Comfort Is Not the Goal

Commentary

We are living in the most comfortable time in human history, and yet we are not thriving. We are becoming weaker, less adaptable, and less capable of doing hard things—not because hardship has disappeared, but because we have stopped choosing it.

I am often invited to speak at conferences about agriculture, food systems, and what I believe is the collapse of the small family farm. I talk about land, responsibility, stewardship, and what it will take to rebuild something real in this country. Almost without fail, someone raises his hand and asks me about my self-care routine.

What do I do for self-care?

The question always catches me off guard. Not because it is unkind, but because it reveals something deeper about where we are as a culture. There is a disconnect between the problems we are facing and the framework we are using to approach them.

I go home to a house with running water, flushing toilets, and hot water on demand. I have air conditioning upstairs, a woodstove downstairs, and a level of comfort that would have been unimaginable to those who came before me. The people who worked the land before us did not have self-care routines. Their lives were physically demanding, uncertain, and often unforgiving. And yet, they were capable.

Today, survival itself has become easy for most of us. Instead of using that ease as a foundation to build strength, we have made comfort the goal. That is where we have gone wrong.

There is a difference between suffering and effort. The generations before us endured hardship because they had to. We, on the other hand, have the rare opportunity to choose it, and we are increasingly unwilling to do so.

Not all discomfort is equal. There is the kind of discomfort that erodes us—disconnection, poor health, addiction, distraction, the quiet anxiety that comes from a life without purpose. Many people today are not free from discomfort at all; they are simply stuck in a kind of low-grade misery that produces nothing.

Then there is the discomfort we avoid: the hard conversations we don’t want to have, the discipline we resist, the commitments we abandon the moment they become inconvenient.

And finally, there is chosen discomfort: the kind that builds something. Fasting, physical labor, raising children with expectations, sticking with something long after it stops being easy, developing a skill, building a business, tending land, growing in faith. This kind of discomfort creates resilience. It forms character. It reminds us that growth requires effort.

As I write this, I am in the middle of Lent, and I have gone more than a month without food, drinking only raw milk, bone broth, and tea. When I tell people this, they often look at me like I am doing something extreme or unnecessary. It is uncomfortable, and it does take effort, but that is precisely the point. If we do not practice doing hard things, we lose the ability to do them at all.

I see this play out not just in adults, but in children. There is a growing philosophy of avoiding any kind of discomfort in parenting—never raise your voice, never push too hard, never require too much. But children need challenge. They need to encounter resistance and learn how to move through it.

My 11-year-old son recently chose to fast for three days, not because I told him to, but because he wanted to do something difficult. He experienced the challenge, pushed through it, and felt a sense of accomplishment on the other side. That experience shaped him in a way that comfort never could.

Children are not fragile by nature; they become fragile when we remove every opportunity for them to grow.

The same is true for adults. In my own life, I have worked a range of jobs—delivering pizzas, working in retail, taking on whatever was needed at the time. I was not always the best employee, especially as a teenager, but I learned something early on that has stayed with me: Effort matters.

When you go the extra mile, people notice. When you take responsibility, more opportunities open up. My parents used to say that the more responsibility you take on, the more freedom you have. There is truth in that, even if responsibility also comes with weight.

Today, it is increasingly rare to see people go beyond the minimum. I see employees waiting to be told what to do, doing only what is required and nothing more. Maybe my expectations are shaped by a different time, but I do not think that the problem is expectation. I think that the problem is the fact that we have redefined what is normal.

We have started to treat discomfort as something dangerous rather than something necessary. Even ideas that challenge us are sometimes avoided. I remember being in college and hearing that we did not have to attend certain classes if controversial topics were going to be discussed, as though being challenged itself were harmful.

But being challenged is not harmful. It is how we grow. If we lose the ability to sit with discomfort—whether physical, intellectual, or emotional—we lose the ability to develop depth, conviction, and resilience. And that loss is not theoretical; we are already seeing it.

We now live in a world where technology can produce almost anything instantly. You can generate writing, design products, and create entire systems in minutes. But when everything becomes immediate, we risk losing the patience required to build something real. Does anyone still have the patience to write a book with his own mind, to build a house with his own hands, to stay committed to something long enough to see it through?

This is not just about work. It is about who we are becoming. The generations before us fought hard to create the level of comfort we now enjoy, but comfort was never meant to be the end goal. It was meant to be the starting point for something greater.

We now have a choice they did not. We can either use this comfort to build strength or we can let it make us weak. One path leads to resilience, purpose, and growth. The other leads to apathy. That choice is being made every day, whether we realize it or not.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.