If we could achieve peak comfort in
our lives, would we stagnate? Perhaps the discomfort we feel as humans is the
subconscious giving us the drive to continue in our lives. We desire to achieve,
develop, and craft; to create greater means to live, innovative inventions to
change and sculpt our existence.
The medium of writing was once said
to be the downfall of mankind when first invented. A means of expressing, seen as
alien by the outsider afraid of what it would make humanity. To the person that
created it, a means of expressing and articulating without the need to make
sound. The ability to refer to information; a physical rendition of what is and
was. Symbols representative of speech to save and maintain the way of the word
throughout a period of time.
This idea likely came out of the
imagination, and the mind’s discomfort in its realisation that this possible
reality wasn’t in actuality.
With true comfort would the loss of
ambition thus emerge? Are we continuing to evolve and do better through our
imagination’s ability to conceive of greater comfort, therefore rending the
current state of comfort as discomfort?
Discomfort is aspirational, it does drive innovation. But are our current high levels of comfortable living, provided for us by the overcoming of the uncomfortable, now driving us to look again at discomfort? To embrace discomfort in order to drive innovation - not for more comfort - but for what exists within the uncomfortable?
ReplyDeleteLife is an ongoing dialectic between positive and negative, pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort, sun and rain. We need the other. Energy exists of positive and negative forces. To create and utilise energy we must not only seek the comfortable but truly embrace the uncomfortable.
Does this come entirely from a privileged perspective? We live comfortably - where does the good come from examining discomfort? Perhaps it lies within innovation and ambition, if we ignore discomfort do we loose ambition?
How much comfort is too much comfort?