Once upon a time, one of my mid-career students came to me with a bleak look on his face. He told me that as he returned to his apartment the night before, he’d had a massive and unsettling realization: He hated his job. He worked in a scholastic publishing house where, he said, everyone else was equally unhappy.* That evening, he walked into his apartment and saw, smack dab in the middle of his leather sectional couch, an ass divot—directly across from the TV. He realized he was a prisoner of his comfortable apartment. Locked in by a decent mortgage rate paid for by a cushy job . . . golden handcuffs and all. “I like my apartment,” he said, “and now I’m stuck.”
The search for comfort and security rarely yields the desired fruit. We want the easy way, but the easy way is a trap. Complacency is the enemy, and settling down is settling. Our desire for an easier life gets us stuck in a smaller one, judging everything by the comfort and ease it brings, not by what it costs our soul. We willingly kill time “just chillin’,” while the muscles of our instinct and intuition grow flabby. We’ve got games, toys, and instant messaging but are spiritually and emotionally empty. We look around the internet and ogle others’ creativity but put off developing our own. The search for meaning is replaced by shopping on the weekend. Even our food is calorie-rich but nutrient-weak.
The answer is to burn it all down and trust that you can build a better, roomier life.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech backing the NASA Apollo effort to land a man on the moon: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”
Today the idea of doing something because it is hard seems as dated as the Apollo program. But hard work, such as the struggle to find a fulfilling job, benefits our souls and forms the core of our grit, fortitude, and character. This is the hard work of self-discovery. By age 35 or 40, many of us reach a plateau, not the moon we initially shot for. The day shift is not you at your best. The uncomfortable spot is where your true voice is: shamelessly and outrageously you. The brave ones—companies and individuals—who risk comfort and safety for a chance at beauty and meaning have the potential to attain more—to actually move someone.
*I can’t even think of the bad karma passed on to our kids.