The cost of comfort: consumption vs liberation

Last year, I was in a liberational leadership meeting where a man in Tehran was on the call while the city was being bombed. His calm clarity struck us all. His focus was to not fall into hate and to care for the people around him. He’d done everything he could to protect himself and his family. He was in total acceptance. He just wanted to be in a space with other people who wouldn’t require him to perform anger and hate, or feel victimised.

His way of being stood in sharp contrast to people who lived in safety but complained about overwhelm from reading the news. It reminded me of Churchill’s reflection that nothing focuses the mind like a speeding bullet. 

The person who was directly living the tragedy of conflict was more open hearted and clear minded than those of us living in relative comfort and safety. It confirmed my own experience of armed conflict and of feeling a sense of clarity and aliveness that made actions focused. The immediacy of death awakened the heart to a deep appreciation of life and interconnection.

A key distinction was that the man in Tehran had a liberation practice in nonviolence and in cultivating comfort with discomfort, whereas those of us suffering by proxy through the news or social media can get caught in the paradigm of consumption handed to us - consuming news to temporarily relieve the discomfort of uncertainty.

This aligns with liberation wisdom: our anxiety often makes situations seem worse than they are. Thinking and imagining (amplified by consuming content) can rob us of the ease available when we directly sense and experience reality.

Here are 3 things we can consume less of, and instead cultivate comfort with discomfort, clarity, and spaciousness:

1. Visual input

Vision accounts for the majority of sensory processing in the brain. Focusing on a single object or closing your eyes can produce instant cognitive relief and sharpen attention.

2. Novelty, shock, outrage

Social media algorithms and news cycles often act as attention-capture platforms, eliciting strong emotion, threat scanning, and fear of uncertainty. Intermittent reward psychology provides a temporary hit of relief before re-triggering craving for more a few moments later — much like an unhealthy relationship.

3. Action and productivity

Movement doesn’t just consume energy through muscle use but also through information processing. It is an evolutionary strategy to sample the environment and ensure external conditions are safe.

Ancient liberation traditions refined movement through the high-efficiency principle of effortless effort, or right effort. This emerges when we co-regulate with our environment, attune to what is contextually necessary moment-to-moment, and prioritise with compassionate ruthlessness.

⸻

If you notice that this essentially reverse-engineers the psycho-physiological mechanisms of meditation, you’d be correct.

⸻

Liberation can simply be consuming less, cultivating more, and relating to life as a field rather than a supermarket.

Amina