Finding Pleasure While Learning from Discomfort
3/365 It’s not about predicting the chaos, it’s about flowing in chaos.
If you are anything, or were anything, like the majority of the millennial public: we loved going out, we loved meeting people and used Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge to meet potential partners and sometimes friends. Our circles got wider and wider we all recognized each other from apps at concerts and coffee shops. It was in good fun and we had built, communally, a new social norm.
Now during Corona times we have had to adapt firstly to unemployment for most of us, to being away from our friends and our partners and the hardest of them all, leaning to live with ourselves. Let’s be honest we have been ignoring our own fall backs and flaws during dates and Meetups placing the blame on others because “they just didn’t get us” or they were “weird”. Now we have nothing to do, all of the books have been read, the garden is watered, the meals are prepped, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Prime Video are up to date and everyone in the chat has hung up. We are left with our biggest fear. Ourselves.
Looking inside can scare most people if not everyone. People have their own ways of dealing with their cycles and bad habits but we cannot control what we are thinking 100% of the time. We will believe things that shouldn't, when in fact they are mere projections of our fears onto the forefront of our minds. Being alone with ourselves has thrown us into the lion’s pit that is our self recovery from all the rejections, all the pain, and all the ill intent we created and harbored in our past lives, pre-Covid.
When we all created the pre-Covid social norm of interacting and community creation we fell into it and it was the most logical thing to do at the time, this can be due to advertising or just the changing times and a generational difference in priorities and communication styles. Now we are shoved into a new norm, Covid times, each person must set a baseline for themselves and their immediate circle of people they have stayed in contact with, those that truly matter to them.
The path to pleasure traverses discomfort.
In times of discomfort we are never alone, we have ourselves, like it or not. We need to find the comfort in the discomfort, if we are really to come out of this global experience changed, anew and learn from our old norms and their errors. We need to learn to be uncomfortable. To learn this will prepare us for anything else that may come our way. We haven’t seen someone live up to 150 years but we are clearly evolving to generations that will be living longer than us at this point, and epidemics, pandemics and natural selection are all very well close tied together. If we can learn to evolve psychologically and in turn reflect change within the norms of our everyday trials our children and our children’s children will cary this betterment in their life lessons and maybe even in their blood.
The false comfort we have given ourselves for the past generation, or 3, has been a terrible “safety blanket” that has done absolutely nothing for the whole of humanity but only controlled the majority of it and given power to those that were lucky enough by the universal game of chance to be born into it. we have just witnessed the most bizarre of bizarrities in the history of the planet this year of our lord 2020 will for ever be known as the year when everything happened. We are now going to play catchup with the damage we have done to the planet and to humanity. We are all paying the price, we are all paying dues and the only way to make amends is lean into your discomfort, actually make a change, actually be better. Let’s not just brag about it, otherwise we are all just going to go back to the sickly 2019 and prior before everything happened.
