How to Break the American Addiction to Comfort
Big Bend, Texas
There's no way around it: the Outside 365 challenge is hard. Going outside and covering one human-powered mile every day might sound easy on the surface, and it is... until the hard days come and it isn't so easy anymore.
The greatest obstacle that stands in your way when you set out to complete Outside 365, or really, do anything of great difficulty, isn't the lack of time, as people most often immediately retort. Rather, it is our collective American addiction to being comfortable.
If our American culture has one fatal flaw, it is our obsession with comfort. In almost every aspect of the so-called “American Dream,” the main goal, the main objective, is achieving a state of comfort, insulating and protecting ourselves from the difficulties and challenges in the world around us. The default question that the average American asks is, “what’s the easiest way? What is the path of least resistance, the easiest way for me to avoid this pain and stay comfortable and secure?”
For those readers who aren't American, you're not off the hook just yet. It's not just America: it's any developed country whose citizens no longer have to deal with the daily pain of acquiring food, shelter, and meeting their other physical needs. But unfortunately, America leads the charge down the drain to greater and greater comfort. Americans, on the whole, hate any sort of difficulty or discomfort in their lives.
Just think about the average morning for your average American:
The Average American Morning
The average American wakes up in their four-bedroom climate-controlled McMansion, walks over to the shower, and turns on the tap expecting a stream of endless hot water to cascade over their bodies, washing away all the dirt they got on themselves while sleeping in a king-sized memory foam bed. After stepping out of the shower, they pull a towel off of a heated drying rack... because a cold towel would be too shocking at this time of day.
To get fired up and ready to go for the day, their coffee machine is set on an automatic timer so they don't even need to remember to put the grounds in and start the machine. Oh, but they were supposed to remember to put the water in and forgot... no matter, might as well just stop at Dunkin Donuts on the way in to the office.
It's mid-winter in Texas, and the temperature dropped below freezing last night, so our American uses their remote start key fob to fire up their one-ton pickup truck to get the heat running. They pull on a heavy fur coat and then rush from the door of the house to the door of the pickup to avoid feeling the brutally cold 30-degree temperature as much as possible. Once they sit down in the pickup truck, the air is all heated up, but unfortunately, our American's fat ass feels uncomfortably cold on the leather seat. They hit the button for the seat warmer immediately, feeling their layers of jiggle warm up ever so slowly.
Does this Texan need their truck to haul hay bales around a ranch? No, of course not: they live in a Dallas suburb and have a 45-minute commute ahead of them. Oh, the woes of existence! The challenges of daily life! They must sit in stop-and-go traffic in their climate-controlled monster of a vehicle, burning gasoline as they sit and listen to the radio.
But remember, before the commute, they must stop and pick up that coffee. So they sit in line at Dunkin Donuts for 15 minutes with all the other Texans waiting for their coffee. But do they even have to get out of the pickup truck to get the coffee? Of course not—they simply go through the drive-thru, even though they could be in-and-out in a minute if they parked their pickup truck and walked into the dining room... because there's nobody in there. Everyone's sitting in the drive-thru line.
The time comes to order, and our jiggly Texan decides that they might as well add three donuts and a croissant to give them some energy for the day. A quick swipe of the card—what's another $10 on top of the $6,000 that they already owe? (Source)
And away they go to sit in traffic, driving their ranch-grade pickup truck deep into the city so they can sit in a climate-controlled office all day, thankful they don't actually have to be outside in that god-awful 30-degree weather lifting heavy things and doing, you know... real work.
And the rest of their day continues on a similar trajectory.
See Also: “Do you really want to be an ‘Average’ American?”
The average Texan has never ridden a mountain bike deep in the desert of Big Bend Ranch State Park.
The Comfort Addiction
We've become addicted to these levels of comfort, these modern conveniences everywhere we look. My time living in a tent camper, and then a van, has driven home to me how much we take so many conveniences, like running water and flushing toilets, for granted... until we don't have them anymore.
The comfort addiction is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. When our lives become so comfortable that we've removed as many types of pain from our lives as possible, the pain of minor inconveniences is greatly exaggerated. This is why people flip out in the grocery store when someone cuts them off or their favorite brand of cookie is sold out. "Crisis on aisle 4! We're out of double-stuffed mint Oreos, and our jiggly Texan is having a conniption fit!" (Source)
We've forgotten that pain is at the core of the human condition. We've forgotten that feeling and experiencing pain means that we're alive. That choosing the type of pain we want in our lives is the greatest choice available to us. Sure, we can try to avoid pain, but we'll only succeed for a short while. (Source)
The pain and the bull shit catch up to us eventually. If we've spent our lives avoiding pain instead of embracing it, instead of training in it, then when the pain catches up to us, the unexpected assault steamrolls right over us, leaving us as wounded, broken carcasses on the side of the road.
How to Break the American Addiction to Comfort
We seem to have forgotten that we can train for the pain. If we struggle against the resistance found in our everyday lives, we'll slowly gain small victory after small victory. The process of fighting the resistance and winning small victory after small victory makes us more resilient and prepared when the real shit happens.
The way to break the American addiction to comfort is to go out of our way to make ourselves uncomfortable. The way to break the addiction is to do hard things voluntarily. Not because we're forced to, not because we have to in order to survive because... we ultimately don't have to. We could just keep skating by, doing the least amount possible.
No, the way to break the addiction of comfort is to consciously choose discomfort, is to choose to do challenging, difficult, painful things because we choose to. And for no other reason.
Jocko Willink, an ex-Navy Seal Commander, puts it this way: “if you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it.”
Tim Ferriss expands on this quote of Willink’s: “‘Being tougher’ was, more than anything, a decision to be tougher. It’s possible to immediately ‘be tougher,’ starting with your next decision.” (Source)
It all comes back to the choice. Will you choose to take on a near-impossible task, a goal of epic proportions, a job that you might NOT succeed at? Even for the most dedicated of decision makers, if your goal is truly tremendous, if it not only takes you outside of your comfort zone but takes you so far into the wilderness that you can’t even see your comfort zone anymore, this idea can still be daunting and intimidating. (Source)
And you can't complete the Outside 365 challenge without doing exactly that.
The outdoors is the ultimate proving ground that can force us out of our comfort zone. The harshness of frontier life, the renowned hardiness of the rancher, gave Texans their steely reputation. We can all learn from the average Texan’s decline from steely rancher to jiggly-assed office dweller. We can choose to forsake the comforts of civilization and instead accept the hardships that nature provides. The outdoors can be our crucible, the refining fire that purges us of our comfort addiction.
Here are 6 different ways that you can use the challenges inherent in the outdoors to break your addiction to comfort:
Step 1: Go Outside and Cover 1 Mile Per Day, Every Day, for 365 Days Straight
Tucson, Arizona
The Outside 365 challenge is a study in embracing discomfort. While some days will be easy, other days definitely won't be. You'll inevitably have to endure days when you're trudging through pouring rain or blowing snow, in the dark and the cold, trying to get your mile in. You'll experience days when your body aches, when an injury flares up, when the soreness cuts straight to the bone. Completing this challenge every day for 365 days straight is a monumental achievement.
Step 2: Go Farther
Go farther than one mile. Start training for distance, be it hiking, running, or mountain biking. Challenge yourself to do more and go harder.
Step 3: Your First Overnight
There is no quicker way to come face-to-face with discomfort than leaving the trappings of civilization behind and immersing yourself in nature. Outside 365 is one way of doing this every single day, but to remove even more of civilization's inherent comforts, try going camping.
For some of you, it might have been years since you last went camping. Or maybe you've never been camping even once in a life. In this case, sleeping in the woods will be a tremendously eye-opening experience for you.
Start small, with a quick overnight trip. To complete a quick overnight, you need very little gear: a tent, a sleeping pad, and a sleeping bag is more than enough.
That's it. Don't overthink it: just start small and work up from there.
Step 4: A Multi-Day Car-Camping Trip
As you begin collecting more gear, especially for cooking and storing food, you can soon complete a longer car-camping trip. Start with a weekend, and then work your way up from there.
Step 5: Your First Backcountry Trip
Salida, Colorado
Has car camping itself become too comfortable and easy for you? Then it's time to plan your first backcountry trip!
Embarking on a self-supported backcountry trip, whether backpacking or bikepacking or some other sport, requires a much more rigorous level of preparation... but it still doesn't need to be overcomplicated. Begin with a sub-24-hour overnight—you might not even need to pack cooking supplies, just basic food to get you through. You shouldn't have to buy too much specialized gear for your first outing if you don't want to—some of the lighter car camping gear that you already own will work in a pinch.
As with all the other points on this list, once you get started you can always work your way up and make it more complicated from there.
Step 6: Try a New Sport
Timberline, Mount Hood, Oregon
One way to truly challenge yourself is to learn an entirely new sport.
If you've become very competent with a certain sport, such as backpacking (for example), even epic adventures may start to feel commonplace. If you challenge yourself to learn a new sport that you have no experience with whatsoever, you'll immerse yourself in a whole new world of pain. Try downhill skiing, mountain biking, or kiteboarding on for size.
And So Much More
The natural world provides a whole host of ways to challenge ourselves as we seek to break the American addiction to comfort. And Outside 365 can be that gateway drug to get you started!
Even More Crucial Tactics
Check out the other installments in the Crucial Tactics series here:
