Leben #6: The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter
(back to books)
- Substrat: we suffer from progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives
- autophagy is metaphor for discomfort: weak links are sacrificed for the good
- rucking: carrying a purposefully heavy backpack (25 kg is suggested as max)
- burns 2-3x calories of walking; running causes 6x more injuries than rucking
- misogi ("hero's journey", "rite of passage"): unstructured difficult challenge
- 4 conditions: chance of success <= 50%; don't die; be quirky/creative; don't advertise
- 3 day trips in wild nature can have long-lasting impact
- beta waves ("go go go") on day 1, alpha/theta waves ("meditators") on day 3
- do less and eliminate limiters to progress
- 1) gather data, 2) identify gaps between belief & reality (e.g. how much you think you eat vs. how much you eat)
- exercise-induced fatigue is predominantly protective emotion
- interesting observations
- early humans running barefoot likely first struck ground with middle/front of feet
- engaging in mentally demanding task can increase time to exhaustion by 300%
- after ~2 weeks in cold, body increases metabolic rate
- at-home silence was more calming than listening to Mozart
- prevalence-induced concept change ("problem creep"): we make relative judgments