Being grateful makes perfect sense. But being satisfied with just that sees a bit of a waste. Perhaps even a bit ungrateful. Should I be satisfied if my headstone says simply "I was comfortable"?
I've been thinking about a similar question for 4 or 5 years.
Should you be satisfied with being comfortable? If it's important for you to leave a legacy related to your hobbies or career field, then probably not. You have to be content with what you leave behind.
For me, I have reached a place where I would be at peace if I left a headstone that said, "Good father, good husband, kind person".
I'm not going to make meaningful changes in computer science, and I'm ok with that. Whether or not I make contributions to open source software won't give me more peace at the end of my life, so I don't pursue it. Is it ungrateful? Perhaps. But it's honest.
What's wrong with being comfortable though? Why should one be dissatisfied with being satisfied? Is satisfaction ever OK? And if so, when? When can you know for sure that you've actualized your full potential? Is it even something that's knowable? This seems overly omniscient to me.
I see this fearful, regret-filled ethos driving a lot of my peers and the western culture at large and I worry about the mindset it instills in people. I know it's well-intentioned and comes from a perspective of the human potential being the highest form of sovereignty. A wasted life seems like the biggest crime. And comfortable has somehow come to become synonymous with wasted.
I'd argue for the cultivation of meaning as a replacement to this search for "finally good-enough" potential actualization, but that's me.
There's something in human nature that finds meaning in turbulence, friction, conflict, movement. A sense of being challenged, pushing past limits, propelling into
excitement and change. When you reach a state where you have all your needs met and don't need to go any further, there still remains a sense that there's more left undone. Comfort can be equated with stagnation. It's a Nietzschean notion. A will-to-danger (not to sound too crazy). There's a sense of being domesticated that adds a subtle discomfort to the comfort.
I've worked blue collar and white collar jobs, and it was the blue collar jobs that made me feel more alive, because I was around dangerous tools, hazards, and actuating my body like it was supposed to be outside exposed to the elements. I went home after and my rest felt deserved and truly regenerative, like my body was drinking it in. The white collar work, though it pays better and offers more comfort and is more cognitively demanding, feels at the same time too breezy, too safe.
It seems like a really stupid argument, that things can be bad because they're too good, affluenza and so on, but there's something to it.
Sounds like the complete opposite of what Jiddu Krishnamurti would say. Krishnamurti would ask whether you can live without conflict, agony, turbulence, and yet, live more fully. To me, Krishnamurti is speaking from the position of sanity, such sanity, that nowadays seem to exist only on a small scale, in places, where the "what's the right thing to do" is not muddied in the accumulated daily problems arising extended from the human psyche and our current way of life.
Or are you saying that there is no way to be productive without the stress that is more and more present in our daily lives, in this environment of competition and constant yearning for more, for example?
There is nothing wrong with having comfort, but if you seek to grow and fulfil your potential (either in career, as a person, spiritually, etc), comfort is a trap you can easily get stuck in.
Maybe you have a good job, but feel like your career isn't going anywhere, but rather than switching to a different role you stay where you are because you like it there. That's comfort.
Plus a lot of people over think what comfort they need and waste a lot of energy on it. Theres a photo of Steve Jobs from the 80s in an empty apartment with a few possessions, where apparently he is comfortable with living like that. I don't know exactly what the story is with the photo, and it's a bit of an extreme example, but imagine instead of working on building his company, he spent his sparetime assembling IKEA furniture, then buying a TV and VHS recorder, then renting movies from the movie store (and physically taking them back).
That's kinda assuming you want work to be the part of your life that satisfies you.
Many people would be perfectly happy with a headstone saying "I had a comfortable job, and raised a family I love" or "I had a comfortable job, and made my art in the evenings and weekends".
When my daughter says that to me after watching TV or sleeping on top of me (when I watch TV or sleep on the couch), I find it the best compliment I can get.
