A Modern Defense Of Staying In Your Comfort Zone

-OpEd-

BUENOS AIRES — The era of technoliberalism has declared total and definitive war on the comfort zone. This is because the imperative of performance demands the subject’s total mobilization, a perpetual hyperactivity that shuns all forms of pause and rest, a true violence of optimization that transforms comfort into sin, rest into unproductivity. Yet perhaps the time has come to resist this tyranny of constant movement and reclaim the ontological dignity of the stillness of being and satisfaction with what one has.

Contrary to what dominant discourses keep telling us, the comfort zone is not cowardice, but temporal wisdom and a space where the soul can breathe without the suffocating demands of permanent improvement.

Only there can the human being recover its condition of animal narrans — or the narrative animal — weaving stories that turn a hostile world into a habitable home and constitute, beyond any distraction, genuine, symbolic constructs acting as resilient shelters against the thunderstorms of the absurd.

Act of resistance

Residing in the comfort zone thus becomes a political act of resistance, even of rebellion against the acceleration that pulverizes stability. Consider it a lucid and poetic way of opposing the speed of our time, which impedes narrative sedimentation or the slow crystallization of meaning that requires time, patience and repetition.

Stories need the slow tempo of familiarity to take root in the collective memory and create truly symbolic homes. In contrast, rampant technoliberalism proclaims that only movement generates value. It is an entire ideology, even a worldview that ignores the silent fruitfulness of repose.

To contemplate is to create without violence, generate without destroying, and produce without consuming.

That is the fertile ground of contemplation, which the ancients considered a superior if not the most elevated form of activity. To contemplate is to create without violence, generate without destroying, and produce without consuming. It is the activity proper to the animal narrans that has escaped the exploitative logic of perpetual productivity, effectiveness and efficiency.

Here, repetition of every related component consolidates the narrative home, and thickens the symbolic fabric protecting us from our existential nakedness.

The deepest affirmation

To all this we may add deep-seated misogyny as another reason for the fierce contemporary hostility toward the comfort zone: because the comfortable, domestic and familiar are always associated with the feminine. Contempt for the comfort zone is another triumph for toxic masculinity that only sees value in conquest and domination. Reclaiming the comfort zone, once and for all, means reclaiming the virtues of hospitality, care and preservation.

We have a kind of total hypermobility… connected to everything but linked to nothing.

Sadly, the world is becoming barely habitable for us with the loss of that laborious art of creating collective comfort zones. What do we have instead? A kind of total hypermobility that can only produce nomadic subjects incapable of putting down narrative roots, with no shared stories to create a collective home, and immersed in the loneliness of hyperconnectivity or connected to everything but linked to nothing.

In this melancholic setting, the most revolutionary gesture of our time may well be to stay still, fully inhabit the place in which we find ourselves, and weave the stories that turn space into home. 

For, whatever they may tell us, the comfort zone is not an escape from the world but its deepest affirmation: It is the place where the cosmos becomes livable, through the gentle magic of shared stories.