The Comfort of Comfort Zones
A counterintuitive approach: no more updates
For a long time, I have been against yet another reinvention that comes with a new year. I’ve done so many in the past to appease the masses that I’m weary of it and wary of its seductive charm. For some of us, perhaps the contradictory mantra of “out with the new, in with the old” is what we may need now. Over the past week, many people have discussed what went well and what didn’t in 2023 and what they plan to improve on in 2024. I get it, and I can even advocate it within reasonable bounds. Whatever gets people access to accountability, a common collective, and all the rewards that bring is theirs for the taking. But I also consider my counterintuitive approaches and reframe them alternatively and philosophically based on my needs.
As the new year arrives and settles in, I consider the peace of mind I’ll have when I’ve reached the stage where such proclamations are no longer necessary. Ironically, I am proclaiming here now that I will not establish any or many objectives for 2024 until I fully comprehend the reality of my surroundings and the world and how it impacts my whole self. My autistic need for deeper interoception and processing in full activation. However, I feel now that I have arrived at a point where I am pretty content with what I have accomplished, even though I have not achieved all of what I desire to pursue in my life and career ambitions.
This may come across as being too content with my status quo, which some may find monotonous and repetitive. But now I see that it’s self-regulating; I’ve figured out how to regulate my behaviour with much creativity. I set limits for myself with a great deal of natural ingenuity. My comfort zone and the comfort and self-regulation it brings me. We can’t see, feel, or be more than what we already are due to the mass social media deception that if we don’t leave our comfort zones, we can’t experience magic, as apparently, that’s only where the magic happens. Nonetheless, in my humble view, that does not lead to renewal. I think that might be where the problem lies. Many people are engaged in so much magic and fantasy that they can’t grasp reality.
Taking a break from this repetitive story that starts with the new year and exiting your comfort zone mentalities may let us see ourselves in all our past, contemporary, and subsequent prospective eminence. We may improve our self-talk by being more transparent with ourselves if we pay more attention to our mental, emotional, and physical forms. This helps us see, feel, and be more of our true nature through restoring our senses and sense-checking our emotional, psychological, and physical data. In this sense, being transparent means accepting ourselves exactly as we are, flaws and all, and not shackling ourselves to the false ideals of perfection that our culture has imposed on us. As opposed to the habit of believing the hype around the annual New Year’s resolutions that flood many social media feeds, we should consider focusing on showing ourselves our reality.
Many of us have weathered the past few years of turmoil by establishing routines that include nurturing, taking better care of ourselves, and practicing self-compassion within our comfort zones; these practices can ultimately lead to more self-acceptance. So what if we reframed our comfort zones as places where we can cultivate psychological safety to speak to ourselves so we can practice more self-compassion without corrupting the self-data we need to operate from a more content whole self-set of systems and beliefs?
A gentle reminder that remaining in our comfort zone does not equate to laziness. It can be a state of flow that brings progress, allowing us to find what we can naturally do with ease and contentment. Perhaps what we can define as a vision of success in the new year is observing many people flitting around in circles and not getting anywhere just to fit in, with the potential to increase the pressure on their physical, mental, and emotional well-being with peer pressure to abandon their comfort zones.
What if we stopped updating and started relating to our senses more?
Consider not abandoning your comfort zone.
But consider expanding it and choosing a comfort zone as a renewal zone.
Maybe your whole system doesn’t need any more updates.
Cue random reflection prompts.
- When is it okay for me to stay in my comfort zone?
- Why is that okay?
- How does it benefit me?
- At what point does it become detrimental to my overall well-being to continuously—unconsciously — step out of my comfort zone?
- Do I know what the median looks and feels like?
No More Updates
Therefore, the time has come to stop updating my software because I am weary and wary. It has a unique wiring individual to my needs, and I am more accepting of how my operating system is wired atypically. When I tried to keep updating it to fit in and avoid falling out with the latest trends and societal scripts so I would blend in, some of my old files became unreadable and got corrupted or deleted. Now, I am choosing myself. I choose not to engage with fluffy internet tropes eager to remind me to leave my comfort zone or that my past doesn’t determine my future.
It does, for which I am graciously grateful.
I am never going to let my past be erased again.
I was erasing emotional data I needed to sense-check and recover my senses to enable me to live a more meaningful, true-to-self life. Yes, even in moments of remorse and regret. Another emotion that social media will try to erase from my software. I disown the no-regrets mindset. I need these kinds of turbulent emotional environments to embrace acceptance.
Aged insight.
Old data.
Good reflection is good thinking.
Good deconstruction enables enhanced reconstruction.
For me, you see, reaching my median level of comfort for self-regulating safety and sanctuary was the one objective in my life and work worth putting in the emotional labour to arrive at homeostasis. The self-stability and sustenance of the software no longer need updating because I have finally found a way to honour and accommodate myself based on my individual needs. I can now savour the familiarity and repetition that returning to this modus operandi brings.
Maybe you are now reading this and have yet to arrive at this life phase. If so, keep going, not just for the New Year, but until you become aware of the saturation of self-awareness enabling you to understand what you deem as enough, and you don’t need to keep updating your software; a self-appreciative, non-depreciative level of self-inquiry as a benchmark for contentment within one’s knowing being and doing—a median within one’s comfort zone or expanded renewal zone where one can stick with it (whatever it defines) without getting stuck.
Personally, this point of effective saturated awareness has been like getting back on the hedonistic treadmill on my terms without falling flat on my face, only to run into a void that needed filling with what in the past I would have deemed hedonistic but was in all actuality a fatalistic band-aid where more emotional files got erased in the absence of adequate, effective consciousness. Now, it feels much more like a graceful hedonic adaptation to my human nature and the tendency for my nature, that of most human beings, to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.
Routinely, when something breaks down technically, the consensus is to unplug it and cease updating. To return to what was comfortable and familiar before. To choose, for the sake of stability and sanity, a rejection of updating or reinventing. Therefore, to maintain the essence of who I am, I continue to unplug and detach from far more of the ‘new’ to preserve my core self because I am the one on whom I have to rely when the sh*t hits the fan.
I live contently under a rock in ignorant bliss but with rational thought. I am not ignorant of the sh*tscape of the world, but I am embracing my escape route from it, which is into myself and may be considered self-absorbed by some. Kimia Dargahi eloquently conveys this as:
“My closest friends compare me to Spongebob’s Patrick Starr: I live under a rock. And by that, they mean I don’t keep up with pop culture (social media, movies, and TV). How could I when Tolstoy takes up all of my time? I opt for dead Russian novelists over another glass of digital dopamine drunkenness.”
Relatable.
I do this because of my desire to carry on working in the manner in which I currently understand myself, with my neurodivergence playing a role in defining some of my identity but not all of it. I am much more than just my autism. My autism is all mine, and I love and embrace it despite the challenges it has brought me in my lifetime, of which there are some regrets I am learning to accept, but also so much self-love and the encompassing diversity of humanity to engage with. Because I did so many updates in the past, trying to fit in and not fall out, I fell out of my whole self. I had to unscramble some of those internal emotional files and lose some of them (me).
I am not going to let that happen again. Okay, maybe that is the only proclamation I will make in 2024!
I will finish with insightful notes from Susan Sontag’s early essay, “Against Interpretation” (1964), which I gratefully discovered via the inspiration for some of this article from Damon Krukowski’s article Against Innovation. Damon noted that Sontag encourages critics and artists to ignore the contemporary rage for symbolism and heavy interpretive frameworks. She wrote the quotes below, endeavouring to free Kafka and Beckett from the endless updates critics imposed on these texts.
“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, and to feel more.”
“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so that we can see the thing at all.”
Yeah, I am all for that.
Cutting back on content to access more contentment.
Grá Mór
As always, this is a reminder that I write this publication as part of my life’s work and do not have any notions about making a full-time career or living from it. Still, I do value my work as many others do, and therefore, I would kindly ask if you find my writing of value and have any spare financial means to consider one of the following options:
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