page-loading-spinner
Home Off the Cuff: The Cost of Comfort

Off the Cuff: The Cost of Comfort

The User's Profile Chris Martenson May 29, 2015
27
placeholder image

You're viewing just the public portion of this content

Become a Peak Insider today and unlock premium content, alerts when Chris takes personal action, and direct access to Chris and other members of our active community of like-minded thinkers.

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • The Cost Of Comfort
    • We are ruining ourselves in the name of convenience
  • Prospering By Borrowing
    • Nearly all of our industries are unsustainable
  • Our 'Monocrop' Economy
    • It's single-track focus ignores the complexity of reality
  • Creating A New, Better Narrative
    • Join Chris, Becca & Charles Eisenstein

This week, Chris and Charles wax philosophical about the priorities we pursue as a society. So much of them have hidden costs that outweigh their benefits, if we'd only look.

Part of this is due to our paleolithic hard-wiring. We are programmed to prefer comfort over hardship. But while this may have served us well when preference for comfort increased our odds of not freezing to death or of dying of starvation, in a society where not only our needs but most of our wants can be instantly sated, this biological drive is working against us. Obesity, over-consumption, resource exploitation, fossil fuel addiction, suburban sprawl — all of these ills result from our collective preference to have what we want — now. As for the implications? We'll get to those later, if there are any…

Where does that leave us? Unhappy, unhealthy, slaves to our cars and digital paraphernalia, and blindly headed over the twin gorges of resource scarcity & limits to growth.

But it need not be this way. Part of the beauty of being human is that we're gifted with the ability to use our critical minds to transcend our

The rest is exclusive content for members

Become a Peak Insider today and unlock premium content, alerts when Chris takes personal action, and direct access to Chris and other members of our active community of like-minded thinkers.

Community

Top Comment

Good one, Nate. The discussion on soil brought to mind another Jackson Browne tune, "Before the Deluge":
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth...
Anonymous Author by charleshughsmith
0
Start Here What Do I Do?