We’ve kind of convinced ourselves that indulgences are mostly sinful; that comfort food are mostly junk-ish food, that relaxation which tend to mean loss of productivity is bad. Our mental accounting systems and association of life with transactional relationships are almost completely distorted by our market-based interactions with the rest of the world.
It’s mostly cultural, and the mental wiring that is cultural can be changed. Look at how hailing a cab now involves using an app; and look at shopping, it’s mostly looking at screens too. That changed in less than a decade. We’ve become increasingly conditioned to love ‘convenience’ and ‘cheap thrills’.
This combination is a complex; because convenience is for the sake of saving time, of saving ‘hassle’ but those hassle that we imagine can be what true life is mostly made of – that we can have serendipitous moments and discovery because of the hassle we go through. And then the time saved is spent on cheap thrills, doom-scrolling through instagram and TikTok. Is that what life has come to be about? What are we running away from?
We’ve turned away from healthy life and healthy comforts. Comforts beyond the kind of physical pain and pleasure can mostly be slowly conditioned and acquired. And there’s goodness and richness in the healthy. If only we can work out a self-reinforcing loop and complex to achieve that. Pause for a moment to think through the healthy things you want to do, put them into a nice loop, a great cycle. Listen to James Clear on Dare to Lead podcast.