Comfort
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Hello, and welcome to Overthink, the podcast where two philosophers help you get comfortable with big ideas. I'm David Peña-Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. David, there are a bunch of books that have come out about comfort recently, and most of them are in the self-help genre. Some are pro-comfort, others are anti-comfort. I'm just going to list a few titles for you as we get started. Love it. The Comfort Zone. The Comfort Book.

And The Comfort Crisis, Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. That one gets bonus points because it has both comfort and discomfort in the title. Wait, so are we supposed to be comfortable or uncomfortable? I feel like you're supposed to be comfortable with discomfort, but I guess it depends on the book. I mean, let's talk for a second about one of them, the comfort book.

This is a recent book by Matt Haig, who's sort of styled himself as a self-help author after writing a successful fantasy novel called The Midnight Library. And the comfort book is like a series of one-page inspirational quotes, ideas, and anecdotes. And Haig says it was born out of the fact that he sometimes writes things down to comfort himself. So the book isn't really about comfort so much as it is meant to help comfort the reader in the way that it comforted him in creating it.

I mean, honestly, I did this when I was a teenager and I called it the book of inspiration. And not to throw too much shade, but what I found in Haig's book was...

wasn't much better. Okay, classic Ellie. I was doing this when I was 13. So now I just want to know what the Book of Inspiration had, but I'll never know. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's somewhere in my dad's house, I think. It's like a bunch of cut and pasted stuff. Okay, anyway, back to the Hague book for now, though. Take a look at this note on structure from the beginning of the book, David. Okay, I am there.

A note on structure. Okay, it begins in a really mawkish, almost like maudlin, sentimental style. A note on structure. This book is as messy as life.

You know, like something you find on a birthday card from Hallmark. But also there's like no way it's actually as messy as life because it's printed, bound, shiny. I know it's actually quite rigid, probably. When times are hard, we need a deep kind of comfort, something elemental, a solid support, a rock to hold on to. Oh, this is my favorite part.

The kind we already have inside us. What? Wait, we have a rock inside us that we need to hold on to. Inside you, there is a rock. Inside me, there is a rock, which is just like stuck in your stomach, unable to pass through. Yeah, exactly. Highly uncomfortable. Real listeners know I'm lactose intolerant. So yes.

Well, the entire genre of self-help books is my lactose, Ellie. I have difficulty consuming it and letting it move through my system. Yeah. And, you know, I actually have a soft spot for self-help books. And I really do feel like even though we're making fun of this book, I think books that give you comfort or inspiration in the case of my 13-year-old self...

I do think they really have an important role to play, even if we might find as critics like ways to make fun of them or disagree with them. I do think some of them are pretty nefarious. I don't think this is like a nefarious one, even though I have not read the whole thing. But like, I think this idea of a book that's going to provide you with a sense of comfort in times of trouble is worthwhile. What I did read of the book didn't

really comfort me personally. I mean, I thought like, I thought it was really bad philosophy, if we could call it philosophy. I mean, some of the musings were musings on philosophical topics. And yeah, I was not at all impressed. But yeah, so let's, I guess like comfort can sometimes be found when you take your critical hat off for things. Yeah, I'm not going to go to this book or really to the self-help genre for my comfort giving literature. Although I have to confess that

Back in the day when I was a postdoc, I went through this period of reading lowbrow Harlequin romance novels. And they brought me so much comfort. And I would say that in terms of literary merit, they are definitely on par with these books about comfort. Interesting.

Yeah, I love a little Harlequin romance giving you comfort. And nothing brings me so much comfort as reading from the comfort of my phone in bed when I first wake up in the morning. Doesn't matter what I'm reading. Oh my gosh, blasphemy, blasphemy. Just love waking up, rolling over, cozying up, reading absolutely anything on my phone two inches from my face. That is comfort to me. Today, we are talking about comfort.

To what extent is comfort important for living well? And what might be the cases when discomfort is equally, if not more important? Is comfort a basic need or an optional extra that destabilizes the climate?

We talk about comfort in various ways in our daily lives. One thing you often hear is that we need to get out of our comfort zones, right? Which implies that we shouldn't be too comfortable because that inhibits us from adventure, from exploration, and from novelty. Yeah, and in that sense, comfort is considered something that limits us.

And I think that is a really different way of thinking about comfort from another way that the concept, though not the word, gets used today.

I think where you see pro-comfort discourse today, outside of the self-help genre, is in the phenomena of bed rotting and couch rotting, which we talked about a little bit in our laziness episode. And this is the trend recently of just chilling out all day in bed or on your couch and doing nothing as a sort of supposed antidote to productivity culture. Yeah, a modern reclamation of the literal comfort zone, if you will. Exactly.

Exactly, exactly. And another way that comfort comes up, though, less frequently is that sort of old school saying that a person is

comfortable to refer to their being financially sustained as in they're not financially insecure, nor are they super wealthy. They're comfortable. I know, which sometimes to me sounds like they're actually super wealthy deep down because I think it's a way of disowning one's class privilege, or at least it's a way of making it indeterminable in the context of a discussion. Because when I think about comfortable, I'm

I think of it as a baseline of well-being, right? It's like on the low end. And so when somebody says we are comfortable...

What they're really telling me is that they have met this minimum. But most of the people who use that phrase, it's clear that they have actually surpassed that baseline and are basically living a life of luxury. And, you know, just to capture this in a really neat example, when I taught at Emory with really wealthy undergrads, I would hear that all the time.

Now that I teach at a state school with a working class population, I have not heard a single student say of their class standing, my family and I are comfortable. And there definitely is a connection between comfort and class status. I saw in some of my research for this episode that comfort is considered to be one of the things, if not the thing, that separates students.

middle and upper classes from the lower ones. You know, this idea that like you can afford to be comfortable. But I think we can ask too what comfort is beyond some of these ways that we often talk about comfort because

Of course, the main form of comfort is material comfort. And to be comfortable in that baseline sense that you were talking about is to be warm, sheltered, well-fed, and not distressed by physical pain. And that means not to be distressed by whether you're able to pay your rent or utilities bills in a given month. Also, not to worry that you or your loved ones are in danger of physical harm at any moment, not to be tortured or tormented or assaulted.

Yeah, although it's interesting that you just moved from describing comfort in a positive sense, you know, like being well-fed, warm, so on, very quickly to describing it in a privative sense where comfort emerges as the absence of something negative, like pain, distress, torment, assault, so on and so forth. And I think that raises a question about whether comfort is something positive that we can put

possess, and if so, then what it feels like to be comfortable and to possess that thing, or whether it's simply the absence of something that we do not want. Yeah. Well, in the Sims video game, which I played a lot when I was younger, it was considered positive. Which, you know, I don't know what it is. I know. I don't know why I mentioned the Sims like multiple episodes. But in the Sims game, it was considered one of the basic needs. And

And you have this little metric. You can have an increase in comfort and be in the green versus going in the red. And so that's a more positive conception of it. And sitting on a comfy couch gave you more of it, which you could only afford if you had a lot of money in The Sims. So it was like the cheap couch had like three comfort points, whereas like the super expensive...

Couch had 10 comfort points. Suddenly the Sims is highlighting like the Marxist connection between comfort and class, but also like expressing the young generation's interest in couch rotting. Right. And you know how Gen Z's talk a lot about aura points. I think we need to start talking about comfy points because that's how I'm going to buy my next couch based on how many comfy points it has relative to its competitors. Yeah.

My couch is pretty comfy. You've slept on it. I can give you the reference, David. But in thinking about whether comfort is a basic need, I was led to look at what anyone who's ever taken a basic behavioral sciences class is familiar with, and that is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So in 1943, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with a list that moves from

our most basic needs to our highest potential for self-realization. And this is most often visualized as a pyramid, though Maslow himself didn't visualize it that way. And it starts with what he perceives to be our most basic need. That most basic need is physiological, eating, sleeping, defecating, breathing, etc. Then the second need is safety, a need for self-protection and security.

Moving up from there, we have belongingness, after that esteem, and then at the top, self-actualization, where we're realizing our potential and fulfilling ourselves. And the idea is that each of these five needs needs to be at least partially fulfilled before you can get to the higher level. So you can't have a sense of belonging, affection, love, or community if you don't have safety or your physiological needs met. And

And you can't self-actualize the fifth level if you don't have esteem, the fourth level, from yourself and others, like basic respect from them, a sense of affirmation and community. And what interests me about this is that the bottom two needs, physiological and safety, seem to me to be about comfort. And so the idea would be that we can't self-actualize if we don't have comfort. And because the higher needs are really what make life worth living...

then it stands to reason that on Maslow's view, we can only have a good life if we first have comfort. What do you think about this? Well, that's really interesting. Although let me say, first of all, that I had no idea that Maslow himself did not conceive of this as a pyramid. I would have bet money that he used the pyramid structure in his writing. So thanks for illuminating us on that point, Ellie. Things I learned in my research and share with you all. Yeah, just spitting facts left and right. But

I think the idea that the first two levels would be something akin to comfort is really appealing, although it presupposes that we accept a largely physiological conception of comfort to begin with, where comfort corresponds to the performance of certain bodily acts like sleeping, defecating, eating, and also to the protection of the body, right? Like you mentioned safety and security.

Another way of thinking about it would be to say that all the five levels are actually various forms of comfort. So comfort would not be the base of the pyramid, but maybe the pyramid itself. And that view would impact.

require us to adopt an expanded notion of comfort that includes emotional, psychological, and because of the focus on self-realization, even existential dimensions. So I would want to say, just thinking about this hierarchy, that esteem and belongingness give us a sense of comfort. It's just not comfort of a physiological order.

Yeah, I mean, that's fair to say. And that was my read on Maslow is that the bottom two could be considered comfort. And I was thinking about comfort in a pretty material sense. I do think no matter how broadly we want to construe comfort, though, the top level self-actualization would not be a comfort.

And so maybe actually that would suggest that like these self-help books that are like get out of your comfort zone imply that you've reached the bottom four levels, which also tracks the fact that self-help books tend to be purchased by people that are pretty well off. And I learned recently before I learned that Maslow didn't conceive of this as a pyramid himself, that Maslow may have been inspired by the Blackfoot or Siksika way of life in developing this hierarchy of needs.

It turns out that Maslow spent six weeks living at the Blackfoot Reserve in the summer of 1938 in order to study how social hierarchies are maintained by some people having dominance over others.

And what Maslow found was very different from what he expected. He did not find a competition for dominance, but instead he found cooperation, processes of restorative justice, and very low levels of inequality. And as the member of the Blackfoot Nation, Ryan Heavyhead, puts it, who's done research on Maslow's time with the Blackfoot, Maslow found that self-actualization was the norm in Blackfoot society.

So the vast majority of people got to what Maslow would later describe as the very top of the hierarchy of needs. And that makes a lot of sense to me that a tightly knit society where mutual aid is the norm and where there are deep kinship ties, i.e. where there is a lot of comfort on various levels, would produce a lot of self-actualization among its members.

Yeah, and we don't know the extent to which Maslow was directly inspired by the Blackfoot way of life. But one thing that Heavyhead points out is that Maslow, after his experience with this community, was still pretty individualistic in his interpretation of their success and ultimately in building the hierarchy of needs.

Because one thing that Maslow doesn't talk about is the emphasis on place, which is really crucial for the Blackfoot or Siksika. That is living on ancestral lands and being in deep community with nature. Yeah, and here it would be about the memory of location. And that's quite interesting because it's almost as if in Maslow's hierarchy, the earth

All that it does really is provide us with food and shelter, right? Like here are things that you can eat and here are structures that will protect you from the rain. And then you can go on to pursue all this business of self-actualization and realization on your own. But there is no meaningful connection between the pursuit for self-actualization and the particular place that you inhabit and where you dwell. So the earth really appears just as a springboard

for spiritual development, which could happen equally for all people in any place. Yeah, and this emphasis on place is, I think, pretty different from how we tend to think about the good life in dominant American society today. And I think that signals why we're often skeptical of comfort. So I think we tend to have this idea that

places where we grow up can be places of severe limitation, you know, holding us to certain social roles that may not support us. And so I'm thinking about how many narratives begin with someone leaving their small town and seeking a more exciting way of life, not in order to go back to it, but in order to like permanently leave it, where getting out of their comfort zone becomes a necessity for self-realization.

Yeah, although we also have to consider that those narratives tend to present discomfort as a temporary pathway to the good life, right? And so often that discomfort is not nearly as profound as the kinds of discomfort that people live with, let's say, in a war-torn country.

Like getting in your car and driving across the country and staying in some crappy motel on your way to Los Angeles would still fulfill Maslow's physiological and safety needs, right? According to the hierarchy. Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, like the ultimate goal is that getting to Hollywood means that you can eventually afford your 10 points comfort couch.

And, you know, even though I have heard that Maslow's hierarchy is not taken super seriously in the social sciences today, I do think there's something really compelling about needing to have our basic needs met before we can get to self-actualization. Like, what do you think about this? I agree, although...

I also don't like the very rigid hierarchical nature of this proposal. I think often we can maintain higher levels even if lower levels are destabilized for some period of time in our lives. But I can say that I basically agree. And

I want to bring in a couple of ancient schools of thought into the conversation that might actually disagree with this way of thinking. One of them is stoicism, where there's an emphasis on removing yourself from all worldly concern, including comfort.

And the second one is ancient cynicism, where there is a premium on actually rejecting all forms of material comfort. So let's talk about these two ancient traditions. For the Stoics, the highest goal is tranquility, or in Greek, ataraxia, which literally means non-disturbance, but most commonly translated as just tranquility of the self.

But this non-disturbance is to be sought according

according to the Stoics, not in external conditions, but solely in the mind's communion with itself. You have to train your mind not to be disturbed by external circumstances, which means that those circumstances really don't matter for the pursuit of the good life. And there's a much more complicated story about this in Stoicism, and not all Stoics would quite conceive it in this way, but that's a simplified version of the Stoic position.

Now, for the cynics, the argument works differently. For them, comfort creates habit. And habit is a form of enslavement that entails the loss of our most important attribute, which is our freedom. So the cynics would say that one has to avoid one's temptation for comfort in order to be free.

And the most famous cynic of all, Diogenes of Sinope, was famous among Athenians precisely for living a life that actively rejected all the comforts that all the Athenians were struggling to achieve. So very famously, he lived unhoused.

exposed to the elements, begging for money. And that's because he believed that as long as he rejected all versions and iterations of material comfort, he was the single most free man in Athens. Yeah, and this reclamation of freedom as being independent of material security, on the one hand, is compelling because it suggests that you can

really only find freedom if you reject the dominant norms of our society. And we talk about diogenes quite a bit in our very early Parousia episode where we're talking about speaking truth to power. But I also think that there's something about that that's just also pretty troubling to me because I think that what we should actually be doing is advocating for more people, all people in our society, to have a baseline of material comfort. And that is what fosters freedom for the vast majority of us

better than not having material security. Like, I don't know, Diogenes was like a real weirdo and that worked well for him. But I mean, we both live in cities with substantial unhoused populations, David. And I think for most of those individuals, not for all of them, but for most of them, that is not a choice. And it is something that could be remedied by having more housing security, you know, universal basic income or any number of other things. So I think I'm much more

interested in that, like getting a baseline of material comfort for everybody so that we can flourish than I am in being like, actually, freedom is found in not having any of that. No, of course. And, you know, nobody will advocate for other people to be involuntary cynics. You know, like you have to live Diogenes life against your own will. That seems pretty horrific. Because also if everyone were Diogenes, then nobody would be Diogenes. But I'm sorry, I'm interrupting you here.

Yeah, a world of cynics is inconceivable, according to Ellie. But I do think at least the case of Diogenes of Sinope forces us to ask a question that we've been sort of tiptoeing around up

up until now, which is what exactly is comfort? What exactly is that base? Because sometimes we tend to associate that base with owning a house that is ours. Having a car for many people would be like basic comfort. And so there is an important distinction to be made between basic well-being, arguably, and luxury, right?

And not everybody draws the line between those concepts in the same way. So I worry that sometimes when we're talking about comfort, whether we realize it or not, we're actually talking about luxuries and artificial needs and commodities that we don't actually need. But because we live in a society that fetishizes them, we experience them as necessities for basic well-being. Yeah. And I think...

When we're considering things from that vantage point, a tradition that is closer to my heart than cynicism, which is Buddhist thought, comes up for me because the Buddha famously came from a life of luxury, then tried out being an ascetic, tried out being somebody who begged on the streets, somebody who didn't have any possessions, et cetera, and then found that what was actually supportive for enlightenment was what he called the middle way. And so obviously it depends on the Buddhist tradition that you're talking about, but it's very common for

monks today, especially I'm thinking about like the Thai forest tradition to have only two robes to get their food by going around begging. So they don't have any, they don't have any money of their own. They depend on the generosity of others. And that actually,

I would say is a life that involves a kind of minimum of comfort. I mean, that's what the Buddha was, I would say, going for with the middle way so that then one can devote one's life to... It wouldn't be self-actualization in the Buddhist tradition. It would be like...

you know, enlightenment, which involves the destruction of the sense of self. But that can also involve really, really intense discomfort too. I mean, there are meditations where you look upon dead bodies, where you meditate in great cold, where you self-consciously expose yourself to the elements. And so I think that Buddhist practices have a really interesting relationship to comfort and

following this idea of the middle way, but also like an overcoming of one's attachment and clinging to material security or luxury. Yeah. And I mean, the first noble truth is essentially the truth of discomfort and suffering, right? And so there's that clear connection. And

Moreover, there is in the literature on cynicism a lot of connections made between the ancient cynics and the Buddha. So there might be a lot more overlaps here, Ali, than you might want to realize after your diss on the cynics. Well, just because you said that the cynics are rejecting comfort entirely, I would say that would put them more in the ascetic way of life than it would in a Buddhist way of life.

Well, they're rejecting comforts that enslave us, but they still want food and they still want to lead a good life and they still embrace philosophy and the path of the mind. And so that's why I'm emphasizing this point of what exactly do we mean by comfort? ♪

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Although the concept of comfort appears in one form or another in many branches of philosophy, from environmentalism to political philosophy all the way to moral theory, nowhere is it theorized more explicitly than in the subfield of the philosophy of nursing. For a long time, nurses have struggled to define their field relative to medicine. What exactly do nurses do, for example, that doctors do not?

Obviously, we don't want to say that nurses do what doctors could but don't want to do. Right. So we need a more positive answer that explains the expertise and the value of nursing in medical spaces. And one answer to that question is comfort. Nurses offer the possibility of comfort while doctors, on the other hand, offer the possibility of cure.

And my friend who is a nurse once put this to me in a really succinct way that stuck with me. He said, David, most people don't really know why they have to go to the hospital and stay overnight. They think it's because they need a doctor, but that's actually not the case. Technically, you could come see the doctor. They tell you what's wrong and then you go home.

But if you have to stay overnight at the hospital, it's because what you actually need is care. And that means you need a nurse. Hmm. And...

It seems to me that sometimes that care would be like medical care, right? Like needing an IV drip or somebody to change your bedpan. But the point seems to be rather that a nurse is offering those things rather than the doctor. And presumably the nurse is also offering emotional support and other non-material forms of care. Yeah. All of that is provided by nurses, often in ways that are not seen by the patients, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think this emphasis on comfort as what nurses offer, although I would also definitely want to say that we shouldn't just identify nurses by offering comfort because I feel like that might overlook their own medical knowledge and like in an already very feminized feel, just being like, yeah, they just give you emotional support. So I want to emphasize that. But I think it depends on how we're defining comfort, going back to some of the stuff that we talked about earlier.

But I do think this helps us think about nursing in connection with the tradition and philosophy of care ethics, which is a field that emphasizes relations of care as more fundamental to ethics than abstract obligations or like cost benefit analyses, such as we would find in deontology or utilitarianism, respectively. And the emphasis on care is

Aside from differentiating the nurse from the physician, although I would definitely wish for a medical system that had more of an obligation among doctors to give care in a broader sense and also more time for them to develop those care relationships with patients, because that's a big problem. It's not like their personal fault. But that would also help us understand the ways that nursing is gendered, given that the concept of care and comfort is so gendered.

Yeah, no, and I really like that you point out that we need to be careful about just associating nursing with comfort because I read a few articles about this and there is this debate in the philosophy of nursing about that. And the reason is because the concept of comfort, much like the concept of care in care ethics, is seen...

by many people, including many practitioners of nursing, as a soft concept. That's the term that's used in that literature, as opposed to the concept of the cure, which is seen as a hard concept. So sometimes the internalization of that sense that this is too feminizing spreads into the nursing community. And there is this issue of like, well, we do do this, but we don't want to be seen as only doing that.

Either way, in the literature, there are really interesting debates about what comfort is. You know, is comfort a basic need, kind of like what we were talking about with Maslow, something that we share equally? Is it a consequence or a result of nursing? There are debates about whether comfort is a state, like I am in a state of comfort, or whether it's a relational process, like I am in the process of being comforted by

by somebody else. And one idea that grows out of this research that stood out for me is that independently of how we define the concept, comfort

is inherently paradoxical because it is a pre-reflective experience. So we never really think about comfort until we are in a state of discomfort, right? So it comes to the foreground in the act of being disrupted or broken down. And so comfort is really hard to theorize or to philosophize about because you think about it when you don't have it.

But when you have it, you're not thinking about it. As one article puts it, comfort lies, quote, at the edge of awareness, end quote. And I really like that phrase.

My comfort does not lie at the edge of awareness when I am cozy in my bed looking at my phone. It is front of mind for me and it feels like just the biggest luxury that I can actually feel comfortable and cozy and indulge in that. But I think in general, the point stands, and especially when we're talking about the medical context,

that you're talking about right now, where it's like the absence, like I'm talking about a really silly example of like being cozy in bed. But I think, you know, in the nursing examples, it's probably much more about like extreme acute and or chronic pain and so on. And I think this relates us a little bit back to your earlier question about whether comfort is a privative concept. And if it is privative or at least pre-reflective, it means that it's something that we bring about not so much by thinking and making rational decisions, but precisely by cultivating relationships.

that nourish and sustain us. And that would explain a lot of the emotional labor that nurses do that is essential to their job, but is often overlooked both by patients and by physicians. Yeah, and I think we're both right to emphasize that there is this gendering and that that causes this overlooking of the work that nurses do in medical spaces.

But one article in particular that I read made a really intriguing point about discomfort versus cure debacle, which is that often when people write about it, they are presupposing that

Comfort is one thing that nurses give, and then cure is something else that doctors provide and that the two never actually overlap. So they're fully isolated from one another. But the authors of this article cited a lot of medical research showing not only that cures obviously make us comfortable because they restore us to health, but also that they're

but also that being comfortable when you are ill speeds up the process of cure, which would force us to think in less dichotomous ways about these concepts. And I think this research that shows that being comfortable makes it more likely that the cure you're receiving will be efficacious is

actually vindicates the very etymology of the word comfort because the word comfort comes from the Latin confortare, which means to give strength. It literally reinforces you and it helps cure you so the two are not separable.

Oh, yeah. Like fortify, fortitude. That's so interesting. And that's not how we think about comfort, right? If anything, we think of it as an optional add-on or as a derivative of medicine, which is why we see nurses as derivatives of doctors or as assistants. And this is a major problem for nurses, given the high levels of disrespect that they often experience from patients who feel entitled to abuse them.

And also by doctors who consciously or unconsciously buy into this myth of the nurse as the doctor's feminine underling. I love the phrase feminine underling. I think it really does capture the way in which we devalorize nursing. Yeah, which is like often...

performed by women or men of color, especially Asian men in the U.S., who are traditionally sort of like a feminized group, according to the logic of white supremacy. Yeah, and also just a lot of gay men who go into nursing. And I here would venture an additional point that borders on the psychoanalytic, because I think one of the reasons that patients lash out against nurses in ways that they would never dream of lashing against

a doctor is because the very presence of the nurse in their lives is a reminder of their vulnerability, of their fragility, of their dependence, of their mortality. So I think we can read that abuse that is directed against nurses as a kind of psychic displacement that happens when people are confronted with their own corporeality and mortality. So it's like the fear of death at work.

Yeah, it's the fear of death at work. And I'm glad you say that because now that I'm thinking about it, death is actually quite central to this discussion because we often think of comfort as a precursor to the cure, right? You want to get comfortable before the cure fully kicks in. So we assume that comfort should lead in all cases to a cure, which is the ultimate goal of medicine.

But there are cases where we need comfort, even though there is no possibility of cure. And in these cases, I think we really see the value of nursing really shining forth. And I'm here thinking about hospice and palliative care, because here are cases where we are dealing with the inevitability of death for which there is no cure.

And I think it's fair to say that at the moment of dying, you know, the figure of the male father doctor archetype is useless because they can't give you the cure that they typically would give you in other circumstances. And so when we're confronting or approaching death, the most that we can hope for is

is comfort, right? We can hope for a comfortable, peaceful process of dying. And that's something that only a nurse can give us. So in those cases, the hierarchy, I would say, is reversed. And nursing appears as superior to medicine.

Yeah, but I also think we really need to keep in mind, David, that there are a lot of situations where people just can't get comfortable. And that's not just the case in hospice or palliative care. In fact, like a lot of times in those situations, people are being given pretty high doses of painkillers. And so they're able to get, you know, more comfortable than they might otherwise. But there are so many conditions, whether it's chronic back pain or autoimmune disorders that cause chronic pain or even like preeclampsia.

Pregnancy, I feel like I hear from all my third trimester friends, I just can't get comfortable. So that's like a temporary case. So there are both temporary and chronic conditions that involve just like actually not being able to get comfortable, which can be so existentially threatening. A lot of people who have chronic back pain, especially if surgery doesn't work, end up having suicidal thoughts just because of their inability to get comfortable.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, this is something that has been quite personal for me in the last six to nine months because I have had chronic back pain that has been the result of a herniated disc from a sports injury that has caused unrelenting chronic back pain that radiates down my leg and the pain.

was so bad that they had to just give me an epidural a couple of weeks ago, which is the same thing that they give women for giving birth to endure the pain. And so I think those cases of not being able to get comfortable do point to the same issue that I'm trying to underline, which is that there are certain situations in our lives

when we are confronted with the impossibility of cure. And in those cases, we have to turn to figures in medicine who are not the privileged individuals

doctor, physician, surgeon, but rather figures who are often seen, as you said, as derivative, like the nurse or like the physical therapist. And so it's a way of foregrounding the idea that cure is not the end-all be-all on medicine, even though we often behave as though it is. Yeah.

Yeah, but what I'm saying isn't just that there are some cases where we can't find a cure, but also that there are some cases where we can't find comfort, let alone a cure, right? And so I think that that's...

important to point out because that then I think raises questions about getting comfortable with discomfort and what that means for people. And in those cases, we would never want to say that those individuals need to learn to embrace the pain or learn to be comfortable in the discomfort. But we would, at the very least in a medical space, hope to provide some resources and tools for them to cope, not necessarily embrace that discomfort in order for them to then go on to lead their lives.

We live under the assumption that the built environment should enhance our comfort. We want our buildings to have pools and elevators and on-site laundry. And I mean, I wouldn't live in a place in certain areas of the U.S. without centralized heating and ventilation for sure. Yet there is a movement in architecture and interior design today that challenges this so-called environment.

comfort industrial complex. And that encourages architects and interior designers to intentionally design uncomfortable spaces. And the reasoning behind this is that our expectation for around-the-clock comfort is highly unsustainable and is a major driver of climate change in the present moment.

Yeah, and when you think about the major contributors to climate change, comfort emerges as a common theme. It's a big reason for our car-centric lifestyle, since a lot of people could take public transit but choose not to because it's less comfortable than driving around in your own private car. And it's certainly the reason behind a lot of air travel, which is often a form of leisure. And of course,

there are the ways that we power our homes to make them comfortable running the AC or the heater like you talked about, you know, in some parts of the country that's necessary. And the irony is that

AC in particular is going to become more and more necessary in more and more parts of the country as the planet heats up, even though the use of things like AC is one of the contributors to the planet heating up. I mean, I would want to specify here that individuals using air conditioning is nothing compared to the scale of industrial contributions to climate change. But nonetheless, you know, there is like a kind of irony there. And of course, some of the industries that are some of the main drivers of climate change are

are also industries that make our lives more comfortable. Yeah, you might say that the planet is burning because we want to be comfortable, right? We are comforting ourselves into extinction. And I read this piece by a professor of architecture from Australia, Daniel Barber. The piece is called After Comfort.

And he argues that we will not be able to revamp our relationship to the environment until we reimagine how we inhabit that environment, i.e. how we build spaces for dwelling, which is, of course, a domain of architecture and interior design.

He says that every icon of 20th century architecture has been, from the perspective of carbon politics and greenhouse gas emissions, an almost complete failure since they all treat the outside as something that is to be dominated and to be kept at bay. And so a lot of these buildings that are the defining achievements of modern architecture, they really see themselves as membranes of

whose function it is to seal us off in a controllable microclimate, in a kind of interiority that sets itself off from the rest of nature. And for example, you know, we have heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems that we very easily control by turning the thermostat or by pushing a button at will. And those things are not just everywhere.

But we also go to great lengths to hide them, to make them invisible so that we don't think about them. And he says that there is a deep paradox involved here. You know, you called it an irony. And he says that the paradox is that this stable interiority that we are creating through architecture, right?

ultimately brings about the destabilization of the outside elements. He says, the experience of comfort inside is predicated on the global acceleration of climatic instability outside. Okay, so the direct quote that you just read from Barber, I would say...

Yes, yes.

Our desire for comfort on the inside is one of the factors leading to climate change, especially if we're just limiting it to this desire for comfort inside the home, like with the HVAC system. But then in turn, the more the climate gets destabilized, the more we need to go to these places.

technologies in order to make life sustainable. And this has been a big problem, especially in Texas recently with there being such a surge to the power grid with heat waves that it actually can short out. And that's because people need air conditioning to stay alive. And a lesser example I would say also is for those of us who live in somewhat polluted cities, oftentimes the dry

drive to close your windows and turn on the AC rather than leaving the windows open is driven by like allergies that are caused by pollution, you know, and or like worries about impacts your lungs through breathing the air of like a very polluted city with a ton of cars. And so it's really tricky, right? Yeah.

Yeah, but I think he's acknowledging that while also emphasizing that everywhere you look, we have unnecessary levels of controlled, stabilized microclimates that are not needed. So, you know, every time you go into a Starbucks, it's like super cold. Every time you go into an office building, there's an unreasonable expenditure of energy in order to create this standard of comfort that is ultimately actually not even that comfortable. Yeah.

Yeah, especially not for women. Have you seen those statistics about how offices are set to like temperatures that most men tend to like and they're way too freezing for women? Yes, I do know that. And so he says that the levels of consumption of comfort right now outpays the need for that comfort. And so he ultimately calls for architects and interior designers to start designing for discomfort in the sense of going back to comfort

older technologies for natural ventilation that are effective that were pretty common actually before the 1960s, before you had this explosion of like, well, AC and central heating have to be everywhere at all times, giving us control. But what do you mean by discomfort here? Because wouldn't it be, I mean, I think like going into a Gaudi building in Barcelona, Gaudi famously used

natural forms of ventilation is a lot more comfortable for me than being inside a freezing office building. So I wouldn't say that that's like an introduction of discomfort. So isn't he just saying that we could have comfort more naturally than we...

Well, he is. And I think part of his point is that we have come to equate comfort with these technologies, with these artificial environments that we think are markers of class, which they are, but that we come to expect as a matter of course. And so he does say that rediscovery

And discovering older technologies is a way of rediscovering the pleasure of what we might call discomfort, but that then becomes an object of our desire. So, yeah, we come to enjoy natural ventilation, whereas maybe a lot of people would be like, oh, no, there is no AC in the Gaudi building. I don't really want to go.

So it's just a temporary discomfort in order to get to new kinds of comfort. What do you mean by temporary? As we got used to the natural ventilation systems, we might temporarily be uncomfortable, but then ultimately we would get used to that and then we would be comfortable again. Yes, I think that's correct. Yeah. And we would come to desire that because we would be in closer communion to the natural elements from which we are currently alienated.

Yeah, and that's where I just think this sounds a little bit idealistic and nostalgic because we've already changed the climate so much that I don't think it's as simple as like we just need to get back to the elements. No, for sure we wouldn't get back to some like primal condition of the Earth, but we ourselves would

be more exposed to the elements, keeping in mind, of course, that there are situations where that's not possible, right? Like for allergies and like certain areas. Yeah, and also increasingly more places on Earth

especially in the coming decades, that are going to be unsustainable just from a heat perspective for the human body temperature. Yeah, no, that's correct. And so now I want to connect all this discussion of heating and AC and architecture and interior design to the writings of a German philosopher by the name of Peter Schlotterdijk, who is a really weird figure, I think, in contemporary philosophy. I don't love his politics, but whose ideas

spherology philosophy is quite relevant here. He has this whole philosophy of spheres. And Sloterdijk has written a ton of books, but his magnum opus is this trilogy, this three-volume work about the ontology of spheres for human existence. Volume one is about bubbles. Volume two is about globes. Volume three is about foam. It's all about these like

sphere-like structures that mediate our relationship to nature. And the unifying thread in his work is the notion that humans are not isolated Cartesian subjects. Rather, we are always immersed inside protective and connective spheres. So we are not ourselves Cartesian spheres. We live inside larger environmental spheres, if that makes sense.

And Schlotterdijk has this fantasy of being the Heidegger of the contemporary world. And he has this critique of Heidegger, actually, where, you know, without going into too much detail, he says that we don't just exist in a vast...

open, undifferentiated expanse, as Heidegger's concept of being in the world might suggest. Rather, we live in all these spheres that enclose us. And he says that we will never arrive at the proper analytic of human existence that Heidegger was after until we prioritize thinking about these spheres and how they protect us and also separate us from one another. So he's trying to out-Heidegger Heidegger

And at one point, he even suggests that his trilogy is the book that Heidegger should have written, but didn't.

Okay, well, I okay, so I haven't read this trilogy. I have bubbles on my shelf, but I haven't cracked it. I've had it on my shelf for like two years. But I can just say without even having read it that I know what Heidegger's response would be to this, which is that Schlöderdyke is focusing on the ontic rather than the ontological and is targeting his critique at the wrong sort of thing being in the world being an ontological structure. But I

Anyway, yes. Yeah, I'm sure Heideggerians would definitely disagree with that assessment. But to get to the point here about comfort in his trilogy, Schlotterdijk talks about all kinds of spheres that he says are key for human life, like the womb at the beginning of life. Intimate, loving relationships, he says, are a form of sphere that protect us.

And specifically in the third volume, which is Foam, he talks about how in the contemporary moment, we live in all these tiny interconnected microspheres like apartments, cars, buildings, so on and so forth, hence the image of Foam.

And he talks about heating and air conditioning in that context, arguing that it's one of the ways in which we go about creating these sort of artificial hyperventilated hyperinteriors. And this is interesting.

interesting to think about as an intervention in existential ontology. But I mean, maybe this has to do with the ontological distinction, too. Are all the spheres he's talking about physical or material enclosures? I mean, I also don't get the phone point, like why it's like, oh, apartments and cars, of course, foam. But anyway, that's a sidebar. OK, tell me about like, yeah, are they physical or material enclosures?

enclosures. Yes, many are physical structures, but not all of them. He also talks about ideological or symbolic bubbles. For example, he discusses the idea of God as a sphere in the first volume of this trilogy.

Then in volume two, he talks about globalization as a kind of like globe that connects us as a big bubble that connects different parts of the world. So they don't really have to be physical, but they do have to have an inside-outside structure mediated by some kind of member.

brain. Okay. Well, and maybe that can take us back as we're closing to the idea of comfort zones, right? Because that might be, I don't know if it's like a bubble or foam or whatever it might be. But this idea, like I do think a comfort zone has an inside-outside structure. When you're inside the zone, you are comfortable. When you are outside the zone, you are uncomfortable.

Yeah, I think of that injunction that we get out of our comfort zones almost as somebody popping our bubble or, you know, the many bubbles in our foam from the outside with a needle such that we are suddenly exposed to all these elements without a protective membrane. ♪

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