Allocating (dis)comfort

June 2021

If getting out of your comfort zone is so damn good for personal growth, why are comfortable jobs in big companies so popular? One reason could be that some people just seek maximum comfort. Another reason is that comfortable environments give space to focus on hard, uncomfortable problems.

Why focus on uncomfortable stuff? Discomfort is a sign that whatever you are doing, it’s new, it’s weird, you don’t understand it well. Which means that you can learn something new or discover something valuable here. And that seems like a good enough reason to value discomfort, even though discomfort by itself doesn’t guarantee results.1

But there is a cost to discomfort. It demands attention, which is a finite resource. If your whole life is uncomfortable, then your attention is spread very thin. And the deeper you want to dig into something, the more attention is required. So ideally, only a limited, important part of your life is uncomfortable, while the rest is comfy.2

While many comfortable activities(especially if done on autopilot) are cheap attention-wise, they still take time and energy. To completely remove this overhead, making activity more comfortable won’t help. In a sense, the most efficient way of doing something, is not doing it at all.

Optimizations like these can suck all the fun out of life, so don’t forget to have fun. But comfort/discomfort is something you can keep an eye on, when changing tools, jobs, homes, operating systems, cola flavours and sleep schedules.

  1. Results are especially unlikely, if you are have no way to exploit this uncomfortable space, or just don’t put in the effort. ↩︎

  2. While attention cost of discomfort is huge, discomfort doesn’t imply suffering. You can be uncomfortable and joyous at the same time. As David Lynch said: “chicks dig melancholy, but you don’t need to suffer” ↩︎

Thanks to Simone for reading drafts of this.
twitter