone is trying to be respectful or doing their own inward thing. And then, yeah, you just notice like the absence of noise and disruption, which we totally take for granted as a species. We obviously care a lot about pollution and society's done a lot of work collectively to reduce pollution,

but we just have thrown up our hands about around noise pollution. And her leaf blowers. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Like the one I hate is like, I hate New York City because of the noise that like big trucks make like a dump truck or whatever where it's like that big heavy back part and they kind of go into an intersection and that that sort of kathumb yeah not the

engine it's like just the sheer weight of the big metal thing moving around on top of a big metal thing and I can feel that like in my chest cavity and I just I have a stress response to those so just loud noises yeah I noticed how everyone in New York City walks really fast. Yes, they're trying to get away from them. It's because they're all running from something. Totally. No, it's just not, it's not natural to hear a car horn

from six feet away. Not in your own metal cocoon, you know? And you feel it and your cortisol level and your emotions. It's just not what a human is supposed to be experiencing. Yeah, what got me thinking about the silence thing and the comfort crisis is that, and that section on silence was not in the proposal, but I went up to the Arctic and I'm there for like a month.

And one of the craziest things is just how silent it is. Like I'm standing on the Tundra one morning, it is dead silent. And I'm standing on the tundra one morning. It is dead silent. And then I just hear this. Hoo, hoo, hoo. I'm like, what is happening? Yeah. Is this like a Blackhawk helicopter?

And I turn around and it's a raven flying. Yeah, you can hear the flapping of a bird. It is so silent that those sorts of noises get amplified almost. And then when I went back into, I'll always remember this, when we get back to Anchorage, I go in my hotel room and it's near an airport. And there's a plane taking off.

And it was just like, it was like you're in an IMAX movie and your seat rumbles, like the noise from that, cause my sense of hearing was just so dialed down to. Yeah. And then of course that fades away eventually, right? Yeah.

And like you adjust, but it is crazy to me how, not just sound, but just all sorts of stimulation that we have today. Well, I live out in the country and that's one of the weird things. I'll be like on my back porch and I'll hear voices. I'll be like, is someone like in my yard? And then it's like, no, they're like very far away,

but the sound is carrying across the water. Like because all the other sounds are turned down, you're able to hear things that you would never ordinarily hear. And you're subjected to phenomena you wouldn't ordinarily not be able to experience because there isn't that sort of low grade just like white noise blanketing it out. And yeah, there's an attuneness like, you know,

John Cage, the songwriter, he's this experimental musician. He did that song, it's like three minutes and 40 seconds, whatever it's called, but he recorded a song of silence. He performed it a few times. He was doing this in the 50s and 60s. So it's almost quaint what he was protesting then. But he ends up going, he does his famous song and it's three or so minutes of silence. You can kind of listen to it. It's like an experimental art project. And so he kind of becomes this proponent

or this sort of activist about silence. And he gets invited, like some tech company or government produces what they think is like a fully soundproof chamber. And so he goes and he's like, no, I can hear something. And they're like, no, you can't possibly hear something. And then he realizes like he's hearing like his own blood pumping or something. So you realize like it's not just you're missing out on these other things, but you're missing out, it's preventing you from hearing yourself. And there's just this whole thing where we've tuned out because it's not on the frequency we can hear.

Yeah, there's those chambers are called anechoic chambers. And they've are starting to use them, I believe, as treatment for people who have PTSD. Just sort of lowers everything, relaxes everything, and people who have, I don't know what the technical term for the condition would be, but for example people who've worked on aircraft carriers, they'll have this crazy just ringing in their ears and you put them in there in this complete silence and it tends to take that away for some people. Interesting. Yeah. See, this is why I like swimming because swimming is kind of a sensory deprivation chamber. Like you can't really hear anything, there's no screens to look

at and then it's immersing your body in such an overwhelming sensation of like being in water that you're not really feeling anything but that, you know? Have you ever done a sensory deprivation tank? I have, yeah. It's weird how disorienting it is. Like I remember I was in it and I had this sensation that I'd spun around, you know? And then when they turn it, it's like,

wait, that's physically impossible. Unless I'd like scrunched into a ball, I couldn't go. I thought I started with my head here and then I ended here and it's like, oh wait, no, that physically wouldn't work, but it's just you're immersed. And so, these kind of little sensations feel so profound and exaggerated. The first time I did one was in New York city.

That was a miscalculation. I got out of that thing and then went down to 57th Street and it was just like, it was way too much coming at me at once. I really needed to, I really needed to like- You needed a re-entry. Yeah, I needed a re-entry. And then I think there's also,

I mean, you talk a lot about this in the book, but just like the feeling of feeling boredom, allowing the boredom or the nothingness to creep in is really important. Yeah. So this was the context where that worked its way into the book, is I was up there hunting with two other guys and we're hunting this herd called the Western Arctic Caribou Herd. And so during the winter, to prepare for winter, they basically migrate southward.

And so you kind of get in the middle of that and you try and catch them on their migration. Sit on these hills waiting for these animals to migrate. Nothing. Like nothing is coming through. So it's literally two weeks of just sitting and waiting. And sometimes you move around, like maybe if we go to another hill, but it is a lot of just nothing. And cell phones are useless.

I didn't bring any other real media at all. And you find yourself bored. Again. And so, the difference though is that if I feel bored at home, I've got a bajillion escapes from it. Relief is easy. Relief is very easy. And the relief is also very intense. And up there it was like your mind just starts going to weird places. We would start to do things like read the labels on our Clif bar as we brought in. You know, like I can tell you all the

nutrition stats of a Clif bar. I can tell you that company's history from the label. We'd read our gear tags. I came up with Christmas shopping lists for all of my friends and family for like seven years, you know? But then your mind also goes to some really interesting places. Yeah. So I think that boredom is sort of this cue. I talked to a boredom scientist about this and he basically said that boredom is neither good nor bad inherently. Boredom just tells you to go do something else. Like the return on whatever you're doing right now, it is worn thin, go do something else. In the past,

this was sort of a survival mechanism. So if it was a million years ago and we're hunting and we need food and no animals are coming through boredom kicks on and it tells us, I wonder what's over there. Yeah. What's over there. Could we get food some other way? But today that sort of gets co-opted and by our cell phones. Cause that one we feel that it's cell phone, it's Netflix, it's computer, it's insert a million other things. But I think that letting your mind sort of sit with that and not going into the

next easiest thing can be beneficial because you your mind sort of sit with that and not going into the next easiest thing Yeah can be beneficial because you start to sort of Ideate basically sometimes you think about some wacky stuff. That's fine Yeah, but sometimes you think about some really interesting stuff. So I ended up writing a lot of the book and having probably my best ideas Were during that time because I had a notebook and I would just be bored out of my mind, three hours of just inside my head, and then, oh, that's an interesting thought. I'll write that down. This new year, why not let Audible

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or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the big flop early and ad free on Wondery Plus. Get started with your free trial at Wondery.com slash plus. There's something very natural and then in the modern sense, very unnatural about hunting because where else do you have to get up super early, go to a special place and then do nothing for an extended period of time, right? And so yeah, like I went deer hunting with my son a couple months ago and it's like, okay, we gotta get up at five.

It's gonna, we're gonna drive over here, we're gonna get in there and we're just gonna sit and we can't do anything. And if we don't, you go, well, if they show up, you know, the cam shows they tend to show up at this time, we'll show up five minutes before that. It doesn't work that way. The table stakes or the cost to entry

are the two hours of waiting for things to go back to normal. And being silent. Yeah, your minor disruption has to, the ripples of that have to be long gone if you wanna get the thing that you wanna get. And so that's obviously a very human experience, but it's very much the opposite

of the modern human experience. Like, hey, this is what I'm gonna do on the plane so I don't have to be bored. Or this is the time I'm meeting, so I'm gonna leave at exactly this number. I know exactly how many minutes it will take to get there. And so I'm not gonna have one spare minute between, you know, like, and then if I do, then I can go to my phone.

But just the sort of extended, unpunctuated amounts of boredom that is then punctuated with extreme excitement and focus is... There's not many experiences that remain like that available to people these days. I think you have to find them effectively. I'll go... When I go on hikes and stuff, I don't bring my phone. Even waiting in the grocery store line, everyone's on their phone. It's like, that is an opportunity to just observe, think, yeah, it's boring. But sometimes you see and observe some interesting things that help you. And you can kind of work through bigger questions

that are lurking in the background. You might all of a sudden, oh, bing, that's the answer to this work problem that I've been laboring on for X amount of time. Driving in silence, another big one. That's great. It's so weird at first and you feel weird, but then you just like, it's great. I tend to listen to music throughout the day, but I find that I listen, I'll pick a song

and I listen to that song on repeat until it becomes kind of a silence. It becomes, it turns off everything else. And then I kind of get lost in the rhythm of that thing. That's kind of how I sort of, that's where I, that's what I do to get into like a creative place is a song on repeat until that song loses whatever potency it has and I go to the next one. Yeah.

I do think that music can be enhancing for performance, one, physical performance, but also creativity. I try and find like a balance between the two. So if I do go on a long run, I'll do the first half, and usually I'm doing out and back, I'll do the first half in silence to just be in my head. And then the back half, I'll put on music. And sometimes that sort of channels my brain

into a little bit different lane for the way home. Yeah. If you think about how boring and difficult the ancient world was, like put aside like hunter gather, just go to like ancient Rome. Like you got to write a letter, it's going to take like two weeks to come back or whatever. You think you want to read at night just how much work goes into like getting a torch, you know, and setting up and then you're unrolling this scroll, you know, like just how shitty everything was, you know?

Totally. And like they had the fortitude to tolerate that shittiness. And then as things improve, which they should, what comes along with that is an inability to tolerate shittiness. But shittiness is like energy or atoms. It doesn't actually disappear. There's just new forms of shittiness, right?

It's always with us. And so if you lose the ability to deal with shittiness, you're gonna have a really hard time. Like you're gonna be, you have a very fragile existence. Yeah, so I think that we adapt. So if you think in ancient Rome, there's probably a guy who had a really kick ass torch. Yes.

And that was like, he's like my life. Basically they just had slaves to do the shitty things for you, right? Like the more powerful you were, the more you had the ability to pay other people to endure things that you didn't want to endure. Yeah. So that guy's like, my life is perfect. It can't get any better than this. Yeah. But that bar keeps getting moved over time. Yeah.

And so a lot of my argument is that you need to do things that reset that bar. Hmm. And so a lot of my argument is that you need to do things that reset that bar. And I'll give you an example of from the comfort crisis. It's that, you know, when I go up to the Arctic, my plane ride from Vegas to Alaska, how many complaints do I have? Yeah, a ton. Chair small, plane's too hot, coffee sucks, movies suck, all this. And then after I spend that month there, it's like for me to get water, I gotta hike down to a stream to get it.

I'm freezing cold the entire time. If I want to get warm, I've gotta go hike around and find firewood, which is rare to find, bored out of my mind, all these things. So then when I get on the return flight, my experience with that flight is fundamentally different. It is like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. I'm traveling 600 miles an hour in a tube of steel, 35,000 feet.

This is magic. Yeah, and I'm watching movies, I'm warm, I have coffee. I don't have to hike to get the water. I don't have to bring a rifle if I need to go to the bathroom, because of grizzlies, you know? And it just fundamentally resets that. And that changes, at least for me,

that really shifted my perspective on how good I personally had it. And I think how good we as a society have it as a whole. Yeah, your perspective on what's normal. Yes. You have to shift because almost everything about our life is not normal. It's a hard-won invention.

It's an incredible privilege. But when it becomes ordinary, you expect it. Yeah, and you don't appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying you have to cram yourself in coach if you can easily afford a first class ticket, but if first class is sold out and then you're like, why the fuck

do I have to sit back here? That's a vulnerability that is not good because you're not going to get your way all the time. And you're not going to, there are some things that you can't pay to make go away. And there are some things that just suck for everyone. And the more you can understand that it's things are nice to have as you have them as opposed to must haves, the more I think resilient and then grateful you are. Feeling grateful was a huge thing that happened to me. Hot running water, right? It's like you never think of that. Yeah. When I got home, I thought about it all the time. Yes. It's like, holy hell, this is just that just really I think changes your perspective and I think you're right too about

Vulnerabilities like to me. It's like the more you need to have in order to do something the more Vulnerabilities or fragilities you have. Yeah, what are you afraid of losing? Right? You want to just be able to accomplish the thing without all this other stuff if you have the other stuff great Yeah, it could help you it makes it a little bit nicer You want to just be able to accomplish the thing without all this other stuff. If you have the other stuff, great. It could help you. It makes it a little bit nicer. But if your ability to do something relies on all these externalities, that becomes a problem because if those get removed, then you just break down.

Seneca famously, he said he would practice poverty one day a month. And poverty, I think, is a word, because it has a sort of social economic implication. But I think his point was like, if you can live a life very different than yours, very, very much pared down than yours on a, you have regular exposure to what it would be like to not have the things that you normally have. You lose the fear of losing them because you're like, I do this all the time. It's the, it's when you become increasingly distant or unfamiliar from how things used to be that you get in a precarious place, because now you need to do things to keep them where you're afraid to say things,

for instance, or do things that might jeopardize your access to those things. Yeah. I'll let you tell the story because I have not studied the Greeks as thoroughly as you have the get out of my son line from Diogenes. Oh, yes. Yes. Diogenes is notorious for having reduced his needs to nothing. Do you know the story about him and the kid at the well? Tell me that one. So he walks to the well, he has his cup

and he's scooping water out of the well. And then this little boy comes up to him and drinks with his hands. In that instance, he slams his cup on the ground. He realizes that there was a way to do it with less. He thought he'd gotten it down to nothing, but he still had this one creature comfort. But yeah, you take that attitude

and suddenly he's in a famous encounter with Alexander the Great, and the most powerful man in the world says to this seemingly powerless man, I'll do anything you want, what do you want me to do for you? And he just says, I want you to stop blocking the sun because he was sunbathing.

And for Diogenes, that powerlessness want me to do for you. And he just says, I want you to stop blocking the sun because he was sunbathing. And for Diogenes, that powerlessness was actually a form of incredible power because here he is and he doesn't need or want anything from this person. And think of all the other people who enabled Alexander or told him what they wanted to hear or were vulnerable to him

because there was something they wanted from him. Yeah, which I think neither of us would argue for get rid of all your stuff and only wear this whatever piece of cloth. But to be able to do that and not complain, that's probably a good gear to have. Yeah, well, I mean, there's something about the Cynic tradition that I think is interesting in the way that, you know, a celibate monk is interesting or a wandering vagabond is interesting.

It's a way to illustrate some of the absurdities and the dependencies and the contradictions of modern life. Can everyone live that way? No, I mean, Diogenes lives off the charity of others. So by definition, I mean, by definition, he's a parasite. But by definition, his, you know, frugality is only possible because of the, you know, the the abundance of others. But I think his point is that he was freer than a lot of people. Epictetus is another interesting example to me because he's not quite so far down that scenic road,

but he's a slave in Nero's court. He works for one of Nero's advisors or secretaries or whatever, and he looks around and he goes, yeah, I'm legally a slave. I don't have power over so many things, but also I want fewer things. And I have a kind of self-awareness or I have a control over my thoughts and actions

in a way that some of these very powerful rich people aren't even close to having. And he realizes that he, even in this form of slavery, is freer than the person who is ostensibly in control of their own destiny, but actually, because they desperately want Nero's approval or they're desperately afraid of his disapproval, are actually much more enchained than he is.

Yeah, totally. And then the question is, how do you take those same ideas and apply them to your own life? Yeah. And I think we've all probably experienced that. There's people who have piles and piles of money, more than they could spend ever. Yeah. And they're miserable.

Yes. Like they're not free. But why are they miserable? It's because they want more than they have. Yeah. And that's, that's what I meant about scarcity, which is like, there is a power and freedom in being like, I is a power and a freedom in being like, I'm good with what I have.

Yeah, 100%. And I think what's interesting today is there's more things pulling at us to try to have more. Whether that's social approval, which we've put at scale, whether that's possessions, which people own so much stuff now. More than they could possibly ever need or want or have expected even a few years ago. Yeah.

I read one step that says the average house has 10,000 to 50,000 items. That sounds strange. Yeah. Yeah. And in the past, people really didn't have that much. Yeah. Like even two, 300 years ago, you had some stuff that was handed down, you used it as tools.

And now, although I would argue possessions have always had status-giving powers, more of our stuff can be used as sort of a status play and we buy for reasons beyond need. And just in general, being able to notice those levers that are being pulled and asking yourself why am I doing this in the first place? What am I really buying this for? Why am I spending time on this device? What am I sort of really looking to

and just like unpeeling those layers? I think can be a good exercise. Hard, definitely hard. Not something you can schedule for an hour and figure out. Like that's a lot, that was like the course of life, right? But good questions asked. Yeah, I mean the pleasure from the stuff wanes And you have to ensure but you still have to ensure the stuff. You got to organize the stuff You got to be afraid of losing the stuff

You got to dust the stuff Do you know what I mean? Just like all the all the things that come along with owning or possessing. Yeah. Mm-hmm We're also in an interesting time. I wrote a newsletter recently All the things that come along with owning or possessing. Yeah. Mm-hmm. We're also in an interesting time. I wrote a newsletter recently about how, as a reaction to all the stuff we have, we've sort of had this turn into minimalism. Yeah.

And I spoke to this researcher who's at University of Michigan. She's like, when you look at hoarders and minimalists, even though they're polar opposites, they are often guided by the same principle. And that is a sort of anxiety over having control. So when she interviews hoarders, they go, no, I need this because what if I need it? No, I have to have like seven kitchen mixers because if I have a huge party and I need to bake a lot like that, that could happen.

Whereas minimalist, they feel more anxious surrounded by too many items and minimizing gives a sort of sense of control. Like if I can just have the perfect minimal items arranged perfection, I will have control of my life. And then things will be good and then I'll be happy. So sort of driven by the same thing. And so I guess it kind of goes back to like the middle way, you know, asking the question,

well, why am I doing this thing in the first place? What do I think I'm gonna get? Yeah, you talk to people who have like strong opinions about gear, you know, of any kind, whether it's writers or hunters or like electronics people, and they're just describing the distinctions or the differences between these things that are a lot of times just pseudoscience, like nonsense,

and then at best imperceptible, you know? And you're just like, so wait, did you like, you got this mattress, then got a different mattress, and then got a third, like, this is like some Princess in the P shit, where you're like, I have a lot, I have stuff, I thought this would, I thought this backpack would do what I wanted, it does most of what I wanted.

I try to be like, it's good enough. Do you know what I mean? Like the optimizing is a sort of a form of kind of like hoarding, even if you're getting rid of the old one, but just this process of like researching and shopping and swapping and preserving. Like I think the idea is you should be chill.

Like the idea is to be chill. And there's an intensity to the minimalist attitude that they're acting like, oh, I'm just so much less stressed than you because I have less stuff. But it's like, actually I know what's represented into this minimalist aesthetic that's perfectly selected and refined and curated. It's the same thing.

It's just, it would fit in a smaller dumpster. Yeah, exactly. I've had fun. So I'm working on another book and as part of it, I'm doing this through hike in Southern Utah. So it'll be like 45-ish days. So because of this, I started talking to a lot of these ultra light backpacker types. And we're talking about people who weigh items down to the

gram. It's like they can put that mattress is 150 grams, this one is 100. Therefore, you must take this and everything is like perfectly dialed. And I realized over time, they're not optimizing the hike. Yes, yes. They're optimizing just the gear. Yeah. The question hasn't been asked, is this the appropriate amount of items and the right items for the process of the hike? Yes.

It becomes a game in and of itself to have the lightest pack, whether or not that is what you actually need on the hike. Yes. And so I have these back, I'm like, well, I'm thinking of taking this thing. And they're like, that weighs two ounces more than this other one you could buy. But they're not saying, you know what you have to see

on this hike is the greatest thing in the, like, it's not, yes, like I think about this with the longevity people. It's like, here is all the things you have to do to live longer. And the more I look into their lives, I go, I'm not sure, that sounds like torture. Like you're telling me I have to live

in your shitty life longer? Like you're not married, you don't have friends, you're obsessed with this or that. Like the existence that you are attempting to prolong, it's not, you're not attempting to prolong it after you have perfected existence. You are optimizing for quantity first and then assuming quality.

And that's a pretty big assumption to make. Yes. And one key difference between the ultralight backpacker and the longevity person is I can measure whether this thing is actually lighter I Can control whether it's lighter or not if you get to pick what goes in the back right whereas with longevity No one knows yes. Here's what we know Don't eat like an asshole probably move your body

Like wash your hands like wash your hands. Is that leaf blower? Yeah. Right on cue. Wear a seatbelt, don't text when you drive. Like that's gonna cover a lot of stuff. Is taking this obscure supplement. We have no idea, right?

And so it's like this hyper control over something that we really don't know. But even if you did know, you can still get murdered in an armed robbery before it gets hit by a truck. You know what it looks like? So you're optimizing for the thing more or less not in your control. Yeah. And ignoring the part of it that you have the most say over, which is like whether it's good or not. Yeah.

And whether it's worth preserving or not. Yeah, I think a lot of these type of rabbit holes sort of just become a distraction and almost a hobby rather than a hobby that is dressed in this big idea. Which fine, I feel like if you are a longevity person, you're like, hey, this is my hobby, I like doing this. Do I really know? That's fine. But if you're like, no, this thing here, therefore you must do this and this will cause us to live. It's like, we don't know. Come on. No, you're just picking a different thing to get stressed about.

Yeah. I do think there's something, you talk a lot about this in the book, like the thing that makes us most uncomfortable, I think, is that contemplation of mortality and death. There's something about hunting that puts you up close and personal with it. There's something about the natural world that does it.

Something about deprivation doing hard things where you're just a little bit closer to the edge than you are in your sort of soft, protected life. But the active thinking about how little control you have and how short it is and how it can get taken from you. I think there's something very powerful in reveling in that discomfort also. Yeah, I think it directs your behavior in a way that can be beneficial. So I talked to this, for that chapter of the Comfort Crisis, I went to Bhutan and I ended up talking to this guy who's a Khenpo in Buddhism, which is kind of akin to a Cardinal almost. And he lives in this shack up on the mountain, right? The spy monastery. And I got in there, in his shack. And by the way, this is like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.

Like it was just, just picture like the most cliche scene of like this gangly Western writer going to see the guru. Like this is it. The dude full robes, shaved head like meditating on a platform. And he told me to think about it like this. He goes, all right, I want you to picture that you are walking on a trail and there's a cliff in 500 yards on the trail. He goes, okay, but the catch is the cliff is death. And then he looks at me and he goes, don't you want to know there's a cliff? Yeah. He goes, in the West, people don't want to know that there's a cliff.

You put death out of your mind. But once you realize that there's a cliff at the end, that is going to change how you walk the trail. Sure. You're probably going to take in the nature a little more. It might slow down a bit. Yeah, it might slow down, might have some different conversations. And so I think the act of metaphorically realizing there's a cliff and pondering that, I think

it changes your behavior in the day to day in a way that can be beneficial. The Stoics might take issue though with the metaphor that death is the thing at the end. So Seneca says that's our big problem is that we think of death as this thing that happens once at the end and then we're moving towards it. He says actually death is behind us. Like every step you take, the trail behind you is gone forever. It is dead to you. And so actually if you think of death as this thing that you are experiencing on a constant basis, it shifts your perspective of time. It shifts your priorities, right? And then that's what I kind of realized like, someone who's always in a hurry, trying to get to the next thing,

trying to move on from this or that, what I'm rushing towards is death. And so, you know, if you can kind of think of everything as every time you're doing something as the last time you get to do it, or as a singular, you know singular experience to never exist again. Something that you're gonna miss someday, right? Like your kids are dying constantly,

that your spouse is dying constantly, that your moment, your peak performance in your career, your profession, whatever, that's dying always. And so as you're trying to kind of like burn through things, you're using up something that you don't ever get back. And then you kind of go, oh, like I'm gonna miss ordinary bedtimes at some point. So why not experience it while I have this one?

Yeah. You know? I think when you, when people do survey people who are, even though we're all dying, people who are like... Near death. Right, near death. Most of them say they regret not being true to themselves. So sort of doing things that they felt they had to do societally because of family reasons or whatever it might be. Not spending enough time with other people. Some of the main things.

I think that kind of reinforces that. Yeah, it's like you have the thing now that at some point in the future, you would trade everything to have for one more second. Yeah, like if you think to your happiest, most important moments, they're probably not that crazy. Yeah. Right. It's like these small instances where you were very present, but they weren't like these big,

yeah, crazy events. I just mean like you're on your deathbed or you're dying, you're bleeding out somewhere, whatever. And someone's like, I can give you 10 more minutes, you know. You'd be like, fuck, okay, what do I have to, take it all, give me 10 more minutes. And meanwhile, you show up for a meeting 10 minutes early and you're like, ugh, you know? And then you're like, how do I kill this 10 minutes? Right, totally. You're like, ah, this 10 minutes is taking forever.

How can I make it end sooner? And that is the stupid paradox of the human experience Yeah, totally I think a lot about adventure too and like how do you insert more adventure into your life? because I think it is easy to kind of get into the cycle of sameness in a way and I mean in my own life. I think there's probably a reason that I go to interesting places for my books. But I think for the average person day to day, like there's so many things you can do that are just fundamentally new. And when you put yourself in a new position, it almost

forces that presence and awareness and the unexpected. I'll give you an example. Is that my wife and I, we drove into Chinatown in Las Vegas the other day and we're like, we're just gonna pick a restaurant at random. We are not gonna Google or Yelp this shit. Yeah. Like driving down Spring Mountain, like, oh, that one looks good. Yeah, let's pull in there. Go in there. Order something totally random off of it. We know nothing about it. And it was great. And then turns out next door, there is a arcade that only has claw machines. Who?

Who knew a thing existed? Yeah, that sounds fun. I do now because I went in there and I won like three stuffed animals. And then afterwards we walk a little more up the street and there's some Korean dessert place. We have something, we don't even know what the hell it is. We just pointed the picture and it was awesome. And it was awesome because we had no idea what we were getting into. Right. Right. There's like so much novelty in that. There's a

change in environment, there's unpredictability, there's all these elements that I think are really rewarding. Even if the meal had sucked. Right. The cost of you have it not working out is also extremely low. Yeah. Even if the meal sucks, we still get a story. Yes. When we drive down Spring Mountain, you go, remember that time we pulled into there and we both got food poisoning? Yeah. Like that's a story we can laugh about for the rest of our lives. Right.

You know, and so I think trying to figure out ways that you can just do new things and like lean on this idea of adventure. Adventure does not have to be the trip into the Arctic. Yeah. You know, when we think of that word, we think of extremes, but it really can just be get out into a big, new, open environment. trip into the Arctic. Yeah. You know, when we think of that word, we think of extremes, but it really can just be get out into a big, new open environment that you know nothing about

and try stuff. Yes. Enter the unknown, see what happens. You wanna go check out some books? Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's do it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on wondery.com slash survey.

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