Flow State

In my last couple of posts about The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, I talked about prevalence-induced concept change—the idea that when problems become rare, we start redefining smaller and smaller things as problems.

Closely related to that idea is another one Easter talks about: comfort creep.

Comfort creep is simple.

Once we experience a certain level of comfort, it quietly becomes the new normal.

Then we start optimizing for even more comfort.

Not because we need it.
Just because it’s available.

Air conditioning becomes climate control.

Driving somewhere means driving to the closest possible parking spot.

Waiting two days for a package becomes an unbearable delay if it isn’t delivered tomorrow.

Comfort keeps creeping upward, and our tolerance for inconvenience creeps downward.

And before long, we find ourselves complaining about things that would have seemed like science fiction luxuries a few generations ago.

The Goal: Whine Less

One thing I’ve been thinking about as I approach another lap around the sun is this:

I’d like to complain less.

Not because there aren’t real problems in the world. There are.

But because I’m increasingly aware of how often I’m complaining about things that are really just minor inconveniences.

Slow internet.

A line somewhere.

A minor plan change.

None of these is actually a problem.

They’re just moments where my expectations of comfort were slightly interrupted.

That’s comfort creep talking.

Saturday Morning Reminder

I had a small reminder of this on Saturday.

A co-worker mentioned the day before that they were speaking on a panel about Veterans in the Arts at a local college. It sounded interesting, so I went.

And it was.

Not only was the panel interesting, but I also met a few people beforehand who had incredible stories—people who had served, people who had turned their experiences into music or writing or art, people doing genuinely fascinating things with their lives.

The whole evening made me realize something.

There are amazing things happening everywhere.

Talks.

Lectures.

Art shows.

Music.

Game communities.

Sports events.

Museums.

People doing creative, interesting, meaningful things.

And most of us miss them.

Not because we can’t find them.

Because we’re sitting on the couch looking at our phones.

Coincidentally, my best friend texted me he was on a party bus to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in some small Wisconsin town.  He was doing it.  Out there, meeting people, having fun.  More of that!

The Doom Scroll Trap

The internet has an amazing ability to make the world seem terrible and boring at the same time.

Scroll through your feed, and it looks like the entire world consists of:

• bots
• partisan rage
• people arguing
• people selling something
• people complaining about other people

That environment keeps us glued to our phones.

Which is convenient for a wide range of interests—advertisers, platforms, political operatives, and anyone who benefits from attention and outrage.

But while we’re staring at that little glowing rectangle, we’re missing something much more interesting:

the real world.

The one where people are building things, creating things, telling stories, and doing genuinely interesting work.

My “60th Lap” Plan

So one of my small goals as I head toward my 60th lap around the sun is this:

Be aware of comfort creep.

Recognize when I’m defining problems down..

And most importantly:

Spend more time doing things than scrolling about things.

This isn’t going to be a strict “less screen time” rule.

Instead, it’s going to be something more positive.

Go out and see things.

Attend things I know nothing about.

Random lectures.

Museum exhibits.

Local music.

Art scenes.

Game scenes.

Sports.

Panels.

Community events.

Whatever.

There’s an incredible amount of interesting stuff happening in the world.

It just requires one uncomfortable step:

leaving the house.

The Antidote to Comfort Creep

Comfort creep tells us to stay where things are easiest.

The couch is comfortable.

The phone is comfortable.

The algorithm serves up things we already agree with.

But the real antidote might be something simple:

Get out.

Go somewhere unfamiliar.

Talk to people.

Listen to someone’s story.

See something you didn’t expect.

Comfort might creep.

But curiosity can creep too.

And I’m hoping to let that one creep a little more this year.

Here’s something that annoys me way more than it should.

My weather app currently says:
High: 42
Low: 35

Cool. Got it.

Also my weather app:
Current temperature: 25

…excuse me?

So at some point, without notifying anyone, we decided to just… blow past the low? Like it was more of a suggestion? A vibe? A loose guideline?

And the best part—they don’t update it.

Not like:
“Hey, quick correction—turns out 35 was wildly optimistic. New low: 25. Our bad.”

Nope. They just leave it there.
Like I’m not looking directly at the number.

This happens all the time. More often than not, honestly. The forecast is basically that friend who says, “I’ll be there in 10 minutes,” and then shows up an hour later with Starbucks and no explanation.

I’m not asking for perfection. Weather is complicated. Science is hard. Clouds are sneaky.

But if the temperature is already LOWER than your predicted low… maybe… just maybe… update the low?

Otherwise, what are we even doing here?  Other than telling me, “hey, we got it wrong…again”

In my last post, I talked about a concept from The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter called prevalence-induced concept change—the idea that when problems become rare, we expand the definition of what counts as a problem.

The more I think about it, the more it connects to a theme I’ve been writing about here for a while: Less Is More.

At first glance that phrase sounds like minimalism. Fewer possessions. Less clutter. Maybe a clean desk and three shirts hanging in the closet.

But the idea Easter is getting at goes deeper than that.

It’s about removing some comfort on purpose.

The Problem With Perfect Comfort

Modern life is incredibly comfortable.

• Climate-controlled homes
• Food is available 24 hours a day
• Entertainment instantly available
• GPS so we never get lost
• Online shopping, so we don’t even have to leave the couch

None of these things are bad. In fact, they’re amazing when you step back and think about them.

But there’s a strange side effect.

When life becomes frictionless, our tolerance for friction disappears.

Small inconveniences suddenly feel like real problems.

The internet is slow.

The coffee line is long.

The streaming service doesn’t have the show we want.

None of these would even register as issues to someone living a hundred years ago. But our brains recalibrate to the environment we live in.

And our environment has almost no hardship.

Humans Were Built for Some Hardness

Easter argues that humans evolved in environments that regularly included challenge:

• physical exertion
• hunger between meals
• cold
• uncertainty
• boredom

Those weren’t occasional experiences. They were normal parts of life.

Today we’ve engineered most of them away.

Again, that’s mostly a good thing. I’m not advocating bringing back cholera or food shortages.

But when everything becomes comfortable all the time, we lose something important: contrast.

Without occasional discomfort, comfort itself stops feeling good.

Parenting and the Discomfort of Letting Go

This idea has been bouncing around in my head lately in a place I didn’t expect: parenting adult children.

When kids leave home, graduate from college, and start building their own lives, they run into all sorts of struggles.

Jobs don’t work out.

Friends drift away.

Money is tight.

Plans fall apart.

And as a parent, your instinct is to fix it. Remove the discomfort. Smooth the road.

I catch myself worrying about their struggles as if they’re something that went wrong.

But maybe they’re not.

Maybe that discomfort is the point.

Struggling through those early adult years—figuring things out, making mistakes, recovering from them—is exactly what builds the qualities we all hope our kids will have:

• resilience
• independence
• self-confidence
• the ability to handle life when things don’t go perfectly

If parents successfully remove every hardship, we may accidentally remove the very experiences that create capable adults.

Which is a hard thing to accept when the instinct is to protect.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is step back and let them handle their own discomfort.

The Less Is More Version of This

This is where my own “Less Is More” idea overlaps with Easter’s argument.

Sometimes adding more comfort doesn’t make life better.

Sometimes removing comfort does.

Examples from my own life:

Riding my bike for two hours in the cold doesn’t sound comfortable, but afterwards, a hot shower feels incredible.  Plus, I feel great for having completed the ride!

Spending a weekend camping without constant screens somehow makes ordinary life feel richer when you get back.

Even something as simple as being bored can lead to reading a book, going for a walk, or thinking about something new.

The hardship creates the appreciation.

The Strange Trick

What Easter suggests—and what really stuck with me—is intentionally adding small amounts of voluntary discomfort back into life.

Not suffering for suffering’s sake.

Just doing things that remind your brain what effort feels like.

Walking instead of driving.

Working out hard enough to be tired.

Going outside when it’s cold.

Leaving your phone behind sometimes.

None of these is dramatic.

But they reset the calibration.

Why This Matters

If prevalence-induced concept change means we redefine smaller and smaller inconveniences as problems, then the solution might be surprisingly simple:

Reintroduce a little difficulty.

Not because life needs to be miserable.

But because a little hardship restores perspective.

It reminds us that the things we complain about most of the time…aren’t actually problems.

And maybe it reminds parents of something else, too:

Sometimes the hard parts of life—the ones we want to protect our kids from—are exactly the parts that will make them strong enough to build a life of their own.  This is why I’m trying to get.

I’m reading The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter and came across a concept that made me stop and stare at the wall for a minute.

It’s called prevalence-induced concept change, which is a fancy way of saying:

When problems become rare, we expand our definition of the problem so we keep seeing it.

Researchers ran an experiment in which participants had to identify threatening faces in a series of photos. At first, there were plenty of threats. Then the researchers quietly started removing them.

You’d expect people to say, “Hey, fewer threats!”

Nope.

Instead, participants started labeling normal faces as threatening.

Their definition of “threat” expanded.

Apparently, our brains really don’t like empty problem space. If the big problems disappear, we simply promote smaller ones.

And once you hear that idea, you start seeing it everywhere.

Parenting in the Age of Imaginary Dangers

One place it shows up is parenting.

If you’re roughly my age, your childhood probably included phrases like:

• “Be home when the streetlights come on.”
• “Don’t burn the house down.”
• “If someone kidnaps you, I’m not paying the ransom.”

And then you rode your bike around the neighborhood for six hours with no adult supervision.

Today, parents are far more anxious about kids being outside alone, largely because of fears of kidnapping or “stranger danger.”

The thing is, statistically speaking, stranger abductions are incredibly rare. I remember reading somewhere that a child would need to stand on a street corner for something like hundreds of years before the odds of being kidnapped by a stranger caught up with them.

But because the truly serious dangers to kids—disease, violence, unsafe environments—have dropped dramatically over generations, we’ve become hyper-sensitive to extremely rare risks.

The definition of “danger” expands.

Now, a kid walking to the park alone feels like a crisis.

When Success Creates New Problems

The same phenomenon happens at the societal level.

When governments or institutions successfully reduce a problem, the incentives don’t always reward saying, “Great! We solved it.”

Instead, the definition of the problem often expands.

Take language shifts like:

• Homeless → Unhoused
• Hunger → Food insecurity

Originally, homelessness meant someone living on the street or in a car. Today, depending on the definition used, it can include someone temporarily staying with relatives or couch-surfing.

Hunger once meant literally not having enough food. Now “food insecurity” can include uncertainty about where the next meal might come from.

To be clear, those situations can still be real struggles.

But the broader the definition becomes, the bigger the problem appears, which conveniently keeps the attention, funding, and bureaucratic machinery running.

When a problem becomes less prevalent, the definition often expands to fill the gap.

The Comfort Crisis Part

This ties directly into Easter’s larger argument.

Modern life has removed many of the hardships humans evolved to deal with:

• hunger
• cold
• physical danger
• boredom
• uncertainty

Our ancestors regularly dealt with real adversity.

We deal with Wi-Fi outages and slow lines at Starbucks.

But our brains still evolved to scan for problems. When the big ones disappear, we simply recalibrate.

A minor inconvenience becomes a serious grievance.

A rare risk becomes a looming danger.

A solved problem becomes a newly defined crisis.

The Takeaway

The lesson here isn’t that problems aren’t real.

It’s that our perception of them is relative.

When life gets better, we don’t necessarily feel better. We often just move the goalposts for what counts as bad.

Understanding that might help us do something radical in modern life:

Pause.

Look around.

And admit that things might actually be…pretty good.