Do You Really Need That Comfort?
ID: [[201905121401 Do You Really Need That Comfort?]]
Tags: #comfort #discomfort #secondorder
Related: [[201911042243 Take Care in Adding Comforts to Your Life]]
We should be careful or at least deliberate and mindful with how we inject comfort into our lives. Comfort for comforts sake will almost always lead to negative second and third order effects.
Are there any times where comfort has both positive first, second, and third order effects? I think so. When it comes to improving our mental, physical, and spiritual health it’s worth adding comforts liberally. But only in certain forms, not unilaterally.
If you are incurring a comfort into your life, you should be willing to take the negative trade offs. And this should also be viewed at a macro level. Is there a tipping point in comfort? Does a certain level of comfort lead to our eventual downfall? Or can we still maintain peak performance amidst ultimate comfort? And does comfort in one area reduce our performance in other areas?
Cato the Censor looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.
When we have anything too easy, it leads to a weakening of the will.
This softening can happen both at a personal level and at a societal level.
The world has never been richer, and has never been more heavily in debt.
As a society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. In some respects, abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
