Comfort and Familiarity is Addictive

The past few days, I’ve been contemplating on taking a certain decision that potentially would mess with my lifestyle and way of life. Every way I look at it, this change is a necessary evil and would ultimate help me in the long run. But there’s this feeling of unease holding me back from actually going forward with my intentions.

It’s like once you become used to a certain standard of living, it becomes practically impossible to willingly give it up. This is why you see people driving big cars that are deep in debt but still won’t sell their cars even if that’s the only way to pay off their debt. They’ve become accustomed to enjoying the luxury of having a car and more or can’t live a life without one anymore.

But this doesn’t mean giving up the life of comfort makes them incapable of surviving in any way.

Willingly is the word to focus on here. Natural forces out of their control like accidents can easily take away whatever it is they’ve clinged onto so much that they can’t see a life without. And even though these would be unpleasant, they would be completely fine without whatever they got attached to.

People that have become used to car privileges will have the privilege taken away by force if they were to be involved in an accident for example. If this happens, they have nothing else to do than accept their fate. What they thought they couldn’t live without, they’ll find out they actually could, but that it was just the human desire to stick to the feeling of comfort and familiarity that hypnotized them into that thinking.

My own experience

What prompted this post among others is a funny incident I remember from a few days ago. There’s been warnings of theft in the neighborhood I moved to do my national service, so because of that, I sleep with my phone next to me every night. I woke up in the middle of the night one night last week to charge my phone and to my surprise, my phone wasn’t next to me like it should be.

I turned the room upside down and even ended up waking my friend (whose place I’m staying at until I find a hostel myself). You shouldn’t seen the fear in my eyes as I started imagining the worst case scenario.

After almost 15 minutes of fear and panic, I calmed down and used my friend’s hotspot to track my phone on my laptop. Funny enough, I saw the phone was still in the building we live so I was a bit confused because we turned over every thing in the room lol.

At this point, I was calm enough to remember that I woke up earlier in the night to use the bathroom and that maybe I took it in there with me. I opened the washroom door and it was sitting quietly on the water closet. Phewww!!!

I realized that the entire time we were looking for it and thought it was stolen, I kept asking myself one question in regret: Why didn’t I just sell it and do x or y or z when I had it?

I realized that the answer was simple. The fear of how much not having my phone would destabilize my life was one to be reckoned with. I couldn’t do it willingly and on my own accord. The fear of not being able to keep practicing my photography and publishing more nature gemz collection posts consumed me. After I got my phone back, the thought of selling it to avoid something like the worst case scenario from happening immediately vanished again.

The thing is, attachment is not necessarily to material stuff. People become used to lifestyles, relationships and all that. Doesn’t mean we can’t function without these things. It just means our comfort will be disturbed if any of these factors were removed from the equation of our lives and so subconsciously, we feel as if we can’t live without them or imagine a life without them.