Comfortable with Discomfort

Don't fight the feeling that something is wrong. Get comfortable with it.

1.

My father died when I was 26. Somehow, I hadn’t expected it, even though he had spent most of the past two years in and out of the hospital, fighting smoking-related ailments, and even though he had been steadily been getting worse in “rehab” for several weeks. I remember how my mother had typed out a list of questions for our doctor onto a 5x7 piece of paper, and how we sat waiting in his office (over air-conditioned, like every indoor space in Tampa, where I’d grown up) when we got the news. “I’m sorry,” the doctor said, before we could even say hello, “but he passed just a few minutes ago.”

I don’t know why I didn’t expect it, but somehow this came as a shock. Death hadn’t seemed to be on the menu. No one talked about the obvious-to-everyone-else fact that my dad might die, and maybe I was too young to understand the reality. How could this happen? This wasn’t what I’d been told to expect.

I felt similarly in March, 2020. To be sure, I’d grown a lot over the 23 years between my father’s death and the onset of the pandemic. I’d lost my mother, survived a serious car accident, come out of the closet, and spent ten years making up for lost time. I co-founded a magazine, sang in a rock band, wrote books, started a dot-com and two nonprofits, and had a great gay decade. I also spent a lot of time on meditation retreats, in therapy, and in intimate friendships that I’d never been capable of before.

And yet, despite all of that, I recall that same cratering in the abdomen, that same panic in the chest; that same cognitive dissonance. This wasn’t what I’d been told to expect.

And I sometimes feel it now, too, in this age of poly-crisis, meta-crisis, and national spiritual crisis. I never expected to see resurgent nationalism in America and around the world, and no one foresaw the massive changes looming because of technology and AI. And of course the spiraling climate crisis (which so many deny is even happening), the obscene imbalance of wealth and resources in our society, the death of truth, the abject cruelty that at least a third of Americans celebrate — and let’s not forget the extremism, conspiracy thinking, furious rhetoric, and misinformation that infects all parts of our public discourse, regardless of political valence.

Should I put on my meditation voice now? Should I reassure you that, if you take some deep breaths, everything will be okay?

I don’t think it will be. As I’ve written in these pages, I cycle through rage, sadness — but also resilience, even a kind of contentment. I think this is how it is supposed to be, honestly, in times like ours. Toxic positivity is bullshit. Wellness culture is garbage. It would be inhuman not to be heartbroken. I don’t feel confident in my country’s future, or even the future of the planet, and increasingly feel personally insecure living in it. What some Americans are willing to celebrate is deeply disturbing.

So if ‘everything’ will not be okay, the attention shifts to ways in which people, especially vulnerable people, can be somewhat okay, or at least suffer less. And of course there are ways that I’ve found, and taught, to find happiness in the midst of all this chaos, without sacrificing the engagement and involvement in public life that I think this moment demands of us. There are ways through which authentic, durable, actual happiness can be cultivated, even when things are not okay: even when the heart is broken, when the mind is anxious, and even when the world seems to be falling apart.

And yet, I sometimes feel that, as soon as I talk about resilience, mindfulness, psychedelics, happiness, or balance, I sound like a privileged, narcissistic twit. Who the hell cares about the happiness of people like me when the fire is raging?

That’s a fair question to ask, but it’s not really how human beings work. We all do what positive psychologists call “hedonic adaptation,” that is, adapting our baseline emotional states to our contexts. This is how some ultra-rich people can still be miserable, and some prisoners can still be happy. I admit, I have had trouble dancing and celebrating the way I did before November, 2024, but I’ve done a little of it lately, and it’s been okay.

Anyway, am I more effective at making the world less cruel when I, myself, am miserable? It’s an overused quote, but the queer Black feminist activist and poet Audre Lorde was surely right that, for her anyway, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Obviously, that was more true for someone whose very existence was questioned and subjugated by the state. And it can be deployed as rationale by far more comfortable people. So maybe it’s just a matter of balance. Of Both/And.

Midjourney

2.

A lot of our happiness really is up to us, as the Stoics, Buddhists, and many others have insisted, and yet the kind of happiness they speak of — “the happiness that does not depend upon conditions” in one allegedly Buddhist formulation — is not about feeling happy all the time. In in fact, it’s often the opposite: it comes from accepting things as they are, even as we also work to change them (Both/And again). In the words of Thai Buddhist master Ajahn Sumedho that I’ve referred to before in these pages, “Right now, it’s like this.”

That doesn’t mean things are great, or good, or okay, or that they all happen for a reason, or that you can just manifest a better reality. Maybe things are terrible and won’t get better. “Right now, it’s like this” is merely declining to deny what is true. It’s like this: the sounds, the sights, the emotions. In the great fake-Zen-koan cliché, it is what it is.

Simple, but complicated — and also contrary to how most of our machineries of happiness operate. Mostly, it’s imagined, happiness comes from getting what you want, i.e., by changing the conditions: switch the channel, buy the car, win the game, come out on top. And yet, asks the Talmud: Eizehu ashir? Hasameach b’chelko – who is rich? The one who is happy with their share.

This kind of happiness is not an ever-present dwelling in joy and lightness, like some great Hollywood Ending in the sky. It’s the ability to return the mind, heart, and body to a state of equanimity and equilibrium, to a basic sense of okay-ness that simply arises from a quieter mind, resting in its own awareness. Thus you can be happy and still kvetch, you can be happy and sad, you can be happy and engaged in the messy world of politics and strife, you can be ‘happy’ at the bedside of a friend who is dying. By training the brain to rest, even alongside anxiety, stress, rage, self-judgment, and other “uninvited houseguests of the mind,” it’s possible to coexist even with the gigantic catastrophe unfolding around us in the world right now.

3.

That, for me, includes a comfort with discomfort itself: an accommodation of the uncanny, even the obscene. Suffering is random and uncertainty is everywhere. Most things are determined by luck. Human beings love, and make art, and discover amazing things, and we are also ruled by our instincts and appetites. We delude ourselves easily; we cause dissention, suffering, and destruction. And we also make great pastries.

Maybe homo sapiens really is not up to the challenge, as I’ve also written about here. Maybe our primal instincts to value the in-group over the out-group, power over compassion, are too strong. Maybe we are just too stupid, too susceptible to whatever unconscionably idiotic idea props up our preexisting conceptions of how the world ought to be. I still think that the best hope for the balance of the biosphere is to upgrade the minds of as many human beings as possible — whether by spiritual practice, mystical practice, meditation, psychedelics, whatever — to strengthen their prefrontal cortexes and help them shine light on the places of inner darkness. But I don’t know if that’s enough. The most reactionary aspects of human nature are remarkably resilient. Even when cities are flooded, climate deniers remain unconvinced, or unmotivated, or focused on their paychecks. Traditional religion is a resilient thing. Post-liberal theocrats are in such profound denial of their own insecurities, they don’t see them as insecurities. Perhaps our species is simply not up to the challenge of its own success.

This, too, is part of the discomfort I am growing comfortable with.

I want to return to that feeling of surprise — that sense that “this isn’t supposed to be happening” — with which I began this post. I think that’s a good sense. In a way, it’s the opposite of hedonic adaptation; it’s shock. And that’s a sign that the abnormal has not yet been normalized. We have not adapted to kids being picked up on the street and thrown in ICE detention centers, or to hostages being tortured, or to two million people being ethnically cleansed from where they live, or to higher education being systematically dismantled by boors and theocrats, or to the Measles being a threat again, or to a $400 million plane being given to the president as a bribe, or to the seething rage of America’s populist right. We still think “it isn’t supposed to be like this.”

Both are true: “right now, it’s like this” and “it isn’t supposed to be like this.” Both that our zeitgeist is reflective of fundamental qualities of the human mind, and that it should occasion a queasy sense of discomfort. And even if it’s not ultimately true, even if it steals my sleep and darkens my days, I think it’s good to feel that things shouldn’t be the way they are.