Mother Teresa Was a One-Trick Pony

Last night at Bridge & Tunnel, Fondren brought us a question he's been wrestling with: What is comfort, and why do we seek it?

This is a question he's living with every day—in every decision about whether to fight or walk away, whether to seek solace or lean into discomfort, how to make sense of a life where physical comfort just isn't available anymore.

Seth kicked us off with Aristotle's worry that comfort drains ethical life—that we've started equivocating comfort with happiness, and maybe that's a problem. Maybe comfort doesn't lift up virtue in the way that brings about genuine flourishing. Then he handed the conversation over to Fondren.

From there, it went exactly where these conversations go: everywhere at once, and somehow deeper than we expected.

Comfort Isn't One Thing

Fondren knows this intimately. He brought up his misophonia—he loves cooking and feeding people, but he can't handle the sounds they make while eating. Silence in a room full of people is also uncomfortable. So he seeks control, small manageable zones of comfort, because total comfort isn't available to him.

He's had 28 broken bones in his life. Physical comfort just isn't something he experiences anymore. The only true comfort he has is in accomplishment—getting to the end of the day and saying, "Yes, I did that." Even sleep isn't comfortable. He has nightmares. The comfort is in waking up from them.

This is the heart of his question: when physical comfort is off the table, when sleep doesn't restore you, when your body is a site of constant discomfort—what does comfort even mean? And why would you seek it when you know you can't find it?

Bob suggested early on that maybe there's no single thing that is comfort—instead there’s a spectrum from comfortable to uncomfortable. He's got a bar in his back, so chairs that feel great to most people are torture for him. A solid wooden chair? That's his sweet spot. Physical comfort depends on embodiment, and what counts as comfortable changes according to who's sitting in the chair.

Seth agreed: comfort is more like a family resemblance than a single concept. There's solace, luxury, relief, indulgence—all these different experiences we lump together under one word.

The Trouble With Inebriation

Justin wanted to split a hair about ataraxia—that perfect peace of mind the Stoics and Epicureans were after. Inebriation by comfort, he said, isn't the same thing. When we indulge, we retreat to familiar associations with comfort, but we don't actually get peace of mind from it.

David Ramage picked up that thread: comfort is a form of rest. Stress without rest and you fall apart. But rest too much and you atrophy. Your brain stops braining. He's known heroin addicts who said it was the best form of relief—until it wasn't. Some comforts are really indulgences. We call them comfort, but maybe we shouldn't. Going home and pouring a quadruple shot of really good whiskey? Maybe that’s really comfortable until tomorrow morning, but it’s more indulgence.

Fondren was working through this distinction in real time. He's lived rowdy without fully understanding why. He seeks out fights. He has discomfort without them. He's used to being in a state of high alert and violence. Ramage asked: when you look for a fight, is part of your mind resting?

It's a hell of a question.

Fondren said part of the struggle is learning when not to fight. He thought he was hardening himself through fighting—that he was being prepared. If he gave himself too much grace not to fight, he'd get soft. But there's no comfort in getting sleep instead of fighting. There's just a kind of equilibrium, a sense of being more at ease. He's trying to figure out: is that comfort? Or is that just the absence of a particular kind of discomfort?

Rick wanted to know: is finding a fight a goal? Is that how you feel comfort?

Justin brought up dopamine versus serotonin. Dopamine doesn't relax you. Serotonin does. What if you had a stoic moment in the middle of a bar and decided not to fight? Would that be comfort?

Fondren admitted he's still working on it. He's learning when not to fight, but it's not clear yet what replaces that. The questions matter: Did I get hurt? Did I hurt somebody else? Am I going to get arrested? But underneath those questions is the bigger one: What am I actually seeking when I seek a fight? And if it's not comfort, what is it?

Comfort and Strife

Jane wondered if utopias are what happen when everything is comfortable. If the conditions of life are what move us forward, what happens when we remove all struggle? How do we grow? How do we risk and learn something new if the foundations are so solid we never have to test them?

Seth brought up Empedocles: love and strife, the two forces that drive the cosmos. We're never fully in love and never fully in strife. Most experiences are the dynamic between the two, both of them constantly at work. Maybe we're miserable when only one is present.

Dale told a story about building a shed. He knew his back would hurt doing it, but he also knew it would be worthwhile. His back hurt for a week. But he has the long pleasure from the benefits of the shed over time. There's a tension, Seth said, that makes us more attuned to the variety of experiences in life. We don't really know what we need. Maybe we can't.

The Obstinate Imagination

I was thinking about comfort in a different way—as a kind of obstinate imagination.

The word obstinate comes from obstinatus: to stand firm, to be toward something with persistence. Imagination is a kind of sculpting, a carving. And comfort—con fortis—means to be with strength, like sturdiness.

Maybe comfort is this: we're constantly editing our experience of the world. The world keeps coming at us, and we must continue carving and imagining it. Comfort is the obstinate imagination we bring to that eternal editing. It's inevitable. It's constant.

And if that's true, there's an interesting relationship between memory and comfort. What we keep, what we cut, what we decide matters—that's where comfort lives.

Seth had a fine go at morphing that idea into something that bridged into the rest of the conversation. Something about the problem I had identified and maybe the way I was thinking about comfort was…more related to the ideas the group was already chewing on. 

Comfort as Weapon

Fondren brought up something darker: comfort can be weaponized. He never got hugs from his dad. He saw other kids getting them and felt jealous. But if his dad had hugged him, it would have been deeply uncomfortable—because the absence of that comfort had become the norm.

The weaponization of comfort. The way withholding it can control someone. The way you can make someone's world so uncomfortable that even basic kindness feels like manipulation.

Jane asked: where's the compassion in all of this? If we're always comfortable, would we even be able to sense the need for compassion? Would compassion arise?

Seth unpacked some Buddhist ideas: compassion isn't a feeling. It's a state of mind. The suffering in you is the suffering in me, regardless of how much we can or cannot feel it.

Comfort for Populations

Thom was thinking about the founding of the country—that the beginnings were trying to make as many people as comfortable as possible. He'd been learning about Captain Ainsworth, a famous capitalist and gentleman who tried to make as many people comfortable as possible.

Maybe, Thom said, that's what the human race should be doing. Like Mother Teresa. All she did was give comfort. She gave and gave and gave. She was so single-minded about it that really, Mother Teresa was a one-trick pony (in giving comfort).

We all got a good laugh out of that. It was such an unexpected way of putting Mother Teresa’s devotion. We were delighted.

But then we hit the social question.

Seth said: one of the drives for flourishing is comfort, but there are so many different ideas about what comfort is that it's almost impossible to achieve on a social level. If we set the bar at basic needs and call that comfort, we diminish what comfort could be. We all need to strive for higher levels of possible flourishing.

Rick wondered: if comfort is so individual, how can we even pass it on? How would we know what we're doing or whether we're succeeding?

John said there are two different things: individuals and populations. If you're trying to comfort a population, you're going to have to take individual liberties. He brought up building permits. He'd prefer to live in a place that didn't require them.

Some people in the room were surprised. Doesn't that make you feel more comfortable, knowing there are permits?

John's answer was adamant: Not at all.

Seth posed the question: Should society offer opportunities to cultivate comfort?

Where We Landed (Sort Of)

Fondren brought us home with: suffering versus comfort versus hedonism. Some suffering brings comfort. But there's a branching off where comfort can become hedonism—an augmented addiction to comfort. Is that addiction hedonism?

It's the question he's living with. When you're someone who's lived rowdy, who seeks fights, who has nightmares instead of rest—how do you know when you're seeking comfort and when you're seeking something else? How do you know when rest is genuine and when it's just giving up the hardening you think you need?

I think everyone in the room has their own versions of his questions—different bodies, different wounds, different ways the question shows up. But that connection to wondering about what the heck am I doing and why am I doing it, that’s super relatable.

We wrapped up without clean answers. Comfort is a chimera. A combination of many different things. It's easily confused with relief, indulgence, safety, pleasure, peace. We seek it, but we don't always know what we're seeking. We think we do, but we're often wrong.

Sarte had an interesting question we didn't have time for: What's the relationship between comfort and happiness?

Guess we'll have to keep thinking about it.

Scoundrels meets every Wednesday at 5:30 pm at Bridge & Tunnel Bottle Shop. Bring a question. Bring your discomfort. We'll see what happens.