Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen.

If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before,

welcome back. Modern life is in many ways astonishingly easy, particularly when you compare it to

what our ancestors went through. We get food without hunting,

warmth without chopping wood, and entertainment that would have blown the minds of two million years

of humans just by opening up our funds. That's incredible, but it has come with a strange side

effect. As these objective measures of scarcity and difficulty and boredom have gone down,

it doesn't seem like people's

subjective happiness has gone up that much. If anything, they seem to feel more restless,

frustrated, and anxious. So what's going on here? And could we actually make our lives

both easier and more fulfilling by deliberately making them just a little bit more difficult?

Tell me to answer that question, I'm joined by Michael Easter. Michael is a professor, journalist, and the bestselling author of a number of books, including the comfort crisis, Scarcity Brain, and his new book, Walk with Weight, the definitive guide to Rucking. He's also the author of the extremely popular substack 2% with Michael Easter. So Michael, thanks for joining me today. How are you doing? I'm doing well, man. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Same. I've been really looking forward to this one. I really appreciate your work. I love the perspective in it. And if I had to boil it down to one sentence, and you can definitely correct me here, it would be that being uncomfortable within reason and particularly in ways that we choose is generally good for us. And this is a bit of a

problem because as most of us have experienced whenever we've tried to do something difficult,

our system usually wants to avoid that kind of effort when it's possible. Yeah, well, you nailed it.

I mean, our system is wired to avoid discomfort. The stat I always like to use and the reason

because you mentioned my newsletter,

called the 2% newsletter. It's called the 2% newsletter because there's this study that I think

encapsulates so much and it found that only 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an

escalator available. Now, I would argue that 100% of those people knew that taking the stairs would give them a better long-term return on their physical health, on maybe even their mental health.

But 98% of people choose to do the easy, more effortless thing.

I'm a chronic escalator. I got to tell you. Yeah. I'm going to try and change that. I'm going to try and change that by the end of this podcast. That's my mission in the next. Personal goal for sure. Next 90 minutes. What this is, though, is it's not really about the stairs. It's kind of a metaphor for how we have engineered our world for comfort. Totally. And how that backfires. So for all of time, to put this in like grand

historical perspective, two and a half million years of human history, it never made sense to

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