We live in the safest, most comfortable era in human history. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to take something from you.
Most of us will never face true starvation and the only ones who have to suffer being an actual part of the food chain are those who choose to venture out into the wilds (Looking at you, Alaska people).
With comfort so easily attained, you’d think people would just sit back and enjoy it. And to be fair, some do. But most seem to get antsy, like they’ve been relegated to the too-soft mattress. Our ancestors would never understand the legions of people who are, right now, flocking to cold plunge tanks, ultramarathons, and 75 Hard challenges. They would be even more baffled as to why millions of people are watching YouTube videos about those things. Those same people are binge-watching shows about apocalyptic wastelands and reading prepper fiction (exactly like post-apocalyptic fic, except with lists of shit they collect to survive. Right down to the number of bullets they stockpile. It’s popular among the autists, as you can imagine).
Somehow, we’ve built paradise and we can’t help ourselves from looking for the exit. Like Agent Smith told Neo in The Matrix (1999):
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program… I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
None other than the archangel Gabriel (in 2005’s Constantine) affirmed this:
I’ve been watching for a long time. It’s only in the face of horror that you truly find your nobler selves. And you can be so noble. So, I’ll bring you pain, I’ll bring you horror, so that you may rise above it. So that those of you who survive this reign of hell on earth will be worthy of God’s love.
If you’ve seen Constantine, you know Gabriel was the bad guy in that movie. But he had a point in this case. We do become our finest selves through trial by fire. And when we don’t have those trials in our real lives, either we succumb to a useless, gelatinous state, usually with a side of obnoxious entitlement…
Or we seek it out vicariously through fiction. And the ratings bear this out.
The Mandalorian Code: Deprivation and willful “Othering”
*Note: There are only TWO seasons of The Mandalorian. Nothing exists after the season two finale. I have spoken.
“This is the way.”
Four words became a cultural phenomenon. Not “This might work” or “Here’s one option among many.” The Mandalorian creed offers something our comfort-saturated culture has forgotten how to provide: absolute certainty born from absolute restriction.
The Mandalorians we meet in the Disney+ series were different than those we met in previous Star Wars properties. Din Djarin, our main character, was a bounty hunter like Boba Fett, but that was pretty much where the similarities ended. The Madalorians who adopted Din Djarin as a child were members of a breakaway fundamentalist sect, more severe than their already-harsh mainstream culture. They can’t remove their helmets in front of others. They follow codes that make their lives demonstrably harder.
And they face exile if they break a rule even once.
The newfound stringent rules, and the forsaking of the need to assimilate to the popular culture, far from being offputting to audiences, made the show, and the Madalorian creed, more popular. Yes, everyone squealed over Baby Yoda. But they were also obsessively quoting “This is the way.”
It became a rallying cry across social media.
Why? Because there’s something magnetic about people who’ve drawn lines they won’t cross. Standing firm means exclusion, suffering, and hardship. But it’s all done for the greater good. And since shortly after the premiere of that show in 2019, we all found out that most people will give up every principle to avoid being fired from a job they hate… and watching a fictional person stand strong against adversity became more appealing. Even if it was part of a quiet shame spiral.
Devil (2010): Your Words Mean Nothing
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A young man suspects his wife of cheating and confronts her with his suspicions. The wife, cornered, admits to it, explaining through tears why she felt driven to such misbehavior.
Hardship IRL: The Latin Mass Bros
Perhaps nowhere is our hunger for suffering more clear than in the resurgence of Traditional Latin Mass attendance among young people. Gen X and Millennial Christians well remember how the churches tried to be hip, adding guitars and the protestant factions inserting ever-more wildly inappropriate cultural references into the sermon (which they started calling “The Message” for some reason).
But the funny thing is that when Christianity tried to mimic popular culture, it only worked on a grand scale. They had to bring a full-on rock concert every Sunday in an arena-style building. Your average Baptist church couldn’t pull that kind of spectacle off, no matter how the pastor insisted they needed more tithes. So they wilted, contracted. People either switched to the rock concert churches.
Or they stopped going all together.
Now that Christianity is surging, pay attention to which congregations the young are going to. Young men looking for wives and young women looking for husbands. Already married couples with children looking for a spiritual home. They’re rushing to Orthodox Christianity. To Catholic Mass. LATIN Catholic Mass, actually. And on the Protestant side… it’s the Pentecostals making the big jumps.
The modern Protestant megachurch offers comfort: contemporary music, casual dress, sermons that feel like TED talks. The Latin Mass offers the opposite: rigid structure, ancient languages, elaborate rituals, and genuine sacrifice. I don’t even go to Latin Mass and I was *this close* from taking orders as a nun.
It’s hard to pay attention to a language you don’t understand. Hard to be still and listen for the Holy Spirit instead of being swept away by a catchy beat and a pretty lady with a microphone on stage. Hard to learn the Catechism. Harder still to live by it.
Hardest of all to submit to an Almighty but unseen force that tells you to trust and believe.
But still they do it. More of them every year. In their search for meaning, the Zoomers and younger Millennials have seemingly understood that nothing worth having is easy to get. And the easiest path is the most crowded and least rewarding.
That “God-shaped” hole in the human heart you’ve heard about is the human need for a framework that demands something from us. It’s the understanding that yes, actually, the obstacle IS the way.
In a culture that bends over backward to accommodate every preference, there’s something powerful about an institution that says, “This is how it’s been done for centuries. Conform or leave.”
What our comfort-obsessed culture doesn’t want to admit is that suffering brings us to our highest selves. If you’re feeling the need to jump in my comments and explain the concept of PTSD to me, let me stop you. I am aware there are limits to the amount of suffering humans can endure before they break, either in the short term (recovery from a traumatic event) or in the long term ( permanent disability or death). Short of that breaking point is the place where we grow, excel, and in some cases become an entirely new person. A better one.
Every hero’s journey is fundamentally a story about leaving comfort for danger. Every athletic achievement is built on voluntary pain. Every meaningful relationship requires sacrificing the easier path of solitude or casual connection. We know this intuitively, which is why we hunger for stories and communities that remind us of this truth.
Shows like The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, and Station Eleven offer escape into worlds where every calorie must be earned, every relationship must be defended, every day must be survived. We watch from our climate-controlled homes, full bellies comfortable, fantasizing about worlds where comfort is impossible. And imagine ourselves rising to the occasion.
Humans are forged by pressure, defined by resistance, and united by shared hardship. Take away all suffering, and you don’t get paradise—you get listlessness, anxiety, and the desperate search for something, anything, to push against.
The question isn’t whether you’ll seek suffering—you will, whether consciously or not. The question is whether you’ll choose your suffering intentionally or let it choose you.
We can keep building ever-softer cages for ourselves, keep removing every source of friction from our lives, keep choosing the path of least resistance. But we know where that leads—to the anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness that plague our age of abundance.
Instead, we can acknowledge what every great story has always told us: we are not meant for comfort. We are meant for the forge.
This is the way. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. And in that hardness, we find who we really are.
Adam's curse was "work" -- hard toil and eating his bread by the sweat of his own brow until he again returned to dust. Meaningful and productive work gives a measure of fulfillment to men's lives. If the men pay attention, lessons of life -- both material and spiritual can be learned. It's not sufficient to a full life, but is necessary.
Lately the nonfiction I have been reading are writings on stoicism (currently in some Seneca letters) and it is interesting and satisfying to read such ancient works describing the uncomfortable but true revelations of suffering and hardship being what allows us to prove our strengths, and so we should be grateful for them.
If I must provide a criticism, it would be that sometimes removing the friction from our lives is the path of greater resistance. For example, I taught myself LaTeX because Word is miserable for some tasks.