Happiness V Comfort

Recently, I came to a realization about my life. I would rather be happy than comfortable.

A few weeks back, I was laying at home, procrastinating on my physics homework. I was wrapped in a fuzz blanket that my grandmother had given me, and I was re-watching “How I Met Your Mother” for the thousandth time. As I was watching, Robin, one of the main characters says, “The future is scary but, you can’t just run back to the past because it’s familiar. Yes, it’s tempting but it’s a mistake.”

After the episode ended, I didn’t start the next. Instead, I sat up and started thinking. I thought about the last few years of my life. The good, the bad, the great, and the worst. I thought through most of my relationships, both familial and amical. I did this for a while. I did this for so long the sun had now set, I had skipped dinner, and my physics homework was still untouched. I decided to do it in the morning, and I rolled over and went to bed.

All through the next day, I kept thinking about that quote. Through everything I did that day, I thought about a time, in the past, when the exact same thing had happened. By the end of the day, I was fully thinking about the past and not what was in front of me. As I drove home, a question formed in my head. Why was I choosing comfort over happiness?

To me, being comfortable and being happy are two incredibly complex things. It’s not so much two sides of the same coin as it is two completely different coins that share characteristics. Like a quarter and a dollar coin. Comfort is a quarter, and happiness is a dollar coin. Most people have quarters but would much rather have a dollar coin. The problem is that dollar coins are so much rarer.

Comfort is easy. Comfort is being content with how your life is. This contentness can make you weary of taking risks. After all, why mess up something good to try and get something better? Shouldn’t you just be grateful for what you have? Say you are at Knoebels. You have been riding Impulse all day. The park is getting ready to close. You have been there all day and have yet to make it to The Phoenix, your favorite coaster. Now sure, you are having fun on the Impulse. It’s a great coaster, there is decent seating around the entrance for when you need a break. There is both good food and good bathrooms close by. It is, at the moment, ideal. But you really, really, really want to ride The Phoenix. It is a phenomenal coaster. Your dilemma is as follows: do you risk going to the back of the park to get a ride in on The Phoenix. Let’s look at a pros and cons list of the situation.

Look at this list. There are double the number of cons than there are pros. From a quantitative stance, it makes zero sense to go to The Phoenix. The list is stacked three to six against that. But look closer. Four of the cons contain the word could. Two thirds of your reasons for staying are based on chances. Now look at the pros. Two of the three contain absolutes. You know The Phoenix is your favorite. You know it will make your day better. Two thirds of your reasons for going are based on certainties. Perspective is everything. If you look at this from a top-down perspective or a pure numbers perspective, you would be crazy to leave. If you actually dig deep into each reason however, it makes complete sense to go.

If you look at life from a pure numbers perspective, comfort rules all. There will always be more reasons to not do something. That doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t do it. It just means you need to look at it in a different way. Look away from the total reasons and look at each individual reason. The simplest way to conceptualize this is by going to the grocery store without a list.

You walk into the store and head to the deli. At the meat counter, you start examining each of the cuts behind the glass. You don’t have a list so there are no right or wrong answers. Two cuts end up catching your eye. A fresh honey baked ham and classic pepperoni. Consider the two meats. You enjoy the taste of the ham more, but the pepperoni is cheaper. The peperoni will also last longer, it has more protein and less carbs. If you were going off for a number of reasons. You would be walking out of that store with pepperoni. That would be comfortable. You didn’t spend too much and you are left with something you enjoy. Now, if you were going based on the quality of reasons, your pocket would be much lighter, but you would be happy with your container of honey baked ham.

Now after two examples I shouldn’t have to continue to explain the ways being happy is better than being content. I would assume that you can grasp the concept and reasoning. However, the question still remains, why comfort over happiness? There are several reasons that are personal to each person. We all lead different lives, and we make our decisions based on those lives. That being said, the decisions we make that have to deal with our comfort all have a basis in fear.

This goes back to the roller coaster scenario. Four of the six cons were centered around a possibility. The reason you would stay on Impulse is because of fear. Fear of not getting to The Phoenix in time or fear that you won’t be able to ride it. There is no straightforward way to overcome this fear. It is this fear that will keep you trapped in a state of comfort. If you are too scared to make a change, you will stay comfortable. The longer you stay comfortable, the more reluctant you will be to take a risk and make a change. This endless cycle of comfort in fear is lethal. It can kill the possibility of someone being happy. The combination of comfort and fear creates pseudo-happiness. You are too scared to be uncomfortable that you assume comfort is happiness.

If you are stuck in a state of pseudo-happiness, it is paramount that you get out of it. Pseudo-happiness destroys lives. And the people whose lives it destroys, they don’t realize it until it’s too late. They feel this numb state of comfort and assume that this is what a happy life should be.

This is a sad reality and what makes it worse is there aren’t many ways to get out of it. You can’t do anything yourself, so it becomes something that is completely out of your control. For you to exit this state of pseudo-happiness, something has to give. For me, it was “How I Met Your Mother.” Now I didn’t put on that show to get myself out of a state of extreme comfort. I put it on that night because one, it is one of my favorite shows of all time and two, I was feeling a bit depressed and when I am depressed, I watch love stories.

Besides the first quote I mentioned earlier, there is another that resonates with me and deals with this exact subject matter. “If you’re not scared then you’re not taking a chance. If you’re not taking a chance, then what the hell are you doing anyway?”

Being happy will never happen if you just wait around for it. The longer you wait for happiness by doing nothing, the farther you will fall down the comfort rabbit hole. To be happy, you have to work toward it.

When faced with a decision, always take the one that has the most potential to make you happy. This option will never be a guarantee of happiness, but it is at least a chance. Best case scenario, you end up happy. Worst case, you don’t, but you move on. You take the information you have just gained, and you move on with your life. You move on to the next person, place or thing that will bring you happiness. If you do this for your entire life, some of these people, places and things are about to stick around.

Earlier, I defined comfort but never happiness. When writing this, I did this due to the flow of the story. Now, this seems as good a place as any to say what happiness is. One problem with that, I don’t have a definition. For some reason, comfort was easy to define. Happiness is not. Isn’t that the point, though?

When you gain consciousness, you are comfortable by default. Comfort is what we’ve all known since our earliest memory. Our lives are nothing but quests for happiness. Happiness is hard to define because it is different for everyone, and you don’t really know what it is until you have it.

As I conclude this absolute beast of a brain-dump, I’ll say this. Happiness is what drives our lives. Moreover, it is the search for happiness. We all want to be happy, but comfort can get in the way. I urge you, evaluate your life. Are you happy or are you content? If you are happy, congratulations! I have nothing to say to you. If you are comfortable on the other hand, I have only one thing to ask. Why? Why are you comfortable? Evaluate your life and look for happiness. Once you see an opportunity to be happy, go for it. You have to go for it. Sure, that decision could bite you in the butt, however, at least you will have learned from it. If it doesn’t and you succeed in finding happiness, congrats! Now do it again.

Featured photo (at top): Senior Jack Dietrich is the Broadcast Editor-in-Chief of The Arrowhead.