Most of us would probably agree that life becoming more comfortable is a good thing. Few people want to return to washing clothes by hand, navigating unfamiliar cities with a paper map, waiting weeks for a letter to arrive or spending hours doing work that technology can now complete in minutes.
Human progress has always involved removing unnecessary difficulty, and much of that progress has made our lives immeasurably better.
But somewhere along the way, something more subtle may have happened. We haven’t just become better at removing hardship; we’ve become increasingly good at removing friction, uncertainty and inconvenience from everyday life, to the point where avoiding discomfort can begin influencing which experiences we choose in the first place.
Food arrives at the door. Entertainment appears instantly. GPS prevents us getting lost. Reviews tell us what a restaurant will be like before we walk inside. Translation apps remove much of the difficulty of communicating in another language. Algorithms learn what we already enjoy and offer us more of it, while increasingly capable AI can take over tasks that once required us to struggle through uncertainty ourselves.
Individually, these things are enormously useful. I use many of them and have no desire to give them up.
The more interesting question then is, what happens when the expectation of convenience escapes the technology and starts influencing the way we approach life itself. When something feels awkward, uncertain, difficult or unfamiliar, do we still see that discomfort as a normal part of doing something new, or have we gradually started treating discomfort as evidence that something is wrong?
Because there is an important difference between eliminating hardship that serves no purpose and eliminating every experience that makes us uncomfortable. And perhaps we are becoming less careful about distinguishing between the two.
Think about how much of modern life is designed to reduce the distance between wanting something and receiving it. We can shop without entering a shop, order dinner without speaking to anyone, watch almost any film without leaving the sofa and communicate with somebody on the other side of the world without waiting more than a few seconds. If we don’t know something, we can find the answer immediately. If we don’t know where we’re going, a voice tells us when to turn.
None of this is inherently a problem. Convenience gives us back time, removes pointless frustration and makes things accessible that previous generations could barely have imagined. But technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated at doing something else as well: Adapting the world we experience to the person we already are.
Streaming services learn what we like watching. Music platforms learn what we like hearing. Social-media algorithms learn what holds our attention. Online stores learn what we’re likely to buy. Search engines anticipate what we’re looking for, while AI increasingly learns how we prefer to communicate, work and solve problems. The better these systems become, the less often we need to encounter something simply because it happens to be there.
That sounds wonderfully efficient, and often it is. Yet some of life’s most valuable experiences begin precisely because reality hasn’t been customized for us.
Sometimes we have to adapt to the world rather than asking the world to adapt to us.
One reason comfort can become such a powerful default is that discomfort is remarkably good at making itself heard.
Walk into a room where you know nobody and your instinct may be to leave. Attempt something you aren’t particularly good at and embarrassment arrives quickly. Raise a difficult subject with somebody you care about and avoiding the conversation can suddenly seem very attractive. Travel somewhere unfamiliar and uncertainty begins long before you arrive.
The feeling is real, but the conclusion we attach to it isn’t always reliable.
Sometimes discomfort is warning us about genuine danger, an unreasonable risk or a situation we should avoid. There is nothing admirable about deliberately making life harder simply to prove that we can endure it, and suffering does not automatically build character merely because it is unpleasant.
At other times, however, discomfort is simply telling us that we don’t know exactly what happens next.
That distinction matters because many worthwhile experiences contain uncertainty by definition. Meeting new people, learning an unfamiliar skill, starting something we might fail at, speaking honestly when silence would be easier or entering an environment where we don’t understand all the rules can make us uncomfortable without placing us in any meaningful danger.
If we automatically interpret that feeling as a reason to retreat, the boundaries of our lives can gradually become defined by whatever already feels familiar.
Comfort stops being something we enjoy and quietly becomes something we obey.
Some of the clearest examples for me come from travel, partly because I began travelling extensively long before smartphones removed so much of its uncertainty.
Arriving in an unfamiliar city once meant finding your way with a paper map, a guidebook and whatever information you had managed to gather beforehand. If you took a wrong turn, there wasn’t a blue dot on a screen immediately telling you where you were. If you couldn’t understand a sign, you couldn’t point a camera at it and receive an instant translation. If you wanted to know where to eat, asking somebody was often more useful than consulting hundreds of reviews written by strangers. It could be frustrating, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. I’ve spent plenty of time wandering in the wrong direction, struggling to communicate and wondering whether I had made a terrible decision.
Author somewhere in Bulgaria
But getting lost also forced you to engage with wherever you happened to be. You had to look around, ask people for help and occasionally follow a route you hadn’t intended to take, which sometimes led somewhere you hadn’t known existed.
Modern technology has made travel dramatically easier, and I happily use Google Maps and other tools that prevent me wasting half a day searching for a railway station. I don’t believe getting lost is inherently virtuous any more than I believe washing clothes by hand makes someone a better person. Research has also found that habitual GPS use is associated with poorer spatial memory when people subsequently navigate without it.
What interests me is the trade, because every time we remove uncertainty from an experience, we should at least recognize that we may be removing some of the possibilities that uncertainty once created.
The answer isn’t to throw away the smartphone. It’s to remember to occasionally look up from it.
There is another difference between exploring the world now and when I first began travelling: Today we can preview almost everything.
Before booking a hotel, we can inspect the room from several angles, read hundreds of opinions about the breakfast and discover that somebody in 2024 thought the shower pressure was disappointing. Before entering a restaurant, we can examine photographs of the meals, study its rating and decide exactly what to order. Before visiting a landmark, we may already have watched dozens of videos showing precisely what we are about to see.
Again, much of this information is useful. Nobody needs to deliberately book a terrible hotel in the name of personal growth. But there is a difference between being informed and trying to remove every possibility of disappointment. If every experience must first survive a review score, a comparison, a recommendation algorithm and the approval of people who went before us, we may become increasingly reluctant to choose anything whose outcome we cannot predict.
This doesn’t only apply to travel. We can research a career until we convince ourselves not to change it, analyze a business idea until every uncertainty becomes a reason not to begin, or avoid meeting somebody because we don’t know whether the conversation will go well. Information that was supposed to help us make decisions can eventually become another way of postponing them until uncertainty disappears.
The problem is that uncertainty rarely disappears. Sometimes you eventually have to enter the restaurant, take the job, make the call, start the project or walk into the room without knowing exactly what happens next.
Modern life quite reasonably teaches us to remove friction. Businesses obsess over it because every unnecessary click, confusing instruction or inconvenient step makes customers more likely to leave. That makes perfect sense when designing a checkout page. It becomes more questionable when applied indiscriminately to a human life.
Some friction really is pointless. Bureaucracy, repetitive work, unnecessary commuting and badly designed systems don’t become valuable simply because they are inconvenient, and there is no NoRuleBook virtue in making easy things difficult. But other forms of friction exist because we are attempting something that requires something from us.
Learning is frustrating before competence arrives. Honest conversations can be uncomfortable before understanding improves. Exercise is physically demanding before the body adapts. Creating something exposes us to criticism. Meeting unfamiliar people requires social effort. Changing direction means surrendering some certainty about where we are going.
Remove all of that friction and we don't necessarily create a better life. We may simply create a smaller one.
The useful question, therefore, isn’t whether something feels uncomfortable. It is why it feels uncomfortable and whether avoiding that feeling is actually serving us.
There is nothing wrong with wanting a comfortable life. After spending decades travelling, sleeping in questionable accommodation and occasionally finding myself in situations I would rather not repeat, I have developed a healthy appreciation for comfortable beds, hot showers and plans that actually work.
The danger appears when comfort moves from being something we appreciate to becoming the condition under which we are willing to act.
If we will only begin once we feel confident, speak once we know how somebody will respond, travel once every uncertainty has been removed or try something once success feels reasonably assured, we can spend enormous portions of life waiting for a level of certainty that never arrives.
That is where the familiar phrase ‘step outside your comfort zone’ becomes more useful when turned around.
The objective isn't to spend your life outside the comfort zone. It is to make sure the comfort zone isn't making your decisions for you.
There will be times when staying with what is familiar is exactly the right choice, just as there will be times when the nervousness surrounding something new is worth listening to. Independent thinking doesn’t require us to automatically choose the uncomfortable option any more than it requires us to automatically reject conventional ones.
It requires us to notice when comfort itself has quietly become the rule.
The extraordinary conveniences surrounding us are not the enemy. I don’t want less technology, worse navigation, slower communication or deliberately inefficient lives, and romanticizing the inconveniences of the past would miss the point entirely.
The challenge is to take advantage of everything modern life makes easier without allowing ease to become the measure by which every decision is judged.
Sometimes the unfamiliar restaurant will disappoint you. Sometimes the conversation will be awkward. Sometimes the project won’t work, the new skill will expose how little you know, the journey will go wrong or the experience won’t justify the effort.
That isn’t a failure of the system. It is part of living in a world that hasn’t been completely arranged in advance.
Perhaps the question worth asking occasionally isn’t simply “How can I make this easier?”
It is:
Comfort is valuable. Convenience is valuable. Technology that removes pointless friction is valuable. But so is curiosity, adaptability, serendipity and the confidence that comes from discovering you can handle situations you haven’t rehearsed.
We don’t need to seek discomfort for its own sake. We just need to be careful that, in designing so much discomfort out of modern life, we don’t accidentally design out some of the experiences that make life larger.
NoRuleBook is about recognising the assumptions that quietly shape our choices, including those that initially appear completely reasonable. Comfort is one of them. There is nothing wrong with choosing it consciously, but there is a significant difference between enjoying comfort and allowing the avoidance of discomfort to determine the boundaries of your life.
If you want to explore more of the unwritten rules influencing your decisions and learn how to question them without simply rejecting them, click the NoRuleBook image below to get your copy.
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