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Aug. 31, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
38:12
The Comfort Crisis with Author Michael Easter
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Embrace Discomfort to Thrive 00:11:00
Hey, everybody, today the Charlie Kirk show.
You are probably too comfortable.
It's time to get uncomfortable.
If you are unhappy, it's probably because you're spending too much time on the couch.
This book is the most influential book of this calendar year that I have read, and I've read quite a few.
I love reading.
I know you do too.
We present a lot of books to you.
So I think you'll really enjoy this conversation by Michael Easter: Comfort Crisis.
If you have a son or daughter that is depressed, if you are depressed, if you're anxious, this book I think might help you.
It has a lot of insights.
Michael talks about how comfort is something that is a new phenomenon.
He does mention that he believes we were evolved.
I didn't correct him on air.
I didn't find it to be appropriate, but I did say at the end, I believe we are designed by God.
So that is probably just something I just want you to know before listening to this program.
I didn't feel necessary to chop up our conversation there.
It's just a little distinction or disagreement, not necessary to say on air.
But regardless of that, that aside, we do both agree that human beings, at least in the modern context, our species, are not built for what we're currently living through.
Sitting on our tail, doing nothing, and staring at a screen.
It's making us deeply unhappy.
I think you'll be blessed by this conversation.
I know I was.
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You are probably too comfortable.
In fact, comfort might be killing you.
I was recommended this book repeatedly by a member of our team, Spencer, who just put on a phenomenal men's summit.
Actually, inspired by this book, he said, Charlie, you got to read Comfort Crisis.
Have you read Comfort Crisis?
I said, all right, fine.
So I, and again, I get recommended books all the time.
And I bought the audio book and I started listening to it.
And I turned to Spencer after about 20 minutes.
I said, this is really good.
He said, keep listening.
I said, okay.
So I listened to it, and it was so profound, and it changed a lot of ways that I viewed how I was acting and things that I was doing.
And then I reread it, and then I recommended, I actually told our entire senior staff, all 35 of them at Turning Point USA, that they got to read the book.
And they did.
And we had this great conversation about it.
And there's so much wisdom in it.
And it's brilliantly written because it's written partially in a narrative form of kind of an experience of hunting in Alaska, but then also part of it really kind of from a clinical data perspective of talking to experts.
And the author of that book is Michael Easter.
The name of the book is The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, and Healthy, Healthy Self.
Michael, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thanks for having me, Charlie.
I'm excited to be here.
So it's a phenomenal book.
I really enjoyed it.
Why don't you start for our audience, just kind of what is the thesis of the book?
What is the main argument you're trying to get across?
Sure.
So the argument is that as the world has become more and more comfortable over time, and it has, especially after the Industrial Revolution, we've lost things that help keep us healthy.
So, for example, we have engineered movement out of our lives.
Our food system is mostly around comfort foods.
We've also removed most challenges from our lives, and especially from our children's lives, and on and on and on.
We've removed boredom from our lives.
There's all these different forms of discomfort that humans evolved to face that used to keep us healthy that are no longer in our lives and we're paying the consequence for it.
So let's start with the boredom one.
The boredom one was one of the most interesting parts of the book.
In fact, after I read the book, I noticed that I'm not bored anymore.
I always have my phone and I always have these different devices at my disposal.
And I started to embrace boredom.
I actually felt myself becoming calmer and thinking more clearly.
Can you talk about how the idea of no longer being bored is this very unique and probably harmful modern phenomenon?
Yes.
So to give you some context, I started thinking about this because, as you mentioned, the overarching narrative of the book is that I did this month-long hunt, backcountry hunt in the Arctic wilderness.
Now, hunting, for people who aren't familiar, it's not this action-packed sport that you might think.
It's actually quite boring.
So, we're sitting on these hills waiting for these caribou to come through and they don't come through.
We're up in the middle of the Arctic, so my cell phone doesn't work.
Didn't bring a computer, a TV, didn't bring a book, a magazine.
So, all of a sudden, I find myself in a strange state, and that is that I am bored again, right?
How often are we bored now?
So, to deal with my boredom, I didn't have this easy, effortless escape.
What did I have to do?
I had to think of things to do, right?
So, I start doing push-ups.
That'll kill the boredom.
Start reading all the labels on my energy bars and stuff like that, right?
Come up with my Christmas shopping list for like five years, right?
Like everyone's covered for a long time.
But I also did some more important things.
I started writing some of the book.
I came up with a bunch of ideas for my business.
So, I told you that to tell you this: boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever you are doing with your time, the return on your time invested has worn thin.
You're no longer getting a good return on what you're doing.
So, boredom would kick in to tell us, go do something else.
You think about, you know, let's say you and I are hunting and it's in the past.
So, food is scarce.
We need food or else we're going to starve.
And there's no animals coming through.
We would get bored and that would tell us go do something else.
And that something else would probably be go pick potatoes or berries or whatever so we could survive.
So, boredom is this discomfort that can push us into do something more productive.
Well, now that we have cell phones, TV screens, computer screens, all kinds of different screens around us, boredom has been co-opted.
We now have this very easy, effortless escape from boredom 24-7.
You look at the average American, they now spend more than 12 hours a day engaging with digital media.
I mean, anytime you feel boredom, you just pull up, pull out your phone or you turn on the TV.
But boredom is interesting because it has a lot of upsides.
It's associated with higher rates of creativity.
Being bored is associated with less stress, less depression, increased happiness.
So, I'm not saying everyone throws away their phone and all that, but I am saying that, you know, maybe 12 hours a day embedded in media might be quite a bit.
Yeah, no doubt.
So, if you talk about the healing properties of boredom, again, when I say this to parents, you know, parents will come to me, you know, 15, 16, 17-year-old kids, they say, my kid's super depressed.
And I just, thanks to your book in the last couple of weeks, I say, how often do you see your kid bored?
Oh, never.
He's playing video games.
He's on his phone.
He's on Snapchat.
He's on TikTok.
And I say, look, I'm not a neuroscientist, but someone like Andrew Huberman would argue that the brain is just getting overwhelmed.
It needs some time to retreat.
It needs some time to just reorganize itself.
Can you talk a little bit about the potential healing properties of boredom in a world where we're just kind of drowning in kind of just this white noise of social media, of which most of the information we actually don't retain?
Yes.
So your brain essentially has, and this is, I'm simplifying this a bit, but your brain essentially has two modes.
There's focused mode where you are focused on the outside world, and there is unfocused mode.
That's usually where you're mind wandering.
So you're thinking internally.
Now, focused mode is anytime we're focused on that screen, that social media, whatever it might be, your brain is actually working really hard when it's, when you're outwardly focused with your attention.
And in the past, we didn't have as much time in this focused mode because now when we feel boredom, we focus on something.
Whereas in the past, we would probably mind wander.
We would go internally.
We would have time to sort of let our thoughts sort of flow and see where they'd take us.
And it turns out that, so this focus mode is kind of really hard work for your brain, whereas unfocused mode is more like a rest break.
It's this period to sort of let thoughts percolate, to have this rest period and revive your brain and thoughts.
So with all this time we're now spending outwardly focused, it's associated with burnout, stress, with drops in creativity and all these different problems.
And, you know, since you brought up teens and social media, I think also we need to ask the question, what are we focused on?
You know, maybe if our attention was always outwardly focused on, I don't know, volunteering, helping others, having deep conversations, maybe that would be a good thing.
But what it's focused on is whatever is on TikTok, whatever nonsense is on TikTok, is on Instagram.
It's like these reels that are very much just junk food for your mind.
And especially for teens, there's a lot of times bullying happens on social media.
And teens are particularly at risk of mental health problems for bullying because your brain is going through a stage where you're really valuing social acceptance at that point in your life.
You don't have the perspective that you might when you're say 25 or 30 to be like, yeah, I don't really care what those people think of me.
They're kind of ridiculous people.
When you're a teen, you think that's really important.
And it happens quicker and it happens harsher on social media than it even did in the 1980s.
I mean, bullying is terrible, but it has always been terrible, but it's worse.
It has an exponent on it.
And then you have a kid that then stares at the screen looking for the next rush of dopamine and their brains are just getting overcooked.
But I just want to talk a little bit about another part of the book here that I found super interesting, which was about diet.
Can you just tease our audience a little bit about some of the discoveries you made with diet and how that ties to the general thesis of Americans or Westerners being too comfortable?
Yeah.
Fuel Minds with Good Ranchers 00:03:26
So we tend to focus really a ton on what are you eating?
Are you eating X amount of vegetables?
Are you eating low carb?
Are you eating low fat?
Are you on and on and on, right?
Rarely do we ever step back and ask the question, why are you eating?
You look at the data and 80% of eating in America is driven by reasons other than hunger.
We eat because it's a certain time, because we're stressed, because we're unhappy, because all these different reasons.
So I think the key insight there, and we can talk more about it later on, is just that people need to understand, one, how much they're eating because everyone totally underestimates how much they eat.
And then number two, why are you eating?
Do an audit.
What is triggering you to eat?
Is it because you're actually hungry or is it because you have some other thing going on where you're looking for food for comfort?
That's right.
And we obviously have an obesity problem in our country and embracing, you know, missing a meal or fasting, pretty, pretty actually not just important, but our ancestors used to do that all the time.
I mean, this idea of eating three times a day is a new phenomenon.
And don't be shocked when you have all these other kind of costs associated with it.
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The Masogi Rule for Survival 00:15:37
I want you to expand also just on the great paradox of comfort, which is we're actually wired to seek comfort because for a long time, we as a species didn't have shelter, food, and comfort.
So now that we have it, it actually makes us unhappy.
So talk about diet and then unpack that paradox for us.
Yeah, so to talk about diet, first of all, humans evolve.
So hunger is this discomfort that basically told us you need food, right?
And when we had the opportunity to eat food, we would often overeat because that provided a survival advantage.
It would help us gain fat.
We were essentially, before we had refrigerators, eating too much allowed us to have an onboard refrigerator in the form of fat.
So now, though, we have this ample access to really calorie-dense food, and we have ample opportunity to overeat it whenever we want.
That's what we're wired to do.
But this is obviously backfiring now.
And so to your question about how does this play into the larger theme of how comfort has changed over time, in our past, seeking comfort was a good thing.
We evolved in these environments of extreme discomfort.
It was always too hot, too cold.
We didn't have enough food.
There was always something we could do to move our life forward.
We didn't get to sit on the couch and go through Instagram.
We didn't evolve to be active.
Like we were, our lives forced us to be physically active, but we had no incentive to do any more activity than we needed to, because again, food was scarce.
You don't want to burn extra energy.
So then you plop us in an environment that we've engineered where everything is easy, effortless, easy to come by, food.
We've engineered movement out of our days.
We've engineered boredom out of our days.
And all these drives we have to always do the next most comfortable thing, they start to backfire.
So you can, this is associated with everything from heart disease to our mental health crisis in the country to just people, you know, really sort of missing the boat on life.
When you look back at your life, you know, we were just talking about boredom.
William James said, your life is essentially a culmination of the moments that you were aware of.
So I think when we look back on our lives, I don't think we're going to be like, man, I really wish I would have pumped up my hours on TikTok.
That's what I really should have paid attention to, right?
So I think that we're just kind of missing these moments that are really profound for being a human and make us well.
I totally agree.
And, you know, I've been more aware since I read your book just about, you know, keeping my phone away.
So I do a Sabbath from Friday night to Saturday night anyway before I started reading the book.
But what I realized is that, okay, I turned my phone off from Friday to Saturday night.
That's fine.
But I was still looking at other screens.
I would still kind of look at a TV or look at an iPad.
And so when I read your book, I was like, I'm doing no screens.
And, you know, my wife laughs.
She walks into the room once in mid-July, and I was just staring at the wall.
She's like, what are you doing?
I was like, I'm just embracing boredom.
And so it's kind of become this kind of running joke.
And it's actually really healing because I'm non-stop getting pings.
And then I turned on screen time.
I get something like a thousand notifications a day to something insane.
And that's a lot of work for the brain.
It has to constantly be there.
And, you know, every so often the amygdala is going off and you're fight or flight and you're always trying to juggle stuff.
And it could wear you down.
And a lot of young people who might think they are depressed, it might just be the brain just saying, like, hey, can you just cool out, man?
Can you just take a second?
And that's a great segue, which is what you call organic Xanax.
That's in my notes from the book, which is nature.
This was one of my favorite parts of the entire book where you talked about just spending time in nature.
It might be the fractured images.
It might be something we can't even explain.
Lowers depression, lowers anxiety.
About 90 seconds, explain, and then we'll pick off from there, Michael.
Yeah.
So first you have to know that humans now spend 93% of our time indoors.
In the past, we were outdoorsy in the sense that we lived outside entirely.
And because we came up in these environments, they seem to do good things for the human brain.
So time outside, there's different types of nature that you can be in to improve your mental health.
But you can get everything from stress reduction to increased happiness, from something as simple as spending 20 minutes in a park three times a week.
And then the longer you spend in the more wilder types of nature, that's when some really profound changes happen to the human brain that are, like I said in the book, akin to organic Xanax, where there's even some research now where they are taking soldiers who have PTSD.
They are taking them deep into nature on, say, like a 12-day river rafting expedition.
And they're coming back with marked, market improvements in mental health.
And these improvements last.
They're not just washing off after their first shower back at the hotel.
And what's so profound about that is if you have your phone while you go, you almost get none of the benefits.
That's what really stuck out me when writing about that.
Writes in comfort crisis, the wilder the nature, the better.
And nature can heal so many of our problems.
20 minutes outside, three times a week, but no phone.
Let's talk about that, Michael, because some people say, Yeah, I go outside all the time.
I'm have my phone.
And listen to podcasts, but you say, no, the studies show that if you have your phone, it actually you don't get the benefits.
Please talk about that.
So, nature, when you're in nature, it incites this mode in the brain that researchers call soft fascination.
Now, this is a terrible name, but that's what happens when you leave naming up to scientists.
But it's basically like meditation, except for your focus is outwardly focused.
You're kind of quietly taking in this nature, you're like turned down, and you're just kind of letting your mind wander as you're seeing all these sort of nice things to see that you see in nature.
Now, if you have your phone and you're looking at it, all of a sudden your attention is on TikTok or Instagram or whatever it might be.
And the same goes with listening to music sometimes.
So, you're kind of taking in the music.
So, really, just having this quiet downtime in nature, that's where the benefits seem to really come in.
Yeah, and I find that to be totally true.
I mean, so I read this as I was listening to the book, I was like, Oh, yeah, I spent all this time in nature, and then I was like, Wait a second, but I always have my phone and I'm doing phone calls and all that.
It's no different than just a nicer office, right?
You lose all the added benefits.
So, I wanted to spend some time here in our longer segment to talk about just a very unique part of the book called the Masogi.
What is a Masogi, Michael?
And it's kind of like Fight Club, which is there's all these rules.
Like, the first rule of Masogi is you can't tell anybody about Masogi, and then also don't die.
What is a Masogi, and why is it so important for we as a species to challenge ourselves in environments where we might not succeed?
When you think of how humans were in the past, we used to have to do hard, challenging things all the time.
This could be from hunting, this could be from moving to summer into wintering grounds, this could be from a tiger lurking in the bushes, right?
And each time we would take on one of those challenges, we would learn what our potential was, right?
Because we get put in a situation where we really struggled, where we really had to challenge ourselves, and we would have moments where we thought, I don't know if I'm going to make it out of this one.
But when we would come out the other side, we would go, Oh, I can do pretty amazing things that I hadn't realized.
Nowadays, it's all of a sudden possible to survive and never be challenged, right?
You're going to have enough water, you're going to have enough food, you're probably going to have a family who loves you, all these things, and that's great.
But at the same time, by not ever really being challenged, you're never going to learn what you're truly capable of.
You're not going to be put in that position where you either make the decision to endure or decide to quit.
And so, by not having that, we really, I think, lose something that's very important about not only being a human, but being able to level up our life in a lot of domains.
So, enter this wacky idea called Masogi.
To talk about the Masogi, that's where it really kind of caught my attention.
Talk about this, it's like a Japanese like nature bath or something.
Talk about it.
Oh, you're thinking of so, Masogi is the challenge element of the book.
Uh, the nature bath you might be thinking of is from the nature section.
So, I'll quickly talk about Masogi and then, um, or do you want me to turn to nature immediately?
No, Masogi, I might be conflating the two.
I'm sorry, I think that I misunderstood the root of the term Masogi, but talk about Masogi as being a challenge that you might not succeed in, just don't die, and you have to keep it to yourself.
So, you can't, you can't live stream your Masogi, which I found to be a brilliant component of it.
So, let's go there.
So, I just told you all that about challenge to basically tell you in order to recreate these challenges that we used to face in the past that are important for us as a species.
There's this idea called Masogi.
And the idea is that once a year, you're going to go out into nature and you're going to do something really, really hard, challenging for you.
There's two rules to Masogi.
The first rule is that whatever nature task you decide to take on, it's got to be really hard.
I said, and we define that by saying you should have a true 50-50 shot finishing whatever it is.
Now, this is important because today, even when we decide to take on challenges, we usually know we're going to finish.
You know, when people decide, hey, I'm going to run a marathon, they don't say, I don't know if I can run it.
They say, I don't know if I can run it in four hours or three hours, whatever the time goal is.
Now, rule two of Masogi is don't die.
And that one is pretty straightforward.
It is be safe, pick something where you're going to be safe, set some safety boundaries along the way.
And I learned this from a guy whose name is Marcus Elliott, and he has totally overhauled sports and training for it.
So he owns this facility called P3.
They work with all kinds of professional athletes.
They do all this data and modeling, very scientific.
But he started doing Masogi because he realizes that what ultimately improves human spirit and potential, it can't be measured.
So they do these Masogi tasks where, again, you go out into nature, do something really hard.
But the important thing is that along the way, you're probably going to have a moment where you think you have to quit, where you think that you have reached your edge and there's no going past this thing.
But if you can just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you're going to get another moment.
And that's where you look back and say, hey, wait a minute.
I thought my edge was back there.
I thought I was completely done back there, but I am clearly past that edge.
And that shows you that you've been selling yourself short.
And then the important question from there is, where else in my life am I selling myself short?
Because that, there is definitely a lot of domains where you are.
You know, I think that humans really are far more capable than we believe.
We just need experiences and moments that really show us that.
Yes.
And so you write in the book that they must be inward facing.
And I found it interesting because it would be tempting for most of modern culture to want to tell the world of the difficult nature task they did after they did it.
I did a rim to river to rim run, or, you know, I ran 48 miles or whatever it is.
But you say, no, no, no, no.
It's only a true Masogi if you might tell your wife or one other person, but it's not the world's business.
In fact, that screws up the incentives to talk about that.
Yeah, we do so many things today just because we want validation from others.
And we have a million different ways to get that validation.
Now, I mean, millions of people could follow a person on Instagram and you could get yourself a million pat on the backs by posting about something.
But what tends to happen is that people start to steer their behavior towards what they think others will approve of.
Well, Masogi is against that.
It's basically saying, I want you to go out and see if you can do something only for you.
Because at the end of the day, that's going to be what's really important at improving your potential and improving the human spirit.
And the other thing that I like about Masogi is it's best to think of something quirky, something made up, right?
So don't run a 10K or a 5K because then you can compare yourself to others.
And comparing yourself to others, it ultimately just sets a ceiling on your potential because you're going to fall to what others have done, not rise to what they've done most of the time.
So by just making up some weird thing, like for me, it might be, oh, yeah, there's this, there's this mountain peak I see every day.
I'm like, mute, I'm going to see if I can get up there in a day.
The 50-50 chance part of it is beautiful because, you know, for example, example, my mother, she's 72 years old, going on 73 and next week.
And she read about this concept and she challenged herself to a hike that was farther than she'd ever done before.
Now, of course, it wasn't that long of a hike, right?
She's 72, but at the same time, it was really long for her.
And it showed her that she was a lot more physically capable than she thought.
And because of this, there's this trip she wanted to take overseas, but she decided she wasn't going to do it because she didn't think she could do all the walking that it required.
Well, after that, she signed up for the trip and she's going.
Once you see your limitations actually aren't your limitations, it's unbelievably liberating.
And the other rule of Masogi is: don't die.
Just for everyone out there that's listening to this, yes, quirky and all that.
I mean, when I was listening to it, you were describing one of these masogi's.
They're like moving a barrel, they're moving a boulder on the bottom of like the Santa Barbara Bay.
I'm like, geez, I hope they thought this through.
And so don't die, everybody.
That's a very important part of this because if it's quirky and if it's in nature and you have a 50-50 shot, I want to be very clear: it's a 50-50 shot of completing the Masogi, not a 50-50 shot of survival.
So that's a very important thing.
Good distinction.
That's there.
So, yeah.
So, Michael, I want to ask you also just about your own personal story, which I found to be super interesting.
And you know, you're a very talented writer, and the way you did the book was brilliant because it weaves in and out of narrative.
So, it's not just all this, you know, data after date after data, but it's this story of you going up to Alaska for this caribou hunt, which was obviously out of your comfort zone.
And it seemed as if this almost had, you know, I don't want to say religious significance, but almost like a rebirth significance.
It was definitely out of your comfort zone.
I wouldn't say that the hunt was a masogi.
Maybe you would.
I mean, you wrote about it, so it wouldn't necessarily be, but it was something that really pushed you to your boundaries and had a profound impact.
There's a lot of young people watching this.
Talk a little about your story, but kind of some of your background and kind of how you've become this kind of thought leader in this ever-growing genre of discomfort can actually lead you to happiness.
Sure.
So, I, in the book, the second chapter, I talk about my family backstory.
Now, my father left my mom when I was in the womb, and that side of the family has always been quite the rabble-rouser.
So, they're well known in the Idaho state prison system, and they tend to drink and get in trouble.
So, I found myself, this was maybe nine years ago now, I found myself kind of going down that same path where I was drinking too much.
I wanted to quit, I couldn't quit.
And then one morning, for whatever reason, I just woke up and I could very, very clearly see that if I were to continue on this path of drinking, it would be very much more easy and comfortable in the short term, but it would ultimately end up killing me early.
Now, I didn't know if I was going to die at, say, 40, 60, 80.
Seeing the End of Drinking 00:03:27
I just knew it would be earlier than I needed to.
And more importantly, is that my life would be a lot less interesting and well-lived and significant.
And this other path I saw, that was going to be very uncomfortable.
I was going to have to relearn how to live and go through, go essentially into the dark cave where you don't know what lies there.
But I chose that path and I ended up getting sober, and it was very, very uncomfortable in the short term.
But on the other side of that, and this is what's important, is that my life improved across the board.
I mean, full stop across the board.
You name anything that you can measure and not measure, it got better.
I lost weight.
I had more money in the bank.
My friends liked me more.
My girlfriend stuck around.
I was able to, you know, pay off my car.
But, but even more important is how I felt internally.
I finally felt good about myself, right?
Because I think most people, when you have a problem like that, you're drinking to find comfort because for whatever reason, you're not comfortable with yourself or something in your life is wrong.
And in order to get over that, you have to go through the discomfort of fixing that, figuring out what is going on.
So there's that.
So that tells me this thing that, oh, discomfort, like you have to go through discomfort if you want to improve your life.
On the other coin, I was working at this magazine, Mental Health Magazine.
I was mostly on fitness, health, nutrition.
Literally every single thing I wrote about, you had to go through discomfort to improve your life.
You want to get fit, you got to work out.
Working out is not fun.
It's uncomfortable, right?
If you want to lose weight, you're probably going to be hungry.
If you want to improve your mental health, you're probably going to have to unpeel some onions and ask yourself some hard questions.
And so that all kind of accumulated to basically ending up meeting a guy whose name is Donnie Vincent.
Great guy, backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker, real thought leader in space.
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You met Donnie, who has a little bit of a colorful language based on the book.
Tell us about Donnie and how that got your journey going.
Yeah, I'm long-winded.
Sorry.
So I make this observation about going through discomfort being good for us, improving our health, improving our mental health.
And then I meet Donnie.
We do this.
We first do this hunt in Nevada, and I sort of realize, oh, the world has become very, very comfortable because I'm up in the backcountry for five days, freezing my butt off, starving, having to hike around everywhere to get water, hunting, bored out of my mind.
Then I get back home to Las Vegas and my house is air-conditioned.
Modernity Harms This Generation 00:04:40
I can sit all day.
The food is everywhere.
So I'm, oh, wow.
Yeah, we're surrounded in comfort now.
Then Donnie invites me up to the Arctic for this 30-day backcountry expedition, hunting expedition.
And I say, you know what?
Sure.
Let's see if I can learn something else.
I went through discomfort before and it gave me something good.
This sounds exceedingly uncomfortable.
The Arctic is very dangerous.
A lot of weather, a lot of animals, a lot of hiking, a lot of this and a lot of that that is uncomfortable.
And I thought, all right, let's sign on and see what happens.
And the trip changed my life.
Full stop changed my life.
But I'm also not saying that everyone has to go up to the Arctic for 30 days to see the benefits of discomfort.
In the book, I talk about a lot of little ways that you can weave discomfort purposefully into your life to improve your health.
I'm really an advocate of thinking, how can I make everyday life just a little bit harder in different ways?
Because I think that's where the benefits usually accumulate the most over time.
So in closing here, Michael, you know, right now, young people are living in the most suicidal, depressed, alcohol-addicted, anxious, and psychiatric drug-addicted generation in history.
Your book, I think, addresses a lot of that, but just any other thoughts on how we go about solving it?
I think your thesis is profound and is really kind of, in some ways, pioneer work where you argue that the best of modernity is actually now harming this generation, where they have everything on demand, and now it's time to embrace discomfort as a virtue.
Just any closing thoughts on what we're up against, which I consider to be the crisis of our time, which is a generation that is killing themselves at record numbers, medicating themselves at record numbers, and no one really seems to know why, but I think you've done the best job of pinpointing that closing thoughts.
Yeah, you know, I'd be pretty sad too if I sat around on TikTok for 10 hours a day and in my home and not ever in nature.
And I think that we've lost out on a lot of connection.
And I think that when you look at all the research, what makes humans happy is struggling for something, really going up against it, going through challenges, and coming out on the other side, having learned something about yourself.
We're really missing these experiences that we used to have that bolstered our youth, that brought them from point A to point B in their lives.
And there's just so many different ways that life has become so easy for young people.
And I think it goes from easy access to entertainment on cell phones to the fact that they spend so much less time outdoors, the fact that nothing is hard anymore.
Everything is safe.
Everything's about safety, from playgrounds to spaces to classrooms to this and that and this.
Everything's got to be safe.
You can't ever have a feeling that makes you feel bad, right?
But in doing that, we actually create a ton of bad feelings down the road.
So do the hard thing.
Do the hard thing.
If you're listening right now and you're, let's say, unhappy, you're probably too comfortable.
This book, I think, will really make a big impact.
It's Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter.
And it's not just, it's not written like a scientific journal.
It's entertaining and it's compelling.
Michael, I hope to meet you one day.
Thank you for the phenomenal work.
It made an impact on my life and hopefully the listeners as well.
Thank you, Michael.
Thanks so much, Charlie.
I really appreciate your time.
Thank you.
And so, yeah, look, I got recommended this book by our team member, Spencer, and it's phenomenal.
And I just want to reiterate this: that right now, some of you might be dealing with depression and anxiety.
And look, I'm not a neuroscientist.
I'm not a psychiatrist.
I'm not going to diagnose, you know, everyone, you know, not anyone.
That's not my point here.
My point is, though, that there might be some value to maybe I'm using my phone too much.
Maybe I'm not bored enough.
Maybe I haven't gone out to nature to really enjoy what it has to say for me.
And obviously, I'm a Christian.
I believe God designed us for a certain purpose.
And I believe in that design, he actually designed us not to be inside all the time.
And there was a really profound thing that Michael just said to close out this conversation.
It was just amazing, where he said, quote, struggling for something and learning about yourself.
Boy, is that not the biblical story?
That really is struggling for something.
I do not believe that God designed us to sit around and just accept things.
He designed us to serve and to give and to push to new levels.
That is the parable of the talents.
So we have a generation that's struggling right now.
And I think Michael Easter, he weaves in some concepts that I think are biblical and wise and are just fabulous.
I really, really enjoy it.
It's great.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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