Why Everything Feels Harder Than It Should

Hey there,

We all say we want an easier life…

More comfort, more convenience, more security.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that the easier my life got, the harder everything felt.

Little inconveniences bothered me way more than they should have.

Someone walking slow in front of me felt like a personal attack.

Traffic felt like an emotional collapse.

Wi-Fi dropping for three seconds felt like a full existential crisis.

That is when it hit me: Life didn’t get harder. I got softer.

Like room-temperature butter, technically still useful but only if handled very, very gently.

This is the Comfort Creep Problem.

When life gets easier, you slowly become more fragile.

And comfort creeps so quietly you barely notice until everything feels harder than it actually is.

Most of us are raised on the same script:

Go to school. Go to college. Get the stable job.

Basically, climb the stable ladder.

Retire with enough saved and live a stable, secure life.

Comfort is treated like the reward.

But comfort slowly drains your curiosity, resilience, and imagination.

It can make you feel full while starving you at the same time.

And that’s how you end up wearing a perfectly polished outer shell of “success”, while feeling empty, restless, or quietly miserable inside.

For years, I thought I was doing everything right, having a stable job, good income, routine, and predictability.

But I wasn’t growing. I was stuck.

Comfort wasn’t helping me evolve. It was actually holding me in place.

Whenever something new or uncertain happened, I felt unequipped because I had never lived outside the script.

Comfort gives you the illusion of stability while making you more fragile.

People feel lost and unfulfilled not because they are behind, but because they have never faced enough friction to know what they actually want.

For years, people asked me, “When are you having kids?”, and I always said, “When we’re ready.”

It sounded thoughtful, but it was really comfort dressed up as wisdom.

We wait for the perfect moment to have kids, to switch careers, to start the thing we want to start.

But the perfect moment is an illusion that keeps you wrapped in a warm blanket of predictability.

Life does not slow down and offer a neat opening. Most of it just happens.

You can step into it, or you can let comfort convince you that “later” is a strategy.

You cannot build wisdom without experience.

You cannot discover your direction if your life never deviates from the route you were handed at 18.

That’s how people wake up one day feeling like strangers wearing their own clothes.

My life changed when I stopped chasing comfort and started chasing experiments.

Not huge leaps, just small fresh start:

• What if I woke up an hour earlier?

• What if I ate mostly whole foods?

• What if I worked out three days a week, consistently?

• What if I stopped taking the same drive, using the same routines, following the same defaults?

• What if I deleted social media from my phone?

• What if I tracked my mood for 30 days?

• What if I ran a Spartan 21K or climbed Mount Washington in the winter?

• What if I started a company, rented our home, got rid of most of my stuff, started a podcast, then a YouTube channel, and tried not to look awkward on camera?

Every small experiment made me a slightly different person.

Not all at once, but slowly, like erosion in the right direction.

And every experiment showed me how wrong I was about comfort.

The less comfort I had, the more alive and capable I felt.

Comfort creep is real. Psychologists call it ‘hedonic adaptation’.

Your brain gets used to comfort very quickly.

Comfort then becomes the baseline, and anything below it feels like suffering.

The body works the same way.

As Alex Hutchinson explains in Endure, the body adapts to discomfort shockingly fast.

A few days of heat exposure dramatically boosts tolerance.

A few days in extreme cold and suddenly freezing your ass off feels normal(ish).

Your body is built to adapt.

The problem is when you stop giving it anything to adapt to.

That’s when small problems feel big.

It’s why your grandparents brag about walking 10 miles in the snow, and we emotionally unravel if DoorDash takes longer than 18 minutes.

Psychologists also talk about ‘stress inoculation’, AKA small, controlled doses of discomfort that make you harder to knock over.

If you skip these small doses for too long, your brain becomes rigid.

Less novelty, less challenge, and even the tiniest problems feel catastrophic.

A life without friction creates a brain that cannot handle friction.

The more comfortable you are, the smaller the obstacles that can break you.

At some point, I realized I wasn’t actually living my life.

I was simply maintaining it by keeping everything predictable, safe, and the same.

And I wasn’t growing.

I wasn’t curious or experimenting.

I was comfortable, and that was the problem.

So I traded certainty for small tests.

Everywhere.

And that one shift changed more about my life than any routine, habit tracker, or self-help hack I have ever tried.

If you survived this without skimming, congratulations.

This was your first dose of productive discomfort.

Here are simple ways to fight comfort creep without becoming a Navy SEAL:

1. Do one slightly inconvenient thing every day.
   Walk instead of driving, cook instead of ordering, take the stairs. Nothing extreme, just intentional friction.

2. Reintroduce productive discomfort.
   Exercise, learning new skills, difficult conversations. These build resilience far faster than comfort ever could.

3. Break routine on purpose.
   Drive a different route, try a new meal, or work somewhere else. Even if that somewhere else is the other side of your couch.

4. Try controlled challenges.
   A weekend without your phone. A night without TV. A week without alcohol. You are not punishing yourself. You are training adaptability.

5. Decide which comforts nourish you and which ones numb you.
   Comfort that restores you is different from comfort that sedates you. (You already know the difference.)

Life isn’t supposed to be perfectly comfortable.

It’s supposed to have edges, texture, and friction.

That’s what makes you capable, curious, and resilient.

Every time you choose a small fresh start, you get a little stronger.

Every time you experiment, your life expands.

Every time you step into discomfort, even briefly, you become someone who isn’t afraid of it anymore.

Comfort will not ruin your life overnight.

It’s sneaky, like mold or extended warranties. It slowly shrinks your world.

So instead of asking, “How can I make my life easier?”, try asking, “How can I make my life fuller?”

And that starts with inviting a little friction back in, one small experiment at a time.

– Scott

P.S. Get more stuff from me (so my wife doesn’t make me go back to a “real” job):

• My podcast

• YouTube

• Instagram

• TikTok