There’s nothing like a long succession of near criminal acts of laziness over spring break to show how easy it is to be comfortable.
This week, if carried out properly, can remind you to what extent comfort actually holds horrible sway over your mind.
Living in an advanced, entertainment-focused society transmogrifies the choice between virtue and wickedness into something more primal: whether we choose to invest our actions with purpose, or whether we spend our time watching the unpardonably bad second half of "Archer: Vice" while eating Girl Scout Cookies and wondering why people don’t like us better.
The choice between between meaning and comfort is simply more prescient in our lives than good or evil actions. This is because, for many of us, the height of our moral action in a given day might be smiling at a person we don't like. The height of evil might be ignoring a friend's text.
This isn’t to say that that good and evil don’t exist in the real world— far from it. UNICEF: good. North Korea: evil. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: good. People who talk to plants as if they were sentient: evil. Squirrels: good. Hamsters: evil.
Also, it’s not as if living a meaningful life is an all-or-nothing thing. Comfort is necessary for mental health sometimes, and one has only so much attention span to give to the day-to-day. To lean too far either way probably isn’t the best way of going about it.
The central point is this: before something can take on good or evil attributes, it must first be meaningful. The small choices that make up daily American life can’t be morally classified because most of them are comfort choices, having absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
These events are hard to pick out because one necessarily forgets the meaningless choices one makes every single day.
This is not because something as forgettable as, say, what vending machine snack one chooses can’t be life changing. (It absolutely can.)
The mistake is ignoring our ability to invest those tiny events with meaning. One forgets meaningless choices because they are automatic and required no thought to perform in the first place. Did you buy an Aquafina or Dasani water bottle yesterday? Did you wave at that acquaintance when you saw him on the street? Did you humor that old religious-prophet-looking dude on Greene Street by taking one of his crazy pamphlets?
Perhaps worse are those who choose to invest meaning in increasingly intoxicating comforts.
Don’t get me wrong; putting one’s brain on hold for a couple hours in a movie theater — or even for a week in the middle of a difficult semester — isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But there is always a danger in putting too much meaning into essentially empty entertainment like, say, super-hero movies, which are designed to comfort and lovingly hold the audience with quips and explosions before all else. Liking entertainment too much can make one into a fanatic, a habitual, a ghost in human flesh. There’s a very thin line between an enthusiast and an addict.
More pitiful are those who simply cannot find meaning in anything because they have forgotten how to create it, or why it was worth creating in the first place. A number of these folks are so desperate for something real to cling to that they’ll go to any length to break away from their comfort cycle and invest themselves with purpose.
For many, this is the actual day-to-day battle that happens beside everything else. Between school or work or hanging out with friends, the attempt to grasp something meaningful is a desperate attempt to avoid going the long way to the grave without anything to hold onto.
Those who have also struggled with depression will understand that losing the drive to act meaningfully is a terrifying prospect, and will know as well as I do how important it is to get help as quickly as possible in order to recover that drive.
But the misplaced search for purpose is a dangerous thing, because it can so easily consume the person searching. The reason so many foreigners go to the Islamic State, for instance, comes from that group’s ability to create, structure and dispense meaning. They’re proof positive that, no matter how wacked-out the ideas, you can always find volunteers to be bullet-fodder if you are able to package meaning succinctly.
Unlike us, they can provide a narrative that overwhelms an individual, depriving them of both indecision and the terrible burden of making one’s own choices.
Our problem in this particular ideological fight against the Islamic State is that there aren’t always immediate handholds for meaning in Western society, even if you’re on the lookout for one. Having the freedom to choose what is meaningful, while essential for free society, means that there are many available ideological narratives to latch onto, some of which are treacherous.
For example, the would-be college graduate is taught to strive for one goal and one goal only: to insert themselves as deep as possible into the largest, widest and (often) least-welcoming orifice that their chosen company so magnanimously spreads for them.
I can’t personally extract any meaning out of this burrowing-ever-upward thinking; only that, because so many other people have, I’m going to have to play into this system like everyone else.
What I can understand is this: one must regularly practice the ability to create meaning to avoid becoming a comfort addict, or pitifully become like those who float through space every day, wake up old one morning and wonder why nothing good ever happened to them.