the best piece of advice I've ever received

I have engineered my entire life so that I never have to be uncomfortable. And I have never been more miserable.

I get my groceries delivered. I get my coffee delivered. I get my dinner delivered by a man on an ebike probably named Madoo while I sit on the couch and decide if the show I'm watching is good enough to keep watching. And my friend's Temptation Island is not good enough to keep watching. My apartment is 72° year round. And the last time I was hot, it was on purpose. It was a little morning sauna session. I take the elevators to the third floor. I take a vitamin pill for sunlight. I even own a humidifier in my bedroom. I don't know why they were on sale.

And my reward for engineering all of this, for building the most frictionless life to have ever existed, is a low-grade untreatable restlessness that I cannot name. It's like a kind of a static. The feeling that something is wrong when nothing is. I'm fine. I'm functioning. I'm by all standards crushing it. But I am also somehow um dying inside.

The best piece of advice I've ever received came from a Substack written by Michael Easter. He wrote this book called The Comfort Crisis. And the advice is, drum roll please.

"I call this concept being a 2%er." Only 2% of people take the stairs when there's an elevator next to them. Only 2% of people when given a slightly easier option choose the harder one anyways. Everyone else just flows. And to be clear, the 98% is basically all of us all the time.

But I think it's funny because everyone knows that taking the stairs is healthier for you. 3 minutes a week of stairs is associated with a 15% reduction in the risk of dying from heart disease, which works out to 25 seconds a day. The cost of becoming a measurably different, healthier person is mathematically less time than it takes for you to draft text and overthink it and not send it.

But I want you to stay with me here because it's not really about the stairs. Look beyond the stairs with me. The stairs is a metaphor. Have you ever tried to find the stairs in a normal building? They are hidden. Or maybe I just choose not to look at them. But most of the time they are hidden. They are behind like a fire door with a tiny little sign that no one can read. The lighting is fluorescent. Usually it's dingy and disgusting in there. The walls are concrete and it feels like your chances of getting murdered there increase 20%.

The elevator, meanwhile, is right there. It's in the middle lobby. It has nice lighting. It has nice little music. There's people. There might even be a mirror. You can check yourself out while heading up. But the architecture has decided for you, which is like the entire structure of modern life. Auto renew, auto reply, autopilot. Everything about your day is set up to walk you to the elevator. You have to go actively looking for the harder thing for the scary murder staircase. And the harder thing is usually behind a fire door.

Cooking versus Door Dash. Calling versus texting. Walking versus Uber. Saying the hard thing versus saying, "I'm fine." Reading the book versus chatgpting a summary of the book. Catching up with an old friend versus saying, "Well, should I get coffee sometime?" Each one is a staircase and each one has an elevator next to it.

There is, by the way, a literal surgeon general's advisory on this. Have you heard of the loneliness epidemic that we are in? Millions of people every single day choose to text instead of call, to stay home instead of going out, to [ __ ] about having no friends on the internet while never reaching out to the ones that they actually have on their phone. The defining illness of modern life is people choosing the goddamn elevator.

I want to address something really fast because I made a really short Instagram reel on this like a few months ago and some people in the comments were pretty mad because they were saying, "Oh, you know, so many people can't take the stairs. Like, I'm in a wheelchair. I have disabilities. I can't take the stairs. Like, you're being super ableist. Like, guys, obviously elevators are important. Accessibility is important." I don't want this video to feel like I am not including a certain group, but I want to be clear that the stairs really is just the metaphor for embracing discomforts of everyday life. Anyways, I just thought I need to put that in there.

But in every single little staircase in modern life, only 2% of people take the stairs. 2% of people on any given day choose to do the harder thing. Not because anyone is checking, not because anyone is giving out gold stars or filming a TikTok video of you doing it. The elevator is also empty most of the time. Whether you took the stairs is genuinely between you and you. Most things in life are always you versus you.

Because the most consequential choices in your life, who you become, who you trust yourself to be, what kind of person shows up when no one is checking, what kind of person is really there behind closed doors, are all decided by the choices that you make when no one else is watching. The staircase is just the most literal version of that.

Here's the underlying argument. By the way, for roughly 99.996% of human history, life was deeply unpleasant. Our ancestors were cold. They were hungry. They were tired. They were on foot. Researchers estimate that they were on average 14 times more active than we are. Yep. I walked 3,000 steps today. I don't think my ancestors walked 3,000 steps. I think they walked freaking 30,000 steps. For 99.996% of our species existence, discomfort was not a wellness practice. It was Tuesday. And then in the last 0.004%, we somehow engineered it all out. A great grandmother of yours somewhere killed a chicken so that the family could eat. You Door Dash tie food to your apartment. Scientists call this evolutionary mismatch, which is a nice way of saying we built a world that we're not designed to live in. And our nervous systems are going batshit crazy. We are built for friction. The caveman inside of us, they are built for friction, but we got rid of all of it. And now our brains are pacing around the apartment going, "Where did all the [ __ ] bears go?"

And there is also a chemical version of this. There is this Stanford psychiatrist, her name is Anna Lembke. Essentially, she said that the smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle. Every scroll, every snack, every notification is this tiny little hit of dopamine. And your brain responds to all these tiny hits by lowering its baseline, which means your floor for what feels good has been silently dropping for years. The relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to anhedonia.

"What's that mean?" The inability to take joy in anything at all. "The coffee tastes flat. The walk doesn't hit. You get bored of hanging out with your friends. This new conversation is boring 12 seconds in. And the vacation that you saved up for just feels like a different room." You are not broken, my friend. Don't worry. You're just so overstimulated that nothing unstimulating registers anymore.

So, okay, the world made us soft little [ __ ]. What do we do now? I want to talk about the self-improvement industrial complex. So, modern-day self-improvement is really built around these big grand gestures. The New Year's resolution, 75 Hard, summer body challenge. How to glow the [ __ ] up. I made that. I made "How to glow the [ __ ] up." I contributed to the self-improvement industrial complex. Guys, don't kill me. We love a plan. We love a protocol. But almost none of it works.

See, depending on the study that you read, somewhere around 80% of New Year's resolutions are dead by February, which is pretty bad. And the funny thing is, we don't tolerate this in any other industry. Like, imagine if just 80% of refrigerators broke in their second month. We would burn the company down. But for personal transformation, we just say, "Oh, you know, I'll just do it next year. I'll try again next January." Same plan, same Pinterest board, same lie. And we keep doing it because the act of announcing your transformation is a dopamine hit on its own. There's actually research on this. Somehow telling people your goals makes you less likely to achieve them because your brain treats the announcement as if you actually done the thing. But essentially, you cash in the reward before doing the actual work.

But that's what's beautiful about the staircase. There's no announcement. You're not going to post on your freaking story and say, "I'm going to take the stairs from now on." There's no arc. There's no before and after. You just took the stairs today once. You'll probably take them again tomorrow. And nobody noticed.

And here's the part I want to keep coming back to, which is I believe the whole game. Consistency over intensity. Not a single hard thing, not a 75-day torture session, a small chosen thing every day for years. I think big versions are goal-shaped, right? They're like, "I will lose 10 lbs by January." But small versions are identity-shaped. "I am the kind of person that takes the stairs." And the second one is like a thousand times more durable because identity doesn't expire on a deadline. You can fail a goal, but you can't really fail at being a type of person. You can only stop being it, which you notice immediately because it's who you are.

And listen, I want to do something here that I wish more people in this niche would do because if I don't, I'll sound exactly like the genre that I'm trying to critique here. But I'm aware how this video sounds. There's like this whole genre of wellness content right now. Cold showers, 2%, breathwork, 5 a.m. wakeups. And most of this wellness content is being sold by men with podcasts to people who do not have the time nor bandwidth to optimize anything. And when this content gets to some people who are burnt out, stretched thin, depressed, anxious, it can sound like I'm just telling you, "Have you tried harder? Have you tried harder to not be depressed?" Which obviously is not the take that I'm trying to go for.

So, I want to be clear. I don't think depression is a discipline problem. I'm not even saying anxiety is something that you can climb your way out of. The staircase is not a treatment. It's not even really a recommendation. I just want to bring this to your attention. It's a noticing. But if you're in like this type of place where listening to this makes you feel like [ __ ], click off of it immediately. Ignore me. Go talk to someone that can actually help you. The staircase will be there in 6 months. Don't worry.

But for the lazy [ __ ] that are not in that type of place, I want to give you one more idea and I think it might be a pretty useful one. Easter calls it misogi. A misogi is something you do once a year that is genuinely seriously hard. There are two rules. Rule one, it has to be hard. Like 50/50% odds that you actually pull it off. Rule two, you won't die. Pretty pretty simple to me, guys. But the rule that almost no one follows is that you don't post about it. The moment a misogi becomes content, it stops being a misogi.

And here's the thing that I missed when I first read about misogi. The misogi only works if the daily small thing is already intact. Because you can't do a misogi if your baseline is already the elevator. The big thing isn't an alternative to the small thing. The big thing requires a small thing to even be possible. The big thing is what becomes available to you once the small thing has actually done its work. The misogi is essentially downstream of the staircase.

I want to be clear, I do not take the stairs every time I see the stairs. I just want to start an open conversation with you guys about what I've been noticing. But what I've noticed is that the few days where I actually feel alive, feel very present, feel very here in my own life, I usually had to do a hard thing.

There's actually another stat in this book I want to show you guys. 90% of the times that we pick up our phone, no one is even trying to reach us. There's no notification. We just pick it up and see what's going on. We're looking for something, anything, and we don't even know what. It's like the digital equivalent of going to the fridge and opening it five times just to feel something really. And I think small chosen discomfort is an antidote to that.

So next time, try walking instead of subwaying. Try doing a little cold rinse at the end of your shower. Not for any health benefits, but just to prove to yourself that you can. Maybe just sit still. Be bored for two minutes instead of opening up TikTok for the 90th time. Try taking the stairs. It was never the big thing. It's always the small one.

And the crazy part is that on the other side of these tiny choices, your dopamine baseline starts coming back. The coffee starts tasting like coffee. The sky starts looking like sky. The walk starts feeling like a walk. And I think you also slowly start becoming someone that you trust. Like self-trust doesn't come from a single journal entry. It doesn't come from a single conversation. It doesn't even come from a personality test. It comes from a 100 small moments where no one is watching and you do the slightly harder thing anyways.

But I will not pretend that I figured this out. I will probably take the elevator tomorrow. I will take the elevator tomorrow, guys. I will probably Door Dash my food this weekend. I will probably in sometime in the next hour scroll my phone for something that I definitely did not need to. The 2% is not a switch flip. You don't suddenly need to change. It's a setting. It's something that you notice that you slowly start to change.

But I think the whole point of the video, if there is one, is this. You don't need to be intense. You need to be consistent. You don't need to chase discomfort, but you should stop running from it every single time. And you don't need this grand transformation. You just need a Tuesday.

So, the next time you walk past either a metaphorical staircase or a physical staircase, I want you to remember this video. And even if you're carrying your 15lb tote bag and you have that small voice in your head saying, "Take the elevator." I want you to take the stairs. Not for the cardio, not for the optics, not even because some random girl on the internet told you to. Take it. Because somewhere underneath all of that dopamine tick-tock 67ified you, there's still a version of you that was built for friction. And they are so tired of being kept inside.