Chris Compton - @twainingwheels | Kingsley Asuamah
Life From Different Perspectives: Bored Yet?
Part 10 of 20: Challenge yourself outside your comfort zone
This article is part of a series of articles written from the perspectives of two very different minds.
My name is Chris Compton. I am a 59-year-old American living in Atlanta, GA. I am writing about the 20 self-improvement facts in this article:
The article’s author, Kingsley Asuamah, is a 36-year-old Nigerian living in Ireland. He is writing about the same topics.
You can follow along and see how two strangers, separated by age, geography, and circumstance, view the world and the opportunity to develop as human beings.
You have spent your entire life designing and building the world you live in. It’s beautiful. You have decorated it in all of your favorite colors. Every food you love is abundant there. Your friends are here, and the conversation is predictable. The witty barbs may be stale, but they are still funny. You can be yourself here. You can let your guard down. You’re accepted. This is the LIFE.
Groundhog Day
Life is a journey from birth to death via a series of comfort zones. Some of us spend more time “in the zone” than others. Some people visit a few zones in their lifetime, while others take up residence in many, but all of us are drawn to them.
By the time you reach adulthood, more than 90% of your daily activity is habit-based. You do the same things every day.
- You get up in the morning and take care of your bathroom business before you go to work.
- You fix your hair so that you look like you, the same you that fixed the same hair the same way yesterday and every day that you can recall.
- You like your coffee black. You don’t understand why anyone would ruin perfectly good coffee with milk or sugar.
- You eat cereal almost every morning. Life cereal. You started eating it when you were a kid, and Mikey was the spokesman. It hasn’t changed and why the hell should it?
- Your route to the office is so familiar that by the time you sit down at your desk, you cannot visualize anything from the drive. Mixing it up might throw off your whole day, so you stick to the plan.
- On your lunch break, you have conversations with co-workers that are indistinguishable from the conversations you had the day before. You don’t have to listen carefully. You choke down as much of your tuna sandwich on whole wheat as you can manage and return to your cubicle, where you push out your work product and watch the hands of the clock just like you watched the clock on the wall of your 6th-period class in junior high.
- On your way to the parking garage, you pass someone in the hallway. “How’s it going?” you ask, without making eye contact. You barely hear the faint “fine” as you stride quickly toward your car and the rush-hour commute you are dreading.
- The TV is on before you make it to the sofa and crack open the first beer. Wheel of Fortune has been a staple in your life since Chuck Woolery was the host. You guess the puzzles out loud and remind your partner that you would absolutely clean up if you ever got the chance to play the game.
- You have dinner on the same couch and finish about the time the Final Jeopardy category is announced. You occasionally come up with the right question, but you don’t brag about your prowess very often.
- After dinner, it’s more TV and a few more beers. You’re a sucker for Shawshank. If you scroll through the channels and see Andy, Red, or Byron Hadley, you know you’re getting sucked in. Lately, you’ve been hooked on The Voice and all the spin-offs and copycats. When you’re killing time, what difference does it make?
- Every once in a while, the stars align, and you make it to the bedroom sober enough for ten minutes of “the missionary” before a fitful night’s sleep. Then you wake up and do it again.
Welcome to Your Comfort Zone.
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
How Did You Get Here?
Looking back at your journey, you can see the route that brought you to your comfort zone. You were a good student. You followed the rules, ticked the boxes, and did all the things they said you needed to do.
They said you should play sports, join clubs, and get good grades so you would have your choice of college, and they were right. You were accepted to all of the schools you applied to. You picked one close to home because you weren’t quite ready to leave Mom’s cooking behind forever, and the convenience of her doing your laundry was an unforeseen bonus.
You took an internship a friend of your Dad arranged after your junior year. Everyone said you were a perfect fit, and the official offer included a company car, a salary that seemed excessive, and a small but unexpected signing bonus. How could you turn it down?
No one was shocked when Sheila got pregnant. After all, the two of you had been locked at the hip since the ninth grade. You were made for one another. One kid led to another, which led to baseball practices, cheer trips, and after-school tutoring sessions.
Twenty-five years later, the kids are following an eerily similar comfortable path while you and Sheila watch other people make fondant flowers on the Lifetime network.
Occasionally, you fantasize about something else, something more. You think about learning to ski or writing your memoirs, but no one save your mom would read them, and she might not like what you had to say.
You consider asking Sheila for a divorce and hiking the Pacific Coast Trail with one of those enormous backpacks you’ve seen on the Discovery channel, but you can’t bear the thought of ruining her life. She’s the mother of your children, for God’s sake. You owe her. So you stay the course.
Every once in a while, you wonder if it might be better just to eat a bottle full of Xanax, sleep with your head in a plastic bag, or try to fire your dad’s old shotgun into your mouth with your toe on the trigger, but those feelings never last, and you would miss the occasional ten minutes of missionary. Besides, this Brandon kid on Survivor is fun to watch. So you try not to get drunk enough that you can’t make a sandwich for the next day, and you keep on keeping on.
At least the pay is good.
How Do You Escape?
The opposite of happiness isn’t sadness. It’s boredom. Here you are, one of the lucky few souls granted the opportunity for a life on earth, and you are spending it doing the same ordinary things day in and day out, forever and ever, amen.
Every time you evolve, you find yourself in a new comfort zone.
Think about it. At the beginning of a new relationship, as you get to know another person, the conversation is fresh and exciting. If the relationship is intimate, you spend time learning how to please your partner. You explore new territory together. Relationship writers like to call this “the Honeymoon Period.” Everything you do together is a first! First kiss, first vacation, first Christmas, first time at Disney, first everything. You’re nervous, and you aim to please. You buy gifts for no reason, cook surprise dinners, write poetry, wash the car, make the bed, and do things behind closed doors you never believed you would do. And then, all of a sudden, you find that you have become comfortable.
This phenomenon is not limited to a new relationship. When you accept a new job, you go through a period of adjustment. You have to learn new procedures and protocols. You have to acclimate to a new office culture and get to know your boss and your direct-reports. You may have to learn a brand new skill set or take on some supervisory responsibility you haven’t been exposed to. It’s exciting. It may be scary. Before too long, it’s familiar. You have become comfortable.
We can make a long list of life situations that follow the same pattern. A new restaurant is an exciting discovery, but once you have tried most of the menu items, it becomes old hat. It’s comfortable. It’s “where we go.”
The first time you hear a hot new band, you get excited. You put them on your playlist, listen to all of their albums, and tell your friends. Before long, your new favorite sound has become background noise. Just hanging with you in the zone.
Possessions become comfortable faster than anything else. A new house, car, appliance, or toy is extremely exciting until your friends see it, and it gets a scratch or a ding. Then it’s just one more thing to maintain. It has become part of your comfort zone.
The only escape is growth.
Growing Out of Your Comfort Zone
The ticket out of your comfort zone does not have to involve a mid-life crisis, gender transition, career change, prison sentence, or hospital visit, but you will have to make an effort. You will have to grow, and at its core, growth involves learning something new.
When you experience major growth, you become a different person. You are reborn, reincarnated, and reinvented.
No matter how intelligent or accomplished you are, there is plenty to learn. Human beings have been around in something similar to our current form for around 300,000 years, and we still don’t know what space is made from. New knowledge emerges every day in every field. Science and technology are advancing faster and faster as the evolutionary snowball thunders downhill.
- Start by stopping. Stop filling your time with fluff. Every minute you spend doing the same things you do every day reinforces the comfort zone trap. Stop sitting on the couch in front of the TV at night. Stop scrolling. Stop drinking. Stop rehashing the same old conversations. Ask your couch-mate how they want to grow. Dive deep. They are likely as bored as you are.
- Use the newly found time wisely. Activate your mind by journaling. Read “The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron.
- Buy paints and canvas and watch some Bob Ross videos. https://www.youtube.com/@bobross_thejoyofpainting
- Get a free education. MIT (yes, that MIT) offers a large portion of their catalog for free, online. You won’t get the diploma, but you will get the knowledge. https://ocw.mit.edu/
- MIT isn’t prestigious enough? Go to Harvard in the privacy of your own home, for the low, low cost of nothing. Harvard has 546 free online courses. Once again, no diploma, but who cares? You’ll be growing. You won’t be bored. And you just might discover your passion. https://pll.harvard.edu/catalog/free
- Join an improv group, volunteer at a hospital, a homeless shelter, or a religious institution. Coach sports at the YMCA, or simply dig deeply into your professional field and get better at what you do. Become the expert you used to be.
- Hike, bike, climb mountains, walk across the continent, meet people and find out what makes them tick. Life is a search for connection and adventure. Start searching.
There is no excuse for wasting the opportunity you were given lolling about in the comfort zone. Anyone or anything that is preventing your growth is a weed. Cut it and move on. Life is short and you’ll be dead a long time.
Once you escape, a whole world of new information, activities, people and communities will open up for you. You will reinvent yourself and take a big step towards becoming the person you were meant to be.
But beware. Before long, you will be in another comfort zone.
Don’t forget to escape.
Chris Compton
04–02–2024
