Comfort is causing you harm

I have a genuine and life long hatred for the work of Pink Floyd, fostered by a sucession of ass-hole boyfriends in the 90’s and a realization that ‘The Wall’ is nothing but the misogynistic rant at the core of all man-babies everywhere (My mummy didn’t love me so I’m going to commit genocide) - but I do take from them the phrase ‘comfortably numb,’ to illustrate just who truly damaging the sense of comfort can be.

In their song, it was used to describe addiction, and it is exactly my point - the reason we struggle to get over addiction, it because however appalling it makes our lives, it quickly becomes familiar, and the familiar is above all things, comfortable.

When a bad or negative situation has been gifted us in childhood, bu those who we most wanted to love and be loved by, it becomes subconsciously the way you need to be to find that sense of home, comfort and familiarity. This is why, without intervention, we are doomed to repeat what we have always known, simply because it is what we know. My mother was brought up by parents who were deeply unhappy in their marriage, so much so that her father married another woman without bothering to let his first wife know. She then went on to have a series of fairly terrible relationships, including her marriage to my father, which she suffered with grim acceptance and small acts of petty revenge, while unable to find a way out because she was unable to really perceive of a life outside of marriage, carrying with her she did to imagined stigma of being from a ‘broken home.’ In turn, she gifted me with the sense that marriage meant being with a terrible human being you have to ‘manage’ day by day, in order to earn small amount of peace and enjoyment - so when I ended up in the same position, it was only because I was lucky enough to live in a time when divorce was far more accepted and even celebrated, that I got out. To do so, I had to do more than escape a marriage, I had to escape her influence and the model of comfort she’d passed down to me, which was a lot harder.

This damaging comfort is the same for so many things in life, so many things which we know are doing us harm, but we seemingly cannot give up. We all know that the cigarette we reach for is slowly killing us, but the thought of not being without that cigarette is new, bright and scary, and the act of smoking is familiar and something you understand. The same goe for the extra portion of chips, the extra bottle of wine, any situation we know we are not happy in or is not making our lives better, but which is familiar. We have survived hangovers, so we know we can do it again, and so we do not moderate our drinking because we are people who have hangovers. We are programmed to always prefer the devil we know because it has not yet killed us, even if it might do so one day.

Think of it in a work scenario - we have all had bad Bosses and bad jobs, but is that because Bosses are inherently bad, or because the world has told us Bosses are bad, and we are their victims? Popular culture only feeds into this - every comedy ever has bad bosses that the good guys bond to fight against, so we understand this is how things are meant to be. There are too many big, scary (and very real) things out there which keep us in situations we hate, but possibly the biggest and the scariest one is the thought of making that change. Who would we be if we didn’t hate our jobs, would we still have that bond with everyone else who hates their jobs, would we gets knocked back down even harder for daring to put our heads above the trenches and daring to enjoy life? If we lose something we hate, well, we can handle that. But what if we lose something we love, is that worse?

(And if policymakers realised this, then they might be less surprised as to why generations of people stay on benefits. If anyone has tried living on benefits, it’s incredibly hard work, its day to day grind and sweat and fear, so if anyone thinks living like this is an easy option then they are the fools.)

Our world is hell bent on making everything more comfortable than is good for us, as if lack of effort somehow equates to happiness. What it actually does, is robs us of so many basic skills as to render us uniquely vulnerable and afraid, and, as the movie Dune has told as over the generations, fear is the mid-killer. If we are more comfortable not using the phone and not talking to strangers, then the need to talk to strangers becomes terrifying, even if what we need to do is call for help. More comfortable to stay where we are being hurt, especially when someone is telling you that’s where we deserve to be.

If you think this is only a personal problem, just think how we mirror this on the world stage - living with cars and planes makes our life far more comfortable that how we imagine living without them might be, and yet we’re slowly, inexorably destroying our planet, basically in order not to have to work to the shops, or think of something to eat which is not an avocado. I wish I could say I’ve got over that one!

Of course, I bring this always back round to creating and creativity, because I see this always pretty much as they way out of everything in life we don’t like, but let me explain why - creativity is always and only about leaving your comfort behind, but it’s also the way you can do so with the least amount of risk. And the more you do something, you simply cannot help getting better at it, so of the thing you are doing is trying to move away from your comfort in tiny, safe steps, you can bring that energy to every part of your life.

I’m making it sound a lot easier than it is, mainly because I want you to try it. I will also acknowledge that it’s bloody hard too, that living in a state of not creativity is far more comfortable than the risk inherent with creating something which is vulnerable to the passing criticism of the cause observer. If you can, if you are strong enough to hear that criticism, to feel its pain and then to take a step back from it, tell yourself that whoever hands out negativity, is also living with their own, familiar devil. They are still stuck in a world where they cannot allow themselves to be open to positivity, where they are so stuck that the thought of someone trying to change only reminds them of their own inability to change, that they are hurt and lashing out at anything which challenges that.

Or tell yourself they’re ass holes, whichever works for you.

But yes - to challenge yourself with creativity, to do anything, is to make a change, is to, through the work of your hands, eyes, brain, body, something which did not exist before. In doing so, you have changed the world, your world, in some small way, and guess what? The sky is still blue, the sun is still warm and nobody died.

(If someone did die as a result of your creativity, probably don’t do that again, whatever it was.)

So you have faced discomfort - the blank page, the lump of clay, the block of wood, the unplayed instrument - and you have made a change. Your comfortable place is now a place where you have made a change and made something from nothing, so that’s a new reality, a reality where you create and (hopefully) no one died.

Generally speaking, if you find your alarm centers going off, if you feel that you might step out of a comfort zone, here’s a tip; why no try reframing this into a warning that your demon is digging its claws in, because it knows this is your way out from under its control?

If anyone is curious about what I’m up to, I am working towards Brand Licensing Europe, which is a massive event at the Docklands where I will fly my flag for independent, hand drawn art in a world of digital banality. Yes, I am trying to convince the world of megga corps that their their reliance on everything they have built themselves on is wrong, so go me!