Simone Stolzoff

Now our problems, especially in the first world, are so much more minute.

And what it does is it

decreases our ability to be more resilient if things aren't able to go our way.

So one of the people that I profile in the comfort section is a guy who creates a computer algorithm to make every life decision on his behalf.

Where do I eat?

Where should I live?

What should I wear?

And on one sense, you might think of it as a type of uncertainty exposure therapy where he's just

leaving everything up to chance.

But I talked to the psychologist about it, and he said, actually, I think it's another type of avoidance.

Outsourcing all of his decisions to this computer algorithm, he's staying where it's comfortable, which is not having to make choices himself and take responsibility for his own choices.

And so I think the need for comfort is innate, but we also need to be able to teach ourselves that

If we are in a situation that's unlike a situation we've been in before we can develop the skills to be able to make it through.

I think there is an objective measure about whether your life is too comfortable or not.

The one that I would use for myself is what is the last thing that I've learned or what is the last novel experience that I have?

You can find yourself in the series of rinse and repeat days, and that might be an indication that you need a little bit more disruption in your life.

So Aristotle has this idea about a golden mean.

And what he says is all virtues lie as a mean between two extremes.

Maybe on one extreme, there is complacency where you are just in a stagnant place.

On the other end is this, I don't know, feeling of being unmoored or like you don't know what you can rely on.