The discomfort of comfort

The routine

The alarm goes off at 7am.

I get up, do my morning stretches, go for a walk around the block, drink my coffee and read before work. A 10-minute meditation with Jen from the Apple Fitness+ studio in LA. Breathe in, breathe out.

If it's a Wednesday, I'll walk to a local bakery and buy a croissant. I'll probably pass a homeless person asking for some spare change. Sorry, I only have contactless.

I log into Microsoft Teams using my work-issued laptop. It's a MacBook Air. It's fast. It looks good. It never crashes.

My work is great.

Lunchtime: I order a bagel on Deliveroo. From ordering to delivery, the process takes around 15 minutes.

Whilst eating, I check BBC News.

More strikes on Ukraine. War in Iran. More large businesses announcing redundancies. Video game companies going bust and taking hundreds of jobs with them.

I continue to eat my bagel. The driver was polite: I tip him.

I see a new thing I want. Next day delivery, it'll be here tomorrow. I could have chosen same-day but I wanted to save £1.99.

Lunch is over. I continue working.

5:30pm. It's time to clock off. I close the laptop and go for a walk along the beach, then grab a pizza from my local pizzeria.

A phone call from my landlord. He's raising the rent. It's annoying, but I can just put a bit less into savings each month.

I turn on my personal Mac. I play World of Warcraft with my friends until it gets late.

I lie in bed. I doomscroll on my iPhone 18 Pro. Violence and famine packaged in a premium aluminium shell.

To help me forget, I watch a video making fun of infamous YouTuber DarkSydePhil. I take part in a rage economy and add engagement to a video designed to mock other people I don't (and never will) know personally.

I fall asleep.

I wake up.

I do it all again. Over and over and over.

The discomfort

It feels uncomfortable to be this comfortable, stuck in an endless loop of mindless consumption.

Every time I buy that bagel or pay my bills without worrying, I feel like my life shouldn't be this way.

When I walked past that homeless person, I felt guilty because I couldn't immediately solve their problems. I can buy them some food, but they'll still not have a home.

Perhaps it's not about solving the whole problem in one go, but doing what you can to make a difference to someone who needs help.

I see all the violence on the news and feel awful because I'm safe, whilst others aren't.

It almost feels like this guilt is replacing action sometimes. I feel better about my life because I also feel bad that I have it good. Which makes it okay, right?

Maybe this feeling of helplessness is coming from the fact I want to help others but I don't know what that looks like.

The thing is, I used to help others all the time.

In service of others

I left teaching because I couldn't stand the countless hours and endless paperwork.

I don't miss those days and love where I am now, but I miss the feeling of contributing something meaningful to others. Even when the kids were throwing insults (sometimes chairs) at me.

I still make a difference in my job today. But it's a different kind of difference: I do it from a desk and I can't see who it's impacting. As a teacher, you see those who you're helping every day.

I come back to this photo a lot: a letter a student wrote me back in 2018.

I believe contributing to others is essential to a meaningful life. I spent so long relying on my job to provide this, but I feel like I can make a difference in a lot of little ways outside of it too.

Some of my best days as a teacher were physically and mentally exhausting. But knowing someone needed my help and I was there for them means a lot to me.

A comfortable life isn’t necessarily a meaningful life. A difficult life isn’t necessarily a meaningless one, either.

When I think about the things I've done that have stuck with me, I can't tell you much about my purchases, conveniences or entertainment choices.

I can tell you about the moments where I made a difference to another person, though.

Things like the letter from S, but probably not the angry comment I posted on a YouTube meme video last week.