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.
by charleshughsmith 
