Being Comfortable Is a Bad Thing, Right?

"They" say don't get too comfortable or the moment you do, you are no longer making progress and moving forward.

But what if "they" are wrong?

It sure is funny how something such as a catch phrase or a myth can take off and spread so rapidly like wildfire whether it’s actually true or whether it holds no validity at all. We so often believe what we are told without questioning it all. The more we hear a phrase, the more we assume it must be true. If everyone is doing it, it MUST be right, right?

*Insert our mothers asking us, if everyone else is jumping off a cliff, are you going to jump, too?*

But why is it viewed as such an unusual thing to be enjoying where you are and what you are doing in life? If we're not always working harder to advance to a higher job status or working toward a nicer car, does that really mean we aren't doing well enough for ourselves?

Have you ever stopped to think that maybe someone actually enjoys their job? Crazy thought, I know. As someone that has continued to struggle finding exactly what I want to do in life, it sounds almost impossible to me, too.

I was speaking with a friend that recently got a new job that stated he would, of course, move up in no time, that he would not remain stuck in his current position like some of his fellow coworkers. At that moment, it hit me. I looked at him and asked, "what makes you think these people aren't happy with their job?"

We so often attach a negative connotation to words like "content" and "comfortable".

As I've grown older, I have found that whenever I go to say "I'm happy", more often than not, I end up saying, "I'm happy, like, I'm so content right now."

The definition of these words go as follows:

con·tent: in a state of peaceful happiness

com·fort·a·ble: providing physical ease and relaxation

So, why would it be considered a bad thing to be either one of these?

While reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I came across a passage that really started me on this path of enlightenment regarding comfortability:

But while investing deeply in one person, one place, one job, one activity might deny us the breadth of experience we’d like, pursuing a breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to experience the rewards of depth of experience. There are some experiences that you can have only when you’ve lived in the same place for five years, when you’ve been with the same person for over a decade, when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half your lifetime.

As someone that thought they needed to move 2,000+ miles away from where they were raised and felt the need to travel as much as my bank account could bare just to experience life in attempt to find a purpose in it, reading this opened my eyes. It confirmed what I already figured out after I had decided to move back home, I just never quite knew how to put this little gem of wisdom into words as effectively as Mark Manson did.

If you find yourself having to constantly travel to new places or you tend to jump from job to job, maybe it's because you are searching for something that isn't really there. Something that cannot be found when you're moving from one place to another so habitually. Maybe that "something" can only be found when you stay put for a while, with someone, somewhere. Because at the end of the day, are we usually prouder of the things that took us three hours or three years to achieve?