Book Review: The Comfort Crisis
Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self
Title: The Comfort Crisis:
By: Michael Easter
Published: 2021
304 Pages
Review by R.W. Richey
In 1879, my great-grandfather, Joseph Benjamin Richey, was 24 and recently married, when he was asked to settle a new area by the leaders of his church. Joseph Benjamin’s parents had come to Utah1 in 1847 with one of the first groups of Mormon2 Pioneers, and they had already settled two different areas: Manti, and St. George (technically Washington). This time it was an area near the source of the Little Colorado River close to the Arizona/New Mexico border — a town that would eventually be called St. Johns.
This journey would be different than the previous two: they had been instructed to take their saw mill along with them. This combined with the extreme difficulty of the terrain, meant that the journey from St. George to St. Johns took nine months. These days it’s a six and half hour drive. But they did eventually arrive.
At this point Joseph Benjamin, and his young wife Naomi Eugenia Pace, settled in to raise a family. Unfortunately that was a more difficult proposition than he initially imagined. The first few children he and Naomi had all died within a few days of being born, but eventually their luck improved and in 1886 they had a small family of three young children. Unfortunately neither they nor their mother survived the scarlet fever epidemic which swept through the community that year. Joseph Benjamin was left widowed and childless, having lost, in addition to his wife, six children in total.
The necessities and expectations of living on the frontier meant that he didn’t stay single for very long, and in 1888 he married his second wife Alice Lydia Platt. She also bore him six children. All of the children survived infancy, but the second child Rollo, died when he was nine and the youngest child, Henry John, died at 14. Even more unfortunately Alice died shortly after Rollo of an apparent cerebral hemorrhage. At the time she was pregnant with their seventh child.
At the point of Alice’s death in 1903, Joseph Benjamin had lost seven children (Henry John would survive for several more years) and two wives. He had only a few months to process this new situation before he was called to serve a Mormon proselytizing mission to the American South. So he farmed out his children, who were 13, 9, 7, 5 and 3 at the time, to various relatives and left for Georgia. It was while he was in Georgia that he met my great-grandmother, Eliza Jane Prather. Nothing happened while he was on his mission, but six months after it was over, having put everything in order he returned to Georgia where he and Eliza were married before returning to St. Johns.
You might have thought, up to this point, that this was the story of Joseph Benjamin, but I’m equally fascinated, if not more so by the story of Eliza. She went from the lush greenery of Georgia to the high desert of Arizona, never once returning. Once there, in addition to the six children she also eventually bore (it seems to almost be a pattern) she had to help raise the five children from the previous marriage. Also, shortly after her marriage both of her parents died, and so she had to raise her two younger brothers, who for reasons which have never adequately been explained were 20 and 24 years younger than her.3 For those keeping track that’s 15 children of various ages.
Joseph Benjamin was 17 years older than Eliza, and died when their youngest child was 7, at the age of 70, in 1926. Obviously most of the other children were grown, but it wasn’t too long before the Great Depression started, and times, which were never particularly great, just got harder. But she toughed it out and kept the whole family together, fed and clothed.
In 1951 my grandfather, the second youngest of all the children, brought her up to live with him in Ogden, Utah. Initially she thought it was unsanitary to go to the bathroom in the house, so they had an outhouse, but once it got cold she decided that having an indoor toilet was a pretty nice invention, and they tore down the outhouse. She died in 1956 at the age of 83.
You may be wondering what this exceptionally long introduction has to do with reviewing The Comfort Crisis, well, in a sense, everything.
I. The Strange Challenges of Modernity
Before we get to the actual content of the book, I have to say something about the subtitle: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. If you’re anything like me, it might be giving you second thoughts about reading the book. It shouldn’t. I have to assume that this phrase was added at the insistence of the publisher. No version of that phrase occurs in the actual text (not even “healthy self”) and even the word “reclaim” only occurs once, and it’s unrelated. The subtitle isn’t wrong exactly, but I don’t think it strikes the right tone. If I had been in charge of subtitling the book I would have gone with: Wrestle Discomfort to Salvage Your Life Before You Die of Depression or Diabetes. But who knows if that subtitle would have sold as well.
In any case, back to connecting the intro to the book. One of the points Easter returns to again and again is the historically unprecedented nature of modern conveniences. I included the story of my great-grandparents because it illustrates exactly how recent so many of these conveniences are, and so much of what made life in the past hard. And yet as heartbreaking as these stories of numerous deaths are, there was nothing abnormal about their lives. If anything, they were lucky. They didn’t experience widespread famine, much of their travel was by rail, none of the deaths were from hunger, and while some were from disease, the scarlet fever epidemic was mild by historical standards.4 Luckiest of all, they didn’t experience war.
As sad as the story was, if you had taken a person at random from the late 1800’s, particularly if you selected from the entire world, their story probably would have been much, much sadder.
Still, when compared to the miraculous conveniences we currently possess, the trials of my great-grandparents seem almost barbaric. And on some level the difference between my life and theirs is the best news ever. I would have a hard time expressing how glad I am that my wife and all my children didn’t die, and that death in general is actually pretty remote for me. But even though all of these conveniences have arrived relatively recently, we quickly acclimate to their existence. As a result we not only don’t appreciate them as much as we should, but we also aren’t as wary as we should be. Because these changes represent a vast and extraordinary experiment. As Easter puts it:
The modern comforts and conveniences that now most influence our daily experience—cars, computers, television, climate control, smartphones, ultraprocessed food, and more—have been used by our species for about 100 years or less. That’s around 0.03 percent of the time we’ve walked the earth. Include all the Homos—habilis, erectus, [etc.]... and open the time scale to 2.5 million years and the figure drops to 0.004 percent. Constant comfort is a radically new thing for us humans.
Over these 2.5 million years, our ancestors’ lives were intimately intertwined with discomfort. These people were constantly exposed to the elements. It was either too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, or too snowy... Today most of us live at 72 degrees, experiencing weather only during the two minutes it takes us to walk across a parking lot or from the subway station to our offices.
Americans now spend about 93 percent of our time indoors in climate control. Early humans were always hungry. The Hadza, a Tanzanian tribe of hunter-gatherers that lives similarly to our earliest ancestors, are constantly complaining to anthropologists that they’re ravenous.
The Hadza are to this day constantly being stung by swarms of bees when they gather honey, a delicacy for the tribe. Nearly 80 percent of Neanderthals’ bones show signs that their owner had either been maimed or outright killed by animals.
That’s a long quote, and as you can tell by the ellipsis, I left a lot of it out, but I felt it was necessary to describe the true scope of how different modern life is. And yes it’s a good thing that in the US starvation is unheard of, that currently infant mortality is 5.6 per thousand5 rather than the 462 per thousand of 1800.6 (Very close to the rate my great-grandfather experienced even though all of his children were born closer to 1900.) And it’s a very good thing that 80 percent of us haven’t been mauled or killed by animals. But that doesn’t change the fact that this situation is entirely new and if there are problems associated with it they are problems we have never before faced. Which means we can’t rely on our evolutionary instincts for guidance, and even traditional culture is going to be hard pressed, though I think it offers better advice than modern people give it credit for. A point I’ll be returning to.
As Easter points out, some things changed 100 years ago, but some things really changed 10,000 years ago when humans started to domesticate plants and animals. Which only moves the decimal point by two places, meaning that even agriculture has only been around for 3% of our existence or 0.4% depending on how you’re counting. On the other hand, and more importantly, things like smart phones and social media have only been widely used for 15 years. It’s still unclear whether these most recent changes will end up having as much impact as domestication. But what is clear is that they’re happening with ridiculous rapidity. It took thousands of years for domestication of plants and animals to reach all corners of the globe. After cars were invented, it was decades before most people had them, even in America. But a new social media platform can achieve a global reach in months.
As a result of all of this we’ve banished hunger, infant mortality, the vagaries of climate, and most recently, boredom. This should be a cause for celebration. And for many people it is. But within these victories Easter (and many others, including myself for what it’s worth) see subtle challenges, and hidden problems. But why should that be?
II. Why are these things challenging?
Some of the things Easter points to as challenges stemming from these changes are well known to everyone. It’s impossible to not be familiar with the obesity crisis, or to have heard about the recent research on the negative effects of social media. But as well known as these challenges are, the root causes are still poorly understood. There’s vast debate over why everyone suddenly started getting fat in 1975,7 and equally intense debate about the effects of social media. As you might expect, Easter digs into those debates. Because he covers so many of them, his surveys of the science are necessarily brief. Despite this he does a great job. I wasn’t sure you could make a meaningful contribution to the debate over which diet is best in 30 pages, but I thought he did a pretty good job. (He basically recommends eating a good variety of natural food that has low energy density, i.e. calories/weight.) Whether it’s actionable is a whole other thing, but it felt more actionable than much of what I’ve read.
Obviously if social media is going to cause problems that will only start once social media exists, but why should social media cause problems at all? And why would a large percentage of the population start to become obese only recently, what happened in the 70s? As Easter points out with his percentages, for 99.996% of the time, we lived in one environment and evolved to survive in that environment. Now that we have radically changed our environment our evolved instincts are misfiring. Let’s start with the problem of social media. From a survival standpoint if you think there’s a danger, say a leopard is about to pounce, and you’re wrong (it wasn’t a leopard but only a squirrel) it’s annoying, but otherwise fine. On the other hand if you think there isn’t a danger, and you’re wrong, you’re dead. We’re primed to see threats even if there aren’t any.
In order to illustrate this tendency Easter brings in the research of David Levari, a psychologist at Harvard University. Levari’s research was inspired by the security theater he participated in every time he flew. As he witnessed wheelchair bound octogenarians being pulled aside for having more than 3 oz. of liquid he wondered if humans had a default threat/problem setting.
With that in mind, Levari recently conducted a series of studies to find out if the human brain searches for problems even when problems become infrequent or don’t exist. One of his studies tasked people with viewing a sequence of 800 different human faces that ranged from very intimidating to completely harmless.
The people had to judge which of the faces seemed “threatening.” But once they’d seen the 200th mug, Levari (without the participants’ knowledge) began showing them fewer and fewer “threatening faces.”
...As the threatening faces became rare, the study participants began to perceive neutral faces as threatening.
He called this “prevalence-induced concept change.” Essentially “problem creep.” It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.
Levari tried something similar with unethical research proposals, showing volunteers 240, and lowering the frequency around halfway through. In both cases he found the same thing, that people expanded their definition of what was threatening or what was considered unethical. This tendency doesn’t entirely explain the problems of social media, as I mentioned the debate still rages, but it definitely contributes.
On the other side of things, if we’re over attuned to threats, we’re also over attuned to the pursuit of comforts as well — scarce resources that assist in survival. Or they were scarce, but with the advent of modernity this is no longer the case. When scarce things become abundant, but our pursuit of them fails to slacken then we can end up with a dangerous overabundance.
This is an idea Easter dances around but never lands on. It’s the concept of supernormal stimuli, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about it because it ties so much of this together. To do so I’m going to bring in another book, The Hungry Brain, by Stephan J. Guyenet. (I’m always going the extra mile in my book reviews!) Supernormal stimuli were uncovered by scientists studying which eggs birds preferred to incubate. In order to test these preferences they constructed artificial eggs.
A typical ringed plover egg is light brown with dark brown spots. When [the scientists] offered the birds artificial eggs that had a white background and larger, darker spots, they readily abandoned their own eggs in favor of the decoy. Similar experiments with oystercatchers and herring gulls showed that they prefer larger eggs, to the point where they will leave their own eggs in favor of absurdly large artificial eggs that exceed the size of their own bodies.
Perhaps you can already see where I’m going, but if not allow me to reword that final sentence: “Similar experiments with humans showed that they preferred food combining fat and sugar, to the point that they will eat such food in preference to their historic fare even as it causes them numerous health problems.” Or “they preferred a temperature in the low-70s, to the point where some of them will not venture anywhere that’s not the case, and they will spend enormous energy and money to achieve it.” This idea covers basically everything Easter brings up in his book, from the avoidance of hunger and extremes of temperature I already mentioned to comfy chairs, video games, and an avoidance of boredom.
But why would evolution impel us to go so far with these things that they become damaging? Because previously there was never the opportunity for them to go that far. Consequently there was never any evolutionary pressure to protect against a danger that never occurred. To use an example from the book: there was never any danger of people regularly having 1000 calorie meals two or three times a day, 7 days a week for years on end. The food supply just wasn’t that stable. And thus the body has very little in the way of defense against the negative effects of that kind of diet. This danger comes from the same process that leads a bird to abandon her eggs for eggs as big as she is even though she could never lay those eggs in the first place. Which is to say there’s no evolutionary backstop against this kind of thing. There’s no innate protection against going too far in the direction of abundance because abundance never existed. But suddenly technology has given us enormous abundance in all the areas where previously scarcity reigned.
This isn’t just a problem when it comes to food. Easter discusses how this same phenomenon plays out with exercise, boredom, getting out in nature and our relationship to death. Once again there was never any danger historically of us not getting enough of these things. As we saw with the story of my great-grandparents they had all of those things in abundance. They had the same drive for comfort as we do, they just didn’t have the necessary technology to banish these things. But we do, so we have. And it’s put us in situations we’ve never previously had to deal with.
When you combine these two things you see that we’re being squeezed from both sides. On the threat side we’re so primed to detect threats that we’re seeing them where they don’t exist. On the comfort side of things we’re gorging ourselves on pleasures to the point that it’s not just our bodies that are atrophying, but also our minds, and, yes, even our spirits.
We evolved to seek comfort, but we’re not designed for it. This is why there’s a “comfort crisis”. Which takes us to:
III. What should we be doing about this crisis?
Easter has a lot of recommendations. You can probably imagine what many of them are, but unlike many writers Easter doesn’t pretend it’s going to be easy. He provides advice on the bare minimum one can do to start reaping benefits, but he also is at pains to point out when the real benefits kick in and it’s generally a lot farther than most people are going to want to go.
As an example take getting out in nature. First off he offers the appalling statistic that more than half of Americans don’t go outside for any type of recreation at all, and this includes simple stuff like just walking. That’s a pretty sobering statistic, and these people are missing out on some easy benefits. Just twenty minutes in nature three days a week shows marked benefits in mental health, reduction of cortisol (the so-called stress hormone) and it makes people less likely to have heart attacks, strokes, asthma, and diabetes. If you want to do more, then the next level at which there’s been significant studies done (mostly in Finland) is five hours a month in a wilder setting, so not just walking through the local park, but a hike, fishing trip, or mountain bike ride. Finally there’s the three-day effect: the mental calm that one gets after they’ve been in the backcountry away from everything for three days. Easter describes the progression:
Three or more days in the wild is like a meditation retreat. Except talking is allowed and the experience is free of costs and gurus.
The rewilding of our body and brain usually goes something like this: On the first day stress and health markers improve, but we are still adjusting to the discomfort of nature. We’re thinking about how it sucks to be cold, missing our phone, and still focusing on the anxieties we left behind—what’s happening at work and whether we closed the garage door. By day two our mind is settling and awareness is heightening. We’re caring less about what we left behind and are beginning to notice the sights, smells, and sounds around us. Then day three hits.
Now our senses are completely dialed in and we can reach a fully meditative mode of feeling connected to nature.
And the benefits?
We now know that the three-day effect doesn’t wash off once we’re back home. Scientists at UC Berkeley found that US military vets who spent four days rafting in southern Utah were still feeling the effects a week later. Their PTSD symptoms and stress levels were down 29 and 21 percent, respectively. Their relationships, happiness, and general satisfaction with their lives were all improved as well.
If 50% of Americans don’t ever go outside, period, I can only imagine how small the percentage is that goes into the backcountry for three or more days. I assume it has to be single digits. Certainly it’s been many years since I last did it. But reading the book definitely makes me want to do it far more often.
But as long as we’re out in nature, and in preparation for those long backcountry expeditions, Easter recommends rucking. I confess that before encountering this book I had never heard of rucking as an exercise. I think I knew about it as something that people in the military had to do, and I’d definitely heard of a rucksack, but I hadn’t heard that people were doing it in place of say jogging or biking. That is putting a bunch of weight on your back while you walk, ideally uphill.
You might be familiar with the idea that humans evolved to be endurance runners.8 That this adaptation allowed us to engage in persistence hunting: running animals down until they collapsed out of exhaustion. Easter mentions this idea, but says there’s even more evidence that we evolved to carry things, and that if you’re looking for an evolutionarily approved way to exercise, walking while carrying weight is the way to go. He makes a compelling case. This is another thing I’m definitely going to try.
These three things: 20 minutes, 5 hours, or 3 days represent what some scientists call the nature pyramid, and if you’re doing them right, they’re all going to involve some level of discomfort, at a minimum there are going to be times, even on the short walks, when it’s too hot, or too cold. And if you’re doing it consistently you’re going to get rained on as well. But at the very top of the discomfort pyramid is the misogi.
The misogi was developed by Dr. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard trained physician who mostly works with elite athletes, and there are two rules:
1- It has to be really, really hard. (Basically no more than a 50% chance of success.)
2- You can’t die.
Also as a supplementary rule you can’t talk about your misogi on social media. This is not a venue for self promotion, it’s a way to truly be challenged.
Easter uses his own misogi — five weeks of hunting caribou in the deep Alaskan backcountry — as a framing for the entire book. And if the book had been nothing but that story it would still have been worth reading.
At its most basic you could say that the book recommends getting out in nature, rucking, and misogis (along with some other specific things I didn’t have space to cover). But at a deeper level the book recommends discomfort and challenge. It recommends embracing struggle, of periodically doing the hardest things you can think of. All of this is difficult, by definition, but it’s also worthwhile at a level we rarely experience anymore. Our ancestors got all the struggling they could handle, and sometimes more, just by virtue of the times they lived in. We have to seek out struggle, and to do that we’re going to need all the help we can get. That’s why I would recommend this book.
Find RW Richey on twitter @jeremiah820 and at wearenotsaved.com
Technically none of the states I’ll be referring to exist at this point, but for convenience I’ll reference the future states and future borders without cumbersome constructions like: “what will eventually be the state of Utah”
The full and proper name for “Mormons” is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I’ll be using Mormons to refer to these early settlers.
It was said that for the trip from Georgia to Arizona they had tags tied to them like luggage and were put on the train. They were 12 and 8 at the time. The younger of the two died a few years later after being run over by a wagon, just a couple of weeks before his 11th birthday.
It definitely doesn’t make it on any kind of list that I could find. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics Which does include an epidemic from around the same time in Australia that killed 8,000, so presumably it was milder than that.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infant-mortality-rate
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_adult_09_10/obesity_adult_09_10.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
 | A guest post by
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Ross, I came across your substack today and I am really enjoying your writing. Thank you.