Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophers help you get comfortable with big ideas.

I'm David Peña Guzman.

And I'm Ellie Anderson.

David, there are a bunch of books that have come out about comfort recently.

And most of them are in the self-help genre.

Some are pro-comfort. Others are anti-comfort.

I'm just going to list a few titles for you as we get started.

Love it. The Comfort. The comfort book. And the comfort crisis embrace discomfort to

reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self. That one gets bonus points because it has both comfort

and discomfort in the title. Wait, so are we supposed to be comfortable or uncomfortable?

I feel like you're supposed to be comfortable with discomfort, but I guess it depends on the

book.

I mean, let's talk for a second about one of them, the comfort book.

This is a recent book by Matt Haig, who's sort of styled himself as a self-help author

after writing a successful fantasy novel called The Midnight Library.

And the comfort book is like a series of one-page inspirational quotes, ideas, and anecdotes.

And Haig says it was born out of the fact that he sometimes writes things down to comfort himself.

So the book isn't really about

comfort so much as it is meant to help comfort the reader in the way that it comforted him

in creating it. I mean, honestly, I did this when I was a teenager and I called it the book of

inspiration. And not to throw too much shade, but what I found in Hague's book wasn't much better.

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