Make It Hard, But Don't Die
Do you ever look around and think about what a nice comfortable life you have? You have food whenever you want food, you have clean water that flows out of any tap you turn on, you have a safe place to sleep every night, you have a good job and you have people around you who love you.
That’s a good life, no?
Society certainly tells us it is.
Last week I was on a call with Michael Easter, the author of The Comfort Crisis.
His research says otherwise.
We evolved to seek comfort because that kept us alive. We evolved in dangerous environments. We learned to find shelter as soon as it started to trickle and get a little bit cold, because maybe there was a one in 300 chance that a blizzard was coming in. Without shelter, the blizzard meant death. We had to do hard things and solve problems every day – search for food, fend off dangerous animals, find a safe place to sleep.
Now we don’t have to do anything difficult. We can literally survive on 2000 steps a day because there is food everywhere. Most of us don’t have any real problems – the world is far less problematic today than it was for all of history.
We should be happy, content and satisfied. But we are not – we are less satisfied and we have skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety.
It’s because our brain keeps looking for problems – it wants to solve puzzles and seek comfort because that’s what kept us alive. In the absence of any real problems we lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. A problem gets redefined. So as the world has gotten better and better our problems have gotten progressively more trivial - the temporary lack of wi-fi, the blisters from the new shoes, the slow delivery of take-out.
It's literally the science of the ‘first-world problem’. Michael Easter shows how our modern-day comforts and lack of problems are linked to obesity, chronic disease, depression, feeling a lack of meaning.
Many of us have no idea what our potential is. We don’t want to test our limits.
Dr Marcus Elliott, Harvard medical school graduate and one of the world’s foremost sports scientists, explains it this way; Draw a big circle – let’s say your potential is that big circle. How much of that circle are you living in now? “We have no idea what exists on the edges of our potential. And by not having any idea what it’s like out on the edge…man, we really miss something vital.”
You know where this goes.
We need to step outside our comfort zone. Far outside it.
Michael says we need to mimic the challenges that we humans used to face out in nature all the time. He calls it a ‘misogi’ (taken from the Japanese ritual of water cleansing done by standing under an icy waterfall). You can think of it as a hard task; a ‘circumnavigation of the edges of human potential’.
Elliott, says “I believe people have innate evolutionary machinery that gets triggered when they go out and do really *expletive* hard things.”
Many tribes still incorporate a misogi in what we think of as a ‘rite of passage’. For example, the young men of the Aboriginal people went on “walkabout”. Young men in the Maasai tribe would be sent into the savannah alone to hunt a lion with a spear. Nez Perce Native Americans would walk into the mountains or desert unarmed and without food to spend about a week in solitude.
They left as one person and came out the other side as a new person.
The closest we have to this in modern life is in the military; military boot camp (Guy knows all about this).
Michael is convinced that by putting ourselves in hard situations we can push back at the comfort creep that has taken over our lives and we can dramatically improve our overall mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing. We can shift our perspective.
Forcing ourselves to do hard stuff also means that when something else comes up in life we can draw on our learning and experience. We can say, I am good at solving problems, I have solved problems harder than this before. The ‘I have figured it out before’ value is very important.
He has two main rules for a misogi.
Rule One: Don’t Die (somewhat obvious you might say).
Rule Two: Make it Really Hard.
He defines ‘really hard’ as something that you reckon you only have a fifty percent chance of completing.
If you regularly run, then running a marathon, for example, is probably not a misogi. Running 100 miles across the desert might be though.
My mind is reeling from this concept. I have done some hard-ish stuff – run a few marathons, set up a business, I did a trek this year. I was outside my comfort zone on the trek but I don’t think I ever thought I wouldn’t complete it.
I need something harder.
This was hard-ish, but not hard enough.
The idea of dying without ever having really pushed myself scares me a little. Does it you?
When you think hard about this, do you feel the pull? The pull out into the wild and into something really tough?
Or do you see this as a step too far and there’s no way you are intentionally pushing yourself to the limit?
I would love to hear!
As an aside, going through a bear market is tough – clearly not a misogi (you are definitely not going to die), but tough nonetheless. The thing about investing is the learning and experience. The longer you invest for, the more bear markets you will go through. When we are deep in it (now) and you are not sure if you can make it through, look back at the others you experienced. You came out the other side then. You will do it again now.
Georgie
georgie@libertywealth.ky