Smart Ass Take:
Great news, everyone: it turns out the reason you’re miserable is that your life is too goddamn easy. Your burrito arrives in twenty minutes. Your questions get answered before you finish typing them. You haven’t been genuinely bored since 2007, which — coincidentally, definitely coincidentally — is exactly when the iPhone showed up and started licking dopamine off our brainstems.
Arthur Brooks walked across Spain until his feet bled and discovered meaning. Meanwhile, you scrolled through TikTok until your thumb cramped and discovered a guy who reviews gas station hot dogs. Both are pilgrimages, technically. The pitch in this article is that suffering is the seasoning that makes life worthwhile. The same neural real estate handling your back pain is also handling your sense of purpose, and that if you Amazon-Prime every inconvenience out of your life you will also, quietly, Amazon-Prime out anything worth feeling.
So by all means, keep optimizing every rough edge out of your day. Just don’t act surprised when the smooth, frictionless, climate-controlled life you built feels like a hotel lobby nobody ever checks into. LIVE a little. Preferably with sore feet.
Article Excerpt:
“Bottom line, if you’re trying to eliminate your unhappiness, you will inadvertently eliminate your happiness.”
Article Summary:
Arthur Brooks — happiness researcher, professor, and the guy who walked the Camino de Santiago at 55 because his career-shaped life had run out of gas — has a new book arguing that we’ve engineered too much discomfort out of our lives, and that the meaning went with it.