Comfort War

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Supernormal stimulus poses the greatest existential threat to our species.”

 

Modern-day global extinction rates are at about 100 to 1000 times background rates[1]. The main cause of that is habitat destruction[2]. If you were to picture, as geneticist Sewall G. Wright did in 1932[3], a landscape of evolutionary fitness values denominated by height relative to the set of all possible genotype variances—you could imagine what happens to a particular organism as this landscape of fitness shifts its shape beneath it.

As the environment to which your genes have adapted changes, you may find that the evolutionary summit you’ve once ascended is suddenly a valley.

 

We’ve seen the rates of depression[4], anxiety[5] and suicide[6]  skyrocket among young adults and children. Our attention spans have been getting worse[7][8]. Opioid crises ravage countries such as the US[9]–and, as most see it, this is not great but overall we’re better. Obesity epidemic[10] aside, a common inability to sleep unmedicated[11] aside, we have greater luxuries and live lives much improved compared to previous generations. “So what?” if the first thing I do every morning is check my phone, that’s an easy fix; no big deal.

And that’s true.

Except, that we’re not minding, fundamentally, why this is happening; the root cause to these symptoms, and the subsequent implications. That though it may not seem this way at first, the habitat of our species, too, has transformed dramatically over the past few decades.

The argument I’ll make today is simple: That our present surrounding environment—though it may seem roughly similar to the way it was a century ago—is anything but. I’ll derive from this a new category of existential risk, and follow it by introducing some bad solutions we’re likely to attempt but that will not work as well as one flawed solution that will work, but that we’re, frankly, very unlikely to attain. And finally, I’ll make the case that endeavoring toward that very solution is no less than the single greatest moral imperative of our time.

 

 

The Comfort Warrior knows this intuitively, not skewed by a life lived for many decades outside comfort’s oversaturated influence; by a youth of habits resistant to it, by mistaking it for luxury. He/she are the canary in the coal mine. They know it on their skin. They know the very real horror of not being able to trust yourself to maintain a semblance of dignity. Not being able to trust yourself with freedom.

Because if despite your best efforts at discipline you still find yourself at rock-bottom time and time again, then something, clearly, is very wrong. If cognitive, physical and emotional fitness are what you’re going for, not necessarily always aware of it—likely not—but during rare moments of intense clarity understand with clear-visioned certainty that you are not the way you should be, and yet despite that you still continually fail at your efforts—then something, undoubtedly, has gone terribly awry.

And it may be that you’re fighting the wrong fight; engaged all this time in combat with an enemy unknown. That you don’t lack passion, but that you’ve been consumed by it. That following your intuition has failed you, that seeking discipline congruently is precisely what has led you again and again to disaster.

So educate yourself on the topic of superstimuli. It’s time you’ve understood that which you’ve been facing,

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Mediate between thought-suppression and cognitive-reappraisal with expression.”                     

 

You can’t distinguish popularity from lowest-common-denominators. That’s prima facie obvious, common agreement is situated within what’s most commonly agreed upon—and it’s why the Comfort War will only ever be overcome by individuals.

Crowd-sourcing anything, be it opinions, governments, economies or otherwise—will cater, always, to the most base notions the mob can corral upon. Supernormal stimuli will—systemically—entrench itself into every facet of a popularized environment simply by virtue of its thoughtless, deceitful appeal.

Only few outliers, employing choice and personal responsibility, pursuing meaning and clarity will overcome the challenge it presents. By associating freely, in an environment in which personal actions carry personal consequence, the individual thrives.

 

 

The Comfort Warrior seeks that, an environment that culturally selects. He/she has been eviscerated by supernormal stimulus. They’re stuck, depleted, frustrated. They find themselves time and time again at rock-bottom—woefully unsuccessful despite their very best efforts. But it isn’t the case, as they may feel, that they lack passion. No, they have ambition in abundance—raging within them. But they’ve been consumed by it. They’ve used comfort to dull its incessant demands.

And so to succeed, they must overcome themselves, sustaining a life ungratified by cheap stimuli, enlisting in self-discovery, in confronting their fears—rising up to live life in all the glory and beauty it has to offer.

 

 

Here, I’ll discuss a simple thing: that we never needed to understand superstimulus to be incentivized to perpetuate it.

Think about it this way: Does a news company need to understand why puppy-stories and click-bait generate more clicks? Does a marketing company need to recognize why focus-groups favor the smell of one product over another? Irrespective of rhyme or reason, voilà! Fluff pieces overtake the industry and consumer products are impregnated[1] with odors that fetuses gain preference to via vicarious maternal exposure[2][3][4].

 

When statesmen and religious leaders call the shots they use repression to control the masses. As of May 2015[5], 92{d0939f169729a67927ea5cd6f72c4436d4d03a1d6e30c1db7ef52ac4db655cdd} of married women in Egypt have undergone genital mutilation. During the Cultural Revolution in China, women were forced to wear a unisex uniform with short hair and the enjoyment of sex, as well as spontaneous un-centrally planned engagement in it was disallowed[6]. During the 1970s millions were tortured and killed in Cambodia, many for being academics or merely wearing eyeglasses[7]. During the White Terror campaign of the Spanish Civil War, an estimated 200,000 civilians were killed, targeting heavily writers, artists, teachers and professors[8].

Yet when the mass calls the shots, different tactics are employed. Edward Bernays—nephew of Sigmund Frued and father of public relations—boasted of this in his 1928 book titled Propaganda[9].

He claimed responsibility for playing on people irrational, subconscious emotions and having directly caused by use of this method the popularization of smoking among women, the bacon and eggs American breakfast, adding fluoride to the water, framing WWI as “bringing democracy to Europe”, overthrowing the democratically elected president of Guatemala in the service...

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“For an addict, it’s not unreasonable to take radical steps toward self-betterment.”                   

 

Suppose you considered yourself addicted to supernormal stimulus. You’d notice of course, that its presence was pervasive and all around you—almost like you were an alcoholic working at a bar. Except, that in this case—the case of supernormal stimuli—you’re not afforded ultimate control over your sensory intake. Good luck trying to block out sights, sounds, smells or otherwise; especially those focus-grouped and continuously engineered to better hijack your attention.

This reality, rather, of addiction to comfort, is more like trying to quit voluntary alcoholic consumption, while being subjected to forced-down hourly shots of vodka.

 

 

Here, I will examine the Comfort War through the lens of addiction; providing a rough outline of the scientific phenomena that I often refer to as being “consumed by passion”. The Comfort Warrior finds his/herself distraught, feeling that they lack the faintest sense of motivation within a life saturated by meaninglessness—and yet that could not be further from the truth. A roaring ambition resides deep within them. It is only that they’ve been overcome by its constant obsessive intensity; that they’ve suffocated it under layers of comfortable indulgence. Consumed by their own passion, prone to bouts of despair and frustration, they are for brief moments, vividly aware that they are not themselves—they are not the way they should be. Only by leaving themselves ungratified by cheap stimuli, does it surface their awareness in a booming riotous salvo of self-discovery, self-discipline, and the pursuit of clarity.

 

 

Let start by examining dopamine and endorphins. To briefly describe the function of these brain chemicals, we’ll take a look at two studies conducted on mice.

In the first[1], researchers genetically knocked out their dopamine receptors, and the mice would not eat food that was placed right in front of them—and would starve to death. However, they would enjoy, chew and swallow food that was placed in their mouths directly.

In the second[2], researchers knocked out the endorphin receptors of infant mice, and when separated from their mother, they would not cry out to her—despite this behavior constituting a death sentence in the wild[3].

Dopamine is a stimulant that incentives us to pursue and to seek, endorphins are indigenous morphine-like substances that make possible the experience of love—literally passion—while also acting as a natural pain-killer and inducing a sense of oblivion.

 

In gratifying our senses, adapting them to increasing levels of stimulation, we desensitize the same mechanism that drives us forward. In experiencing trauma, loneliness, or any other form of psychological pathology we pine for replacing this cardinal sense of inattention, of escaping ourselves, of comfort. Keith Richards, the (The) Rolling Stones’ guitarist, said of his heroin-dependence: “the contortions that we go through, just not to be ourselves for a few hours”[4].

 

And yet, despite this result, your dopaminergic neuro-adaptation can be remediated by leaving it unstimulated. Just like if you were to get used to a strong smell, or bright light, but given enough time without it, reset back to normalcy. This has been aptly demonstrated by the research of Drs. Douglas J. Lisle and Alan Goldhamer, authors of the book The Pleasure Trap[5], who took patients accustomed to junk food, and returned them to a state of finding nutritious, healthy foods to be delicious.

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Live outside the pursuit of happiness.”                        

 

There are two traps, I’d say, that’ll lead you to gorge on supernormal stimuli; overextension and excess. Overextension occurs when you’ve strained yourself past your tolerance, you’re unable to calm or pay attention, and your subconscious takes over—engaging in activities you wouldn’t choose mindfully. Excess occurs when you’re well-rested, full of energy, but not engaging in anything meaningful or productive; lazing about. You crave fulfillment, and by not attending to this need, are driven to cheap domanergic gratification.

 

 

This is what it means to be consumed by your own passion. It is the common starting position for those enlisted into the Comfort War. See, a great desire will lead you to one of two certain outcomes: it either bolsters your efforts, or consumes you entirely—and the Comfort Warrior has been consumed. To achieve the former he/she must be willing to become obsessed, and confront their fears.

 

 

Here, I’d like to go past the first two fundamental methods of the Comfort War—the MR and unconditional ruleset—and suggest a variating that specifically targets these traps of excess and overextension. To do this, we’ll take the 24h day cycle as our level of analysis, and implement a pre-dawn and post-dusk MR. Obviously, each of our lives comes with unique constraints that may or may not fit this model; decide for yourself if this applies.

 

To start, let’s look at these terms: overextension occurs when you require rest and sleep, excess occurs when you require taking action and enduring difficulty. So in a sense, the post-dusk MR is to extract you out of a state of restlessness and into the embrace of sleep, and the pre-dawn MR is to extract you out of lazy fatigue and into confronting life (and potentially pain).

 

The savagery demanded of you, willing to accept hardship, to confront your fears and thrive of stress—to ‘unleash the beast’ sort-of-speak—is congruent with the normal conduct of the pre-dawn MR; self-discovery and the practice of leaving yourself ungratified by cheap stimuli to the point when your ambition erupts and ensues entirely.

 

As for the post-dusk MR, yielding to the clutches of rest and sleep, there’s a slightly different angle I’d like for you to consider. Sleep is a strange dynamic, and lately, I’d say we haven’t been good at it. We find ourselves awake at night, until we’re not, and tired in the morning, just until the moment we aren’t. Superstimuli has had a profound effect in this regard; in the US alone, an estimated 86 million people are literally incapable of preforming this basic bodily function, requiring an annual total of $41 billion in sleeping aids and remedies to sleep[1].

 

Sleep is when we are at our most vulnerable, and it is often associated with death. We’re helpless in that state; the threat “I’ll kill you in your sleep” signifies just that. There’s an old religious myth that sleep in equivalent to one sixtieth of death[2] , and to die in your sleep is often considered the most peaceful way to go. It’s remarkable, really, how well we’ve been able to integrate this fragility as a staple of daily life to the point of seamless reliability. During his time with the Amazonian Pirahã tribe, Daniel Everett noted that they took naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours, and rarely slept through an entire night—warning him: “don’t sleep, there are snakes”[3].

 

If you’ve ever been able to stop and calmly observe yourself when caught-up in one of those zero dark thi...

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Consider your origin story.”

 

We all love a good ‘rise from the ashes’ tale. Our superheroes who overcome a great tormented past, the homeless man turned real-estate tycoon, an underdog athlete overcoming great odds; the list is without end.

But what of those raised in comfort?

Without a strong driven sense of clarity, those instilled with comfort are fighting against something far less determinable. Worse yet, they are too often inclined to underestimate it, and perpetually fail.

 

If you find yourself spread-thin, wavering between periods of intense energy and exhausted apathy, if you find that despite your efforts, you’re not objectively better at the end of the day, if you find your sense of aspiration dulled and eroded—it may be that you’ve been fighting the wrong fight, engaged all this time in combat with an enemy unknown.

The Comfort Warrior finds his/herself so; frustrated, desperate, unable to move forward in any way that’s congruent. They are not themselves, their deepest passions engulfed by supernormal stimuli, unavailing but for cheap indulgence and vicarious pining. They do not lack a strong sense of drive, they’ve been consumed by it.

Yet from within their hopeless condition, they recklessly and defiantly enlist. They become informed, they pursue clarity, ungratified by staged euphoria. They discover themselves from within a brutal chaotic struggle, confronting fear and stress, molding it, and their ambition erupts.

The only obstacle in the way of this enemy earning your respect, is understanding it. left unnoticed, subtly effective, it seems to pose no great threat, yet once realized, it obstinately reveals itself as an apparent, grand endeavor.

Once you understand the challenge posed by supernormal stimulus, you recognize it for what it is; momentous.

Once you understand the tyranny of your subconscious, formed under this influence, that your neurological underpinnings are pervasively inclined toward thought-suppression over cognitive reappraisal, that following your intuitive tendencies in an attempt to make things better leads to making them worse. There’s no other way to slice it, it’s nothing short of insidious. And to be doubtful of that is indicative of a Warrior’s mindset, an often-warranted and skeptic dismissal of cowering behind the maternal dress of self-victimhood; but ultimately, it is just prideful and ignorant. Perhaps it is courageous to laugh in the face of terror, challenging its claim on reality, but never to make light of endeavors you’ve yet to apprehend. Sure, it’s the sort of thing that’s the right strategy against hardship, but not against comfort. Respect all challenges! Take heed! Especially of those you’ve so consistently been unable to overcome.

Without an origin story, liberating yourself from both your nature and your nurture is truly heroic.

 

I think that, in this sense, the Comfort War calls for a sort-of “low resolution” overview or map that describes these rational, intricate dynamics in a way that is more immediately realizable and accessible.

I think that this is integral to you never falling for the trap of underestimating the onerous challenge before you; to have terms with which to define it.

However crudely, I’ll attempt to present that here. I’ll outline the fundamental differences between the challenges posed by hardship and posed by comfort, and specifically those two because they are what I view to be the Warrior’s primordial trials; hardship the one we’ve accustomed ourselves to, and comfort the one newly arisen.

The familiar and intuitive crucible of hardship being more congruent, it presents a firm baseline from which to extend and extrapolate onto the challenge of comfort, as well as to serve a warning.

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Become as capable as the weapon you wield.”

 

In his 1977 article “The Theory of Affordances”[1] psychologist James J. Gibson describes the world as perceived through a lens of all “action possibilities” latent in the environment. For understanding what this means, I particularly like an example given by Professor Jordan B. Peterson. It goes something like this: ask yourself, what constitutes a chair? Well, you might say, maybe a flat surface upon 4 legs. But that’s obviously wrong, because what if it had 3 legs? Or no legs at all? Is a tree stump a chair? Okay, what about a bean bag? What about a rooftop? Quickly, it becomes apparent, rather, that a chair is in fact just a “thing you sit on”. And this is not only how we categorize but how we literally see the world, by means of utility, as has been further demonstrated by the famous visual cliff experiments[2].

What this signifies, is that we live and organize ourselves within a world of tools. Most of which, we create; neither objectively good or bad, but determined by the ways in which we use them. Fire, the wheel, gun powder, steam engines, nuclear fission, encryption.

So capable are these peripherals we’ve constructed, that the mutual and assured destruction of our species along with the utter devastation of our planet for eons to come has just been narrowly avoided at least 5 times already just in recent history[3][4][5][6][7]. It’s clear that fundamentally, with these tools being inanimate, all that mediates how they are used is us as individuals; the actions we take, our character—how we conduct ourselves and how we organize. Yet it seems, despite that, that we take great faith and aim ourselves toward the improving of the capabilities of these tools themselves, not necessarily matched by our moral caliber. In fact, the call-to-arms of the Comfort War is precisely telling of a phenomenon acting as a force opposed to this—the degredation of our cognitive capabilities. Supernormal stimulus serves this purpose astoundingly well, targeting our attention span, but not at all mediating our aversions toward careless action. It forms the incentive structure for self-inflicted detriment. In intuitively seeking comfort, we lessen ourselves constantly, incapacitating our abilities. What will be the consequence of that?

 

If you find yourself numb, empty and uneasy—if you’re unsatisfied, wishing to improve but yet incapable—if despite having tried every trick in the book, and giving it your all, you still find yourself pitted against rock bottom, unable to conquer that which you care about most, helplessly dejected—it may be because you’re fighting the wrong guy. It may be that you’re facing an enemy unknown. It may be that, in fact, you have within you a maelstrom of driven ambition, awesome and terrifying. That you do not lack passion in the least, no; that you’ve been consumed by it. That out of fear and unpreparedness you’ve taken to comforts just to dull this inherent intensity—to suffocate it, suppress it—leaving it to wreak havoc unattended. You notice this only during rare moments of desperate self-realization. When confronted by the frustration that you are not “you”—you’re not the way you should be.

As the Comfort Warrior enlists in this endeavor to counteract cheap pleasures, he/she endures hardship and undoes this over-stimulated desensitization in their pursuit of clarity. And before long, they recover the first victim of their previously-accustomed numbed-state of brain-fog; empathy. Once confronted with pain, forced to face it head-on, to look it straight in the eye,

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Clarity can be thought of as the third derivative of a self–actualization function.”

 

Before I get any further into this idea on maths and method, I should address first an obvious flaw; Namely, that thinking humanity a concept abstract enough to qualify for the rigor demanded by the formal sciences is precisely the sort of egregious mistake that has led us in the past to conclusions such as those of Karl Pearson and his equation of inferior races[1]. It is the mistake we make when we attempt to correlate the unquantifiable with the unrelated, it’s akin to hocus-pocus of astrologists, the gobbledygook of witch-doctors, or the occasional Nobel prize awarded to an economist.[2]

Yet these unsightly follies notwithstanding, it would remiss of us to wholeheartedly ignore the considerable merit arithmetic operations can offer in other areas of our lives. The insightful words of Viktor Frankl come to mind, enriching us in his description of desperation by an equation:

“D = S – M”[3]; suffering without meaning. Or likewise, in the epic tale that gave rise to the Dark Forest theory, building upon the 2 axioms and 2 concepts of cosmic sociology.[4] In this sense such ideas are confined beyond the realm of certainty or prediction; narrowed exclusively, rather, into a line of thought—but a line nonetheless, from which one may infer a direction.

 

The individual engaged in the Comfort War is similarly confined; unable to think clearly, aware of his/herself and discontent by it but only for brief moments, consumed by their own insatiable passion, succumbing to an ever-encroaching pervasiveness of cheap comforts, spread-thin by a deafening, yet unknown challenge. He/she finds their redemption in clarity, in pursuing it—even if only for its own sake. They unleash their sense of drive and obsession by leaving it ungratified by prefabricated stimulus; by uncovering and molding their fear. They learn eventually to thrive off stress, and experience like they never have, or could ever expect before. After all, this is the crux of finding yourself in the Comfort War; the lack of clarity. And in the simple and consistent dedication to a daily reminder—lies all the potential in the world.

 

 

So, let’s go on and establish this premise—and should you accept it—the mathematical implications. First, let’s suppose an aggregated combination of all the measures an individual seeks to self-actualize, folded into a single dimension and plotted on a y-axis as it relates to time. What we have as a result is a simple motion graph; position over time.

 

This “position”, as you can imagine—your position as you relate to self-actualization—must be uniquely described. Skills, as we’re all aware, tend to have distinct limits; this is often portrayed with an S curve[5]—arching both near the upper and lower margins.

As you improve at anything, your progress is at first slow, then considerable, and finally curbed again near the boundaries of human potential. But that, of course, isn’t the end of the story—because at that lower limit, with every small improvement, you’re several multiples better than your old self, and at the very top—every bloody inch counts.

For example, ever since people have begun keeping track, a sub-4 minute mile has been broken over 6000 times by athlete runners. 3:55 has been broken roughly 1400 times. 3:50 has been broken roughly 151 times, and 3:45 has been broken 6 times by a total of 3 men[6]. One could argue whether or not a 3:40 mile is even possible, but what is undeniable is that the closer we’ve gotten to such a potential limit,

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Find liberty in a solution precisely calibrated to your circumstance; the hardship you elect.”

 

 

The Comfort War is a path; it’s a discipline for those of a unique condition. Those who find themselves at rock bottom, despite their best efforts. They’ve been consumed by their passion, by their own ravenous desire, suppressed it with layers upon layers of stimulated comfort, only to experience a pervasive state of “brain fog” alongside bouts of desperate frustration as a result. From this unique condition arise both the circumstance as well as the method of dealing with it; a precisely calibrated solution.

It’s a solution for individuals in your exact condition with these exact strengths and weaknesses; though you are deficient in the area of clear-thinking, your passion is fervent. This means you don’t require an arousal of ambition, but only the means to combat the clouding of your perception. You therefore instill a simple system: consistent dedication to an abstract notion—a daily Manual Reset, and passion ensues. Your greatest strength is the intensity of that vigor (which has made you so susceptible to its suppression in the first place), and therefore you need not worry about what comes after clarity is regained, as passion erupts on its own, this I assure you. As it stands, only our kind is capable of both crafting and enduring such insane desperation—that which has led you to whole-hearted commitment in the first place—use that to your advantage.

A daily commitment to an MR is a daily commitment to the fact that you fundamentally accept that what you seek is outside of your current capability; that you’ve chosen the pursuit of improving it as such. Try as we might, no single-moment of clarity–however great–will snap us out of years of faulty-habits. No single-commitment can be pursued in a solely conscious manner. Such a thing would require us to instantly master conscious thought; brandishing it, commanding it to our every beck and call, but you’ve tried that already and know the result for yourself, haven’t you?

Maintaining enough consciousness so as to slowly change your subconscious is achievable, but it is not a process during which your consciousness is absolute and never-faltering.  That is what I offer in the pursuit of clarity itself, and although it is not enough—it is the missing piece. As we’ve identified previously, once thought suppression is sufficiently practiced, you become “programmed” with the habit to “just not think about it”—whatever “it” may be. You’ll go off on reoccurring auto-piloted, pain-suppressing pursuits of comfort whenever faced with (ever increasing) negative emotional impulses. Thus, you are not only left with the inclinations to perform your worst behaviors, but this emotional experience isn’t achieved consciously, and is therefore nearly impossible to learn from or address in a rational manner (ever regret something immediately after doing it, commit to never do it again, and repeat it sometime later?). These suppressed emotions build up until they are eventually released in a destructive outburst—only to somewhat calm, then rinse and repeat; it’s a cycle that seems to suppress the exact faculties needed to extract yourself out of it.

This is an important point; by doing so, supernormal stimuli acts in a positive-feedback loop, self-perpetuating and self-enforcing. To this, again, we must calibrate our solution.

The exact details as to why privacy, difficulty and reduced stimuli work as they do to extract you from this numbed state are perhaps for another time. Nevertheless, this is a notion I must make clear: by your apprehensive aversion to it you can often judge the effectiveness of the MR because of this insidious trait of comfort, entrenching itself in the strong aversions it instills towards countermeasures. You can see, therefore,

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“To nullify discomfort is to nullify your very ability to endure emotion; it is to nullify and erode both ends of life’s spectrum of experience. “

I’d argue that the most intense of emotions are inherently taxing. Not only do stress and frustration require effort to contain, but even moments of great joy can often be difficult to bear; they too are strenuous and demand enduring. I argue that both difficulty and joy are conditions of restlessness that are an integral part of the human condition. To subdue one is to subdue the other; the subduing of life itself.

 

 

You see, combat can be spent unknowingly. If you’re stuck, depleted or frustrated—despite your best efforts—it may be because you’re fighting the wrong guy.

I was. In what I call “cycles of attrition”, I would waver between periods of intense energy and exhausted apathy. I tried every trick in the book to get inspired, but somehow none of it ever came to fruition. I wasn’t objectively better at the end of the day. If anything, these repeated efforts eroded my sense of aspiration. What was the point of riding the waves of ambition only to crash onto the shores of failure?

And there was nothing for me, nothing there, nothing to hold onto to. Except misery and self-hatred, of course. But you can’t even hold onto that, at this point you’re too fragile, too empty; in this state motivation is altogether blunted, inaccessible. And you don’t know what to expect from a different course of action, you can’t even understand it, or distinguish what the alternative is. I can tell you of it, that it is a wild beast so ferociously eager to live, but it is inaccessible to you now. Though you need not worry about seeking or sparking it.

As I’ve said before, I believe that the only way you can reach this condition is if you have already a tremendous, deep-seated desire burning within you. This passion leaves you with one of two certain outcomes: it will bolster your efforts, or consume you entirely; achieve, or desperately suppress. Eventually I learned, that the difference between those two outcomes, is whether or not you are able to regularly confront your passion, to mold it, and learn to control it in its own irrational reality. To leave it ungratified by cheap stimuli, and let it rise and surge. To confront your frustrations rather than suppress them, to mold them, to discover yourself. As I pursued clarity, as I discovered myself, I discovered someone already driven. “My god”, it occurred to me, “there was no need to attain spirit, only unleash it”.

 

 

For my entire life, I’ve thought of motivation as the short-lasting bursts of energy one might get every so often. In regards to my ambitions, I thought it was impossible to consistently “feel like it”.

But in reality, passion was an innate sense of drive that could consistently called-upon and lived-by through the confronting, manipulating, and thriving off of stress.

See, stress is inherently there so it can be used for your advantage; this is the purpose of the stress response. When your brain detects a stressful situation, a series of interactions between your endocrine glands in the brain and kidneys (called the HPA axis) cause the release of the cortisol, adrenaline and norepinephrine hormones (among others) into your body in order to prime you for immediate action. This reaction is meant to benefit you by elevating your heart rate and giving you a burst of focus and energy—it even boosts your immune system[1]—so that you can better address the situation at hand.

But we don’t see it this way, do we?

The problem, as mentioned earlier, is that we use thought suppression rather than cognitive reappraisal to deal with our feeling this way. It doesn’t resolve anything, only postpones and makes matters worse. You get used to distracting yourself,

Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“If you, despite you best efforts, despite your frequent willingness to dedicate yourself entirely to self–discipline, are nevertheless stuck, depleted, frustrated and unsuccessful—then there is exactly one, recklessly defiant way in which you should go about it; a Comfort War.”

 

 

What I’ve just described are unique conditions; your unique conditions. Because they are specific, I can make a few axiomatic assumptions and then extrapolate to their logical conclusion. So, in the next hour I’ll build such a case, beginning with the familiar and expanding into the unforeseen, and this will be the jist of it: You’ve been consumed by your own passion. You don’t lack motivation, no, you have it in abundance. So much so, that you’ve become overwhelmed by it and suppressed it with layers upon layers of comfort, allowing it, inadvertently, to swallow you whole. Your desire is so fervent, so overbearing, that by leaving such a beast unattended, it wreaks havoc, devouring every shred of stimuli it can get its hands on just to satiate its need. This creates a deep incongruence within you, and it is why you’re frustrated; because you are not you—you’re not the way you should be. What you may feel is a total, unavailing, miserable need for cheap gratification is only a reaction, in fact, of a nullified, equally ravenous and fervent desire for real fulfillment—one that might put even the Greats to shame. Think of Joe Louis, Sonny Liston or Aaron Pryor, for example, who reigned as tremendous world boxing champions but later, after retirement, turned to drugs and alcohol to fulfil their need; you’ve been consumed by your own passion.

This being the case, you only have one logical alternative to your current circumstance—to become obsessed; to center your entire life around meaningful pursuit. Yet incidentally, seeing as you don’t have any “middle-ground” or a “balanced” option available to you, the challenges ahead are far different for you than for those combating hardship. You, my friend, are at war with comfort. And that, is a fact far more insidious than you may imagine.

 

Now, there’s a lot to get into here, but seeing how this is the very first podcast, I’ll briefly cover the basic premise of these installments. Most important, is that in light of the outstanding amount of misinformation that’s currently out there, you understand what makes this podcast different, and worth your time. So know this:

1st. The most crucial, need to know, step-by-step information is available to you now in the Comfort War book which can be downloaded directly from the site comfortwar.com. The podcast, in essence, is only to sustain you in the efforts already detailed there.

2nd. This podcast is about a few things, but primarily it’s about perspective and ideas. In each of these I’ll present a rational, well-researched idea, along with a transcript and citations for you to scrutinize. I’ll do so by keeping my incentives honest in the most anti-Machiavellian means possible, providing free access in return for support only if you found the information valuable thereafter, and all proceeds go to further this effort.

These two are the rules of this podcast, allowing it to survive and thrive only through the use of reason and by providing value. You may find that in your life, perspective—the very way in which you see—is currently inseparable from your experiences. And with these ideas, that is what I intend to disrupt; the very way in which you see. By allowing you to regularly introduce yourself to a mindset so far outside your own, this external intervention, should you seek it, enables even your self-perception to undergo drastic change.

 

 

So, back to business. Let’s get right into it, shall we? And where better than by describing the enemy?

In today’s self-help, we try and focus our efforts on how to get rich...