No Stupid Questions - 202. Why Can’t We Tolerate Discomfort?

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Are we using technology to make ourselves numb? What’s the downside of air conditioning? And was Angela the most annoying person in her college classes? SOURCES:Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.Ed Diener, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.Michael Easter, author.Alex Hutchinson, journalist.Shigehiro Oishi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.Taylor Swift, singer-songwriter. RESOURCES:"World Happiness Report," (Gallup, 2024)."How Painful Should Your Workout Be?" by Alex Hutchinson (The New York Times, 2022)."Taylor Swift’s NYU Commencement Speech: Read the Full Transcript," by Hannah Dailey (Billboard, 2022).The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, by Michael Easter (2021).The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning, by Paul Bloom (2021)."Residents of Poor Nations Have a Greater Sense of Meaning in Life Than Residents of Wealthy Nations," by Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener (Psychological Science, 2014)."Confusion Can Be Beneficial for Learning," by Sidney D’Mello, Blair Lehman, Reinhard Pekrun, and Art Graesser (Learning and Instruction, 2014)."Stranger Situations: Examining a Self-Regulatory Model of Socially Awkward Encounters," by Joshua Clegg (Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2012). EXTRAS:"Should You Get Out of Your Comfort Zone?" by No Stupid Questions (2024).

Hello, Kettle. I'm Pot. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Mike Maugham. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, what are the benefits of feeling uncomfortable? I'm a little confused, I'm a little frustrated. ["I'm a Little Frustrated"] Angela, today we have an amazing question about getting uncomfortable. Oh my gosh, I'm already uncomfortable. This is so awkward. Here we go. Dear NSQ, in a recent episode of the show,

Angela said that in today's day and age, the discomfort that people have with negative emotions is unhealthy. So I was wondering, as a society, are we getting progressively less tolerant of all kinds of discomfort, physical and psychological? And is that such a bad thing? Hasn't intolerance for discomfort motivated

the development of technological advances to improve our situations? For example, if we're in physical pain or we're clinically depressed, we can now take safe, regulated medicine. If we're hot, we can turn on the air conditioning and find relief. Is sustained experience of discomfort

really an important skill for people to master? Thanks. R from New York. You mean like capital R period, right? Yes, R from New York. What we do know is that R might be in the CIA because I immediately thought of M from James Bond. Oh yes. And I was like, I'm afraid to answer this question. Maybe someone from MI6 is emailing us from New York. It could be.

They'll never tell us. I love this question. Super interesting. Well, let me ask you, do you intentionally seek out uncomfortable situations, whether that's physical or psychological or maybe even emotional? I would not say that I chase discomfort for discomfort's sake. I personally, and as a professional psychologist, do not think discomfort is an end in itself. I don't think it's like, oh, I had 12 units of discomfort today, that's better than yesterday

because I only had 10 units. It's not like, oh, there's something noble in suffering itself. You do, I know, seek out exercise, which is not as comfortable as sitting on your couch, but that's not the end itself. The end is to be healthy, to exercise both your body and free your mind for a bit, stuff like that.

Would that be fair? Yeah, no, totally. I know it sounds like a contradiction and I don't think it is, but actually, if I gave you a little report at every moment of the day, I'm usually uncomfortable. So neither do I seek out discomfort for discomfort's sake, nor do I have a life that is comfortable. And I think the reason to me that this makes sense is that what I'm really seeking out is challenge, right? And I think as a emotional byproduct of

being in a state of challenge, you feel something. You feel sometimes like a little, you could argue pain, but we can talk about that word. We can argue like frustration, confusion. I mean, there are all these feelings that I have, mild I should say, you know. I'm not like a 10 these feelings that I have, mild, I should say. You know, I'm not like a 10 out of 10 on frustration all day long, but I seek out challenges and because they are accompanied with this sensation of discomfort, it looks like I'm seeking out discomfort, but I'm actually seeking out progress. I'm trying to do things I can't yet do, and my body and my brain are telling me that

But I'm not like chasing the feeling and I think that is important because I think some people do chase the feeling they're like No pain no gain, you know if I go to bed and I had like a lot of suffering then I win I mean I do Understand both I will say I have a cousin who at least one time per month, he tries to do something that completely scares him. Now again, there's a goal behind it. He's trying to improve or... Like what kinds of things does he do? Like he'll email someone or try to get in touch with someone who's way outside the league of who he should be talking to. Like he wants to talk to the Rock and he's like, I'm gonna email Dwayne Johnson.

Yeah, or he'll make a romantic advance. He's trying to date someone and it's very uncomfortable to put your stuff out there, etc. I love that. And actually, I need to talk to your cousin because there's one part of my class that I teach to undergraduates that has been a consistent failure. And the assignment in the syllabus is this week, do something that you're almost certain to fail at. And I give examples like your cousin is doing, like ask somebody out who's likely to reject you, send an email to someone who is unlikely to respond affirmatively, do something physically that you feel maybe is beyond what you can do in a safe way, you want to get sued, let's

not get into trouble. But like when the students turn back're written reflections about what they did and how that, you know, went for them, right? What their experience was. And they're like, I went for a run, you know, and they go on, you're like, like I always do. And I'm like, how was that a fail? Like, I emailed my best friend and we got together on Friday night.

I'm like, wait, how is this a failure? So I have consistently failed to teach my students how to fail. And I'm converging with your cousin because I agree that if you do something and there's no discomfort, then you probably haven't stretched yourself. It's just that I don't want this to turn into this kind of like masochistic suffering is good thing. And maybe this is very personal to me, Mike, because for a lot of my life, I was the person who was like, the more tired I am at the end of the day, the more, in a way, unhappy I

am at the end of volunteering, the better. And I think I got confused between the signal of the thing and the thing. And I think the thing is challenge and growth and doing things that we can't yet do. I think the signal is the feeling like I'm hot, I'm cold, I'm a little scared, I'm a little confused, I'm a little frustrated. I confused that for like, I don't know, until my 40s.

There's often been this idea of busyness as a badge of honor. Yeah. And oh, how are you? I am so busy. So stressed. Yeah, and you know what I decided? First of all, it's not a badge of honor. Maybe it means that you're horribly inefficient

at your job or who knows. Right. But nobody also cares. When you were talking about your students though, one thought that came to mind, I don't know if you've read Michael Easter's book, The Comfort Crisis. I have not. Is he a journalist or a scientist?

He's a writer and a professor of journalism at UNLV, and he wrote this book, The Comfort Crisis, Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. And I thought it was an incredible book, but the reason I thought of it when you were describing your students, one of the things he talks about in the book is annually he tries to do what's called a masogi. And it's basically go do something- A masogi? A masogi.

It's something physical that you are probably going to fail at. So for example, he'll say, if you're going to run a marathon, but you've trained for six months for said marathon and you know, you can complete it That's not what qualifies. Oh, it doesn't count. It's just like what you're saying like, oh, I went running like I do every day but his thing is like go do something you're not prepared for and See if you can push your body to the limit But he doesn't just talk about exercise or physical He also talks about that we are too emotionally comfortable

or we don't get bored anymore. And boredom is actually like a sign to go do some things, right, pay attention to these emotions. But I thought it was an amazing book because I wonder if your students have this comfort crisis where they're afraid to actually fail. So instead of doing a Masogi-like where they're going to push themselves really hard, it's just like, oh, I'm just going to email my friend because my friend might reject me

because they have plans. That's not the same as emailing the rock. It's not the same. And by the way, like how hard is that to send through cyberspace an email to some like info at the rock and not get anything back? Like how embedded are we in I guess the phrases, the comfort crisis? Okay, you may not know the answer to this, but like, why is it called a misogi? So misogi is a Japanese word that means water cleansing.

It comes from a practice that involves mental and physical challenges that help purify the mind, body and spirit. And so that's the origin of the word. I think he has just adopted the principle to call what he's doing a misogi every year. What I really like about this way of thinking about it is that there's something in the nuance of, oh, you know, it has to be a misogi or like your cousin,

like, how do you know you're doing it? Oh, because it doesn't feel comfortable. I don't have that in my syllabus. And my syllabus is just as like, go do something that you're doing it? Oh, because it doesn't feel comfortable. I don't have that in my syllabus. And my syllabus is just as like, go do something that you're likely to fail. But maybe because we're so averse to failure, we need a lot of scaffolding, hand holding and instruction. Because I really do think these kids need training wheels

for failure, for discomfort. And I don't want to blame everything on like Gen Z or whatever generation is younger than us because I actually think that the problem at its root, I mean, yes, culture shifts and maybe we get so used to being at like exactly 68 degrees, low humidity, not feeling a lot of frustration, not feeling a lot of boredom, not feeling a lot of anything. So maybe it's a cultural plague that's very recent. But I think our evolutionary instincts tell us that pain is bad, that boredom is bad, that socially awkward moments are bad. And those evolutionary instincts that get us to be more interested, to get us to be more socially comfortable, like, you know, that impulse to avoid those negative feelings is

hardwired into us. We just have to understand, like, we need our own user manual. We need to know that, like, when this light is on, boredom, it just means that you're not being stimulated and it's not the end of the world and it's not a bad thing to feel boredom because it's a signal to move you to something that's more interesting. But I feel like we've lost the user manual or maybe we never had it and I think in modern times we just move directly to how do I be as comfortable as possible and then we lose out on all the things that the instincts were trying to teach us in the first place.

Right, because boredom, and Michael Easter writes about this boredom, is obviously this sign, but we don't go through the discomfort of it. And so, we're always just flipping through TikTok or on our phone, reading another news article or going through some social media or whatever that is. He talks about using his boredom, this is how he talks about it. I use my boredom to think internally, to observe the outside world, and to work through a work or home related issue that's more productive than going on Instagram

for the 79th time that day. But I think about that, like just the one that he talks about there, to observe the outside world, you can make so many connections just by observing. And if you're never allowing yourself to just have that boredom to people watch, you miss so much of life.

So here's my data-free speculation as somebody who's thought about this. But if you think about our evolutionary past, how we've evolved not over years, not over decades, not even over millennia, like how homo sapiens came to be. We evolved all these emotions, some positive, like joy and pride, some negative, like pain and fear. And the only way that those signals could be stopped, you know, like thousands of years ago, was

some form of solving the problem. You're bored, so you have to like start thinking about something where you get more information. Now you go on TikTok. Same thing with calories. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors were like, calories are good. That helped them survive. The ancestors who were like, no, I'm good. I'll just eat this low calorie, high fiber stuff over here. Okay, they did not live. They did not put their genes into the gene pool.

So sad. So I think we have these ancestral instincts. You know, we're hardwired to not want these negative feelings of discomfort. But in the bad old days, you would have to solve problems to get out of those feelings, which is why they helped you survive. And in modern times, we created all of these devices that allow us to immediately turn off those negative emotions. But it's a misfit. It's like a mismatch between our ancient instincts and the modern contrivances that we've made and now we're screwed up because we've created a mismatching environment.

Right, where none of it makes sense anymore and we seek out comfort because that's what we're designed to do and now it's like, hey, that's actually bad for you. Including me, by the way, I have to say, it's not like I'm immune to this. I am a really high maintenance individual. I think you know this about me.

I definitely like being at 68 degrees, low humidity. Hello, kettle, I'm pot. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. But I think at least in my work life and probably for exercise, I have been able to understand that, like, when I read something and I'm like, I'm confused. The confusion is an emotion, actually, and some scientists argue it's the cardinal emotion of learning. Like, when you are confused, that is the best signal that you're learning something. But learners hate feeling confused. It makes them feel stupid.

And at least for me, I've been able to understand, I'm like, oh, I'm reading this and I'm deeply confused. This means I am actually learning more than if I read an article and I'm like, oh yeah, that makes total sense. So I think at least in my work life, I've been able to, as we psychologists call it, reappraise or reframe the emotion

and get to the understanding what it's for in the first place. Well, I think that goes to the really beautiful concept of just being good at asking questions because some people avoid the discomfort of confusion by just running away or you feel really dumb if you're in a classroom setting or at a work setting and you're like, I'm not going to ask the question because I don't want to stupid, I don't wanna be uncomfortable. One of my favorite classmates named Rushi Seth, Rushi always asked the question, like always. And I remember sitting there thinking,

man, I wish I had Rushi's confidence to lean into the confusion. And you know what? I guarantee he got a better education than I did because he always sought to clarify. Whereas I think I just avoided it or hope someone else would ask you got a better education because he was in the room Right a hundred percent. Okay, by the way, I was that person I mean I took organic chemistry in color me not surprised by the way

I know I would literally sit in the front row and I would like wave my hand around. Excuse me Wait, no, sorry. Can could you go back one example? I don't get it. And then oftentimes the distinguished academic would be like, I don't get that you don't get it. Or like, what's so confusing? And I would just say like, I don't know. If I understood, I would tell you, but I don't.

And so they would sometimes reluctantly go back and try to explain it. And honestly, Mike, if I didn't understand it, I would be like, so sorry, still don't get it. And I think what encouraged me to keep going, because like, I mean, that sounds awful, but afterwards, my classmates would come to me and they were like you, right? They were like, thank you for asking that question. And I don't know what gave me the courage or the arrogance or whatever it was to do that. But I remember thinking very quickly after like the first lecture that when I raised my hand, I was representing the silent majority who could not keep up with the Nobel laureate.

I think I'm to a point now where I would absolutely ask the question, but I definitely was too insecure back in the day. And I think Angela and I would love to hear about your experiences with discomfort. Has your discomfort or pain led to growth or did it just end up making you miserable? Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email it to nsq at Freakonomics.com and maybe we'll play it on a future episode of the show. And if you like the show and want to support it, the best thing you can do is tell a friend about it. You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your podcast app.

Still to come on No Stupid Questions, how can social anxiety lead to friendship and bonding? How awkward was this moment? How awkward was that moment? Now back to Mike and Angela's conversation about discomfort. I want to hit on one other thing that you said because you've talked about temperature a few times here. I really don't like being outside. You say 68 degrees. I'm a 72 degree person.

Isn't 68 room temperature? That is a fair question. I will. Now I'm just going to go back to the comfort crisis and he has this exact line in the book that says, "'Today most of us live at 72 degrees experiencing "'whether only during the two minutes it takes us "'to walk across a parking lot "'or from the subway station to our cars.

"'Americans now spend 93% of our time indoors "'in climate control and entire cities wouldn't exist "'had we not developed air conditioning like Phoenix and Las Vegas. Yeah I have heard that 7% sky 93% roof statistic which is crazy. It is crazy because if you go back far enough you don't even need data collection. It was a hundred percent sky. Yeah.

That's how we evolved like most of human history and yeah I mean when's the last time you were ever like soaking wet because like it was raining or something? Three weeks ago. What? You were soaking wet three weeks ago? Yes, my friend Casey Safford and I went on a hike or a walk in Hawaii and just a massive monsoon. And we are, I mean, we literally could have just jumped in the bathtub or the ocean or whatever.

Okay, were you uncomfortable? No, and this is what was so fun about it, is it made it so memorable and so fun and actually quite funny. And so it was really a delightful experience to be just completely drenched. And we just kept walking, cause it was like at this point,

we're not gonna get drier. So enjoy the experience. Yeah, you reach maximum saturation, right? Like there's a point at which you cannot get more wet. Right, but it actually reminded me that we don't do that very often. And I thought back to, and we talked about it, when was the last time you did this?

And I think the last time I did it was when my niece, Rachel, was maybe 10, 12 years old, and it was raining cats and dogs were outside the house and she wanted to go dance in the rain. And there were a bunch of us there as a family and no one wanted to, and I grabbed Rachel and we went out and just got so wet, but it was awesome.

And that's what was, I think, really interesting to me, is you're just getting wet with rain. But even that created core memories because it happened so infrequently. That's probably not a good sign about how infrequently we're experiencing life. Did you feel a particular relief or joy of getting all dry and warm again?

Yeah, I think, course you feel that, but I also think it's sort of like after exercise. I have never regretted exercising because there's the discomfort of exercising, but afterwards I always feel better. So I think it's less the like getting dry itself and more the idea of, oh, I just did something that was valuable

or meaningful or experiential. So it's not like a primitive kind of like relief from discomfort, but more some higher order understanding of what just happened, like some meaning. That's what I would say. But here's one thing that I thought was super interesting. I was reading about someone who I'm certain you know well, the great Paul Bloom, who's a psychologist at the University of Toronto. In a New York Times

article written in 2022 by Alex Hutchinson, and he talked about Paul Bloom saying this, that humans are not pure hedonists. We also seek meaning. So it's not that we're just always seeking comfort. He said, we also seek meaning and meaning, he says, is often closely linked with suffering. You know, Paul Bloom is one of those people in psychology who thinks about things and when he says them, they seem wrong. And then the more you think about them, the more you're like, oh, such a good point.

And he wrote this book called The Sweet Spot, and it really was, I think, a kind of like manifesto on how there is a sweet spot of discomfort. The reason why he wants to say sweet spot is it's not more as old as better. It's not like a little bit of discomfort is good, and if you cut off your left arm, it's even better. Like it's really that there is this sweet spot that we should be looking for in life where there's like some challenge, that there's like some amount of discomfort and one of the findings that he cites, I mean I have to say when I first read it, the classic Paul Bloom effect, I was like that cannot be right.

And then it turns out that it's true. So Paul says, if you look across the world and you look at the countries who are happiest, you get what you expect, which is that rich, democratic countries, and especially the Scandinavian countries, they come out on top, like famously Finland, Denmark, etc. But if you ask a very subtly different, but importantly different question about how much meaning and purpose you have in life, which is not the same as kind of like overall, how satisfied are you, or overall, how happy are you, you actually get the opposite pattern.

Now you have countries like Togo and Ethiopia and Sierra Leone who are at the top of the charts on like, are you leading a life that has meaning and purpose? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I would have guessed that happiness is tied to meaning. Okay, that's the other thing, and it's a little mind-bending. If you look, for example, within an individual,

like if I ask a group of 100 people to answer those questions, within a person, they are typically positively correlated, but this was a cross-country analysis. So now they're looking at the country average for one question and the country average for the other. And so if we just accept it as true, because like I said, I was like, this can't be right. And when I looked up the paper, it is published in the top journal in my field called Psychological Science. And it is published by two of the most trustworthy

scholars, Shigeru Oishi and Ed Diener. They are the giants of cross-cultural and happiness research. Like there are no two people more famous. And the title of their paper is, Residents of Poor Nations Have a Greater Sense of Meaning in life than residents of wealthy nations. And they fully own up to the fact that this is not a predictable effect. It's so super surprising. And when they speculate about like, what the heck is going on? I mean, this is not a little bit of data. This is a Gallup World Poll.

And what they speculate is that there's something called the modernization hypothesis. And it sounds a lot like the comfort crisis, that like we have kind of solved so many of our problems in rich democratic countries that we no longer have what gives rise to purpose and meaning, which is something we can't yet have, something we can't yet do, something we're aspiring to, something that we're chasing that gives our life meaning and purpose.

Which is why we make up problems half the time. Right, because we have this evolutionarily hardwired need to chase things. So this modernization hypothesis is strongly supported by this completely surprising finding that Paul Bloom writes about, and it's part of Paul's whole argument that we've kind of gone off the track of where we need to be. He says like, we should believe that all emotions have some use, like flow state and joy and pride and bliss. They're great, but you need to experience anxiety and fear and confusion and anger and frustration. What's interesting to me is I think there's this unwillingness to engage in discomfort with ideas as well.

We now gather online with online communities that just reinforce our beliefs and we find people who just agree with us and it's so much easier now because you don't even have to physically be around them. And if you can't engage in discomfort with different ideas, then how are we ever going to move forward? I don't know. I mean, you're not going to be surprised that I 100% agree with you. I mean, like, relatives who shall remain nameless like to send me news stories, and they are

not on the same pole of the political spectrum that I am, and they come from news outlets that I generally don't watch. And my visceral reaction is, this is ridiculous. Like, this is fake news, or it's carefully curated news that's not fake, but like, totally misleading and incendiary. But I think what I ought to do is say like, oh, there you go, Angela, having a feeling. Because by the way, all these emotions like confusion and frustration that we're talking about, even boredom, they have a physiological signature too.

And we generally don't like what they do to our physiology. So my brain and my body are like, no. But instead of avoiding it, I think I want to go through it, like overcome it, because that's what I've been evolutionarily programmed to do. And there's a lot of research on how we can learn what our emotions mean. There's almost like a code book. It's like anger means that your rights have been violated. Frustration means that you're pursuing a goal and you're not making progress.

Boredom means you're not getting information that is useful. If you understand the code book, you're like, got it, now what do I want to do with it? Do I want to completely avoid it? Or do I want to actually lean into the signal and try to resolve the signal, because it's a negative signal, and come out on the other side, it's very Nietzschean, right? That what didn't kill me truly could make me stronger. I'm gonna quote someone a little more modern than Nietzsche, but someone that you're gonna like even better

and that's Taylor Swift. Totally would choose Taylor Swift over Nietzsche any day. Although I think they would get along, just a wild guess. I have no opinion on that because I don't even know how to start with that. Yeah. But Taylor gave a commencement address, and one of the lines she said that stuck out to me

was, lean into the cringe. Yeah, was this at NYU? I think I watched it. Yes, NYU 2022, Taylor Swift gave this commencement address and says, lean into the cringe. And I love that, because sometimes you have to lean into the cringe of a relative sending you something that you don't agree with at all, but maybe it's worth taking time to understand somebody else's perspective, somebody else's truth.

So, since you brought up cringe, which I don't believe Nietzsche ever used in his writing, even translated from the German, but one of my favorite studies, it is so cute, it's called Stranger Situations. And what this psychologist did was he created this room that was like a laboratory equivalent of like a living room. And there were these chairs and there was a video camera, I think behind like a one-way mirror. So like this room was a laboratory for seeing how people who had never met each other before interacted. So you bring volunteers into this room who are strangers to each other

and the only instructions really at the beginning are that you have to sit in these chairs and you know they know they're being videotaped and so you give them a few minutes with no instructions and you can imagine like how you would feel and I I think some people would be like, that sounds fun. A lot of people would be like horrified that there's like no script, right? Right. You're in this room, it's weird, you've never met these people. Then there's what they call confederate, which means in research experiments, like a non-volunteer who enters the room.

Oftentimes confederates have like a thing that they're supposed to do. But in this case, it's just like this other adult who enters the room. Oftentimes confederates have like a thing that they're supposed to do, but in this case it's just like this other adult who enters the room and they don't really have any instructions. So now you have this fourth person in the room and you're like, okay, like now what? And then finally, after several more minutes, the experimenter comes in the room and they give an icebreaker activity where they ask people to introduce themselves Soon after that the whole thing ends and then this is so reality TV They take people into another room and they play the videotape. Oh god in front of them

And they have this little box and they get to basically slide to the right I think like how awkward did you feel at this moment? Well, I feel most awkward watching myself be awkward. Right? Like that's the worst thing I've heard. Anyway, so I've got this like awkward meter. And so then you get this data that's very rich, which is like, how awkward was this

moment? How awkward was that moment? And then they have this graph that shows like how awkwardness ebbs and flows over the course of this social interaction. And what you find in the graph is that first of all, like, you know, basically most people have the same response. Like in the very beginning when they're roomful strangers, they feel maximal awkwardness. Then that kind of like starts to drop down. They literally say things to each other like, this is awkward. Yeah, this is kind of awkward.

So there's a little bonding over the fact that you don't know what to do and that this is weird and you weren't given any instructions. Then awkwardness goes up again a little bit when the confederate enters. Like, hey, what are you doing here? I don't know. I don't have any instructions either. This is awkward, right? But it tends to go down again. Then the experimenter comes to the room and says like, hey, I need you to all do introductions. And so awkwardness goes up again because people are like self-conscious, they have a little social anxiety. But then it goes down again.

And I think the key to this paper's major insight is that we all have a kind of social anxiety meter. That's really what awkwardness is. And in the data, what they find is that the way that the awkwardness comes down is that this group of strangers engages in these like lovely bonding things. They start telling stories about their own interests and then one person says like, oh my gosh, I also am interested in that. And then whenever anybody does anything helpful to another person, awkwardness goes down. So the moral of the story is you should know that there are going to be awkward moments. And the resolution of those awkward moments is bonding. So I do worry that when young people today, because it seems to use that word all the

time, like, oh, that was awkward, like cringe, they have this impulse to avoid the awkwardness. But like, no, don't avoid introducing yourself to other people. Do not avoid being with people that you've never met before or having to figure out what to do together when you don't have instructions. Go through it, not around it. Angela, I just want to mention, as we wrap up this conversation, a conversation I had with my 13-year-old nephew, Sam. And I asked him about being uncomfortable or discomfort just in his life generally.

I was curious what he would say. And he started telling me about the thing he is most looking forward to in the summer, and it is going on what is called high adventure. I said, okay, great branding. I like the idea. Yeah, yeah. And he said that he went on it last year as a 12 year old, and it's this camp and they went caving and they did zip lining. And he said that the very first time any of these

kids got on the zip line, they were terrified. He was terrified. Right, because it's usually like at high, I mean, maybe this is obvious, right? Like, are you high in a tree or something like that? Usually, yeah, and you zipline from tree to tree, really high in the air. But he just said it was the most terrifying thing ever. But when he got to the end, he realized how fun it was,

and that was something that he never thought he'd be able to do. Now this summer on High Adventure, they're going to go rappelling. What is rappelling? Rappelling is where you basically walk backward off a cliff. Oh yeah, you have a rope and then you're like kind of walking backwards. Okay, yeah, yeah, I've seen that. But there is a moment where you literally have to lean off the cliff till you're perpendicular and then you walk down.

And he is experiencing this same level of maybe negative anticipation toward what repelling will be, but he also harkens back to like, hey, I made it through the zip line. I'm gonna make it through this. But I love the idea that for these teenage kids, there is this quote high adventure thing

that he can go on that is outside, that is uncomfortable, that invites them to push themselves and helps them see that sometimes leaning into not the cringe in this instance, but leaning into the discomfort is actually a huge source of growth. I like it. I have to say that I have a slight fear of heights. I don't have a slight fear of heights. I have a cripp slight fear of heights. I don't have a slight fear of heights. I have a crippling fear of heights.

Okay, I'm not going to pinky swear that we're going to do this, but we will take it under consideration. Will we not, Mike? The possibility that we would be bigger, better people if at some point we, like, repelled or ziplined or did any of those things. I don't have the slightest desire to do any of them, but I think we should take it under consideration.

First of all, ziplining is easy. Repelling is way scarier. If you come to Utah, I will arrange a repelling experience for us both. Okay, to be continued. And now, here's a fact check of today's conversation. Mike says that misogi is a Japanese word that refers to mental and physical challenges that help purify the mind, body, and spirit. That's the modern American version, which author Michael Easter credits to his friend Marcus Elliot. In Japanese, the term refers to a Shinto purification rite that uses cold water to cleanse the body and mind. Later, Mike and Angela discuss the concept of room temperature.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a temperature that is, quote, comfortable for occupants conventionally taken as about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. However, studies have shown that people from warmer climates may be comfortable with higher temperatures. Also, Mike shares his experience getting caught in a monsoon while on a walk in Hawaii. The heavy rains that occur during Hawaii's wet season don't technically meet the meteorological definition of a monsoon, which implies a seasonal reversal of wind direction. Finally, while we can never know if German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have gotten along with Taylor Swift, I'd like to propose that he might have had more in

common with another American pop star, the singer-songwriter turned talk show host Kelly Clarkson. Clarkson's 2011 hit song, Stronger, parentheses, What Doesn't Kill You, is a direct reference to Nietzsche's famous aphorism, What Does Not Kill Me me makes me stronger, from his 1888 book, Twilight of the Idols. That's it for the fact check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on unrealistic dreams. Hi, NSQ. I'm a recovering addict of daydreaming. I grew up in a very large family of siblings who mostly live in sort of a fantasy world. And it was very charming when we were all kids,

but it doesn't look pretty in its adult form. So I went cold turkey on fantasy decades ago. And that's not to say I live without imagination. I do write a little fiction. I'm an accomplished actor, but I don't do a lot of fantasizing for fun or mood enhancement. And it's been kind of great, mostly. But all that being said, I think I overcorrected because when I'm tasked with goal setting, I'm kind of bad at it. The result is that I'm a really hard worker, but I progress so slowly because I'm not moving toward anything. So you've inspired me. I think this next year, I'm gonna try to set aside

an hour or something on the weekends to sort of relearn daydreaming, to sort of nourish that part of my brain, maybe find the sweet spot. But even if I don't find a sweet spot ever, for me, living in the here and now with all its flaws and all its problems has been a much, much happier place to dwell. This is Andrew McCall from Bermuda. I wanted to send a note on unrealistic dreams. If you had asked me as a kid growing up in Greenville, North Carolina, if I would ever live in Bermuda

with my daughter and swim in the ocean every day with parrotfish and stingrays and sea turtles, it was not even an unrealistic dream. It was so far beyond the realm of possibility. And then COVID hit and Bermuda changed its policies and now for just a couple hundred dollars, you can be a digital nomad here. And given the amazing infrastructure, it's actually a really great place to work and certainly a great place to live.

And I do wanna comment on Mike Slipup calling it the Bahamas later in the episode. I would say more conversations than that. That happens when I say I'm in Bermuda by the end of the call. Someone says, well, have a great time in the Bahamas. And I don't know from the Beach Boys song, Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama, or where it comes from. But that is a very common sub-up. Thanks. That was, respectively, Helen Marino and Andrew McConnell. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us.

And remember, we'd love to hear your thoughts about discomfort. Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show. Coming up on No Stupid Questions, are you getting enough physical touch? I don't really want to have an eight second hug. That's coming up on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.

The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lierk Vaudich is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Griffin. We had research assistants from Daniel Moritz-Rapson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter, NSQ underscore show and on Facebook at NSQ show. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to nsq at Freakonomics.com. To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com

slash nsq. Thanks for listening. Nobody wants to listen to me be like, oh my life's so hard. It's like, oh really? The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.