Listen, dear digital world, you cannot drive people mad like this.
You cannot with one hand inject us with a mass of technological innovations that remove every possible frustration, flood us with social media to the point of nausea, and turn all our interactions into something fast, colourful and light — and with the other hand dispatch battalions of mentors and coaches to preach at us that we need to leave our comfort zone.
If the comfort zone is such a repellent place, why is the entire world occupied with putting us into it?
No need to go to a restaurant — there is delivery. No need to attend lessons in person — there are online courses. No need to plan a route and learn it — there is satellite navigation. No need to impress somebody for a fortnight before going to bed with them — there are apps.
What is going on here?
The truth is that the comfort zone is not such a terrible thing, in my view. I am actually keen that a person should have a comfort zone — some refuge where you can stretch out, be indulged, recharge, and go back out into the world for the familiar business known as life.
Obviously the comfort zone has to remain a zone. Fenced, separate, particular. When the comfort zone leaks through the fences and takes over your entire world, then we have a problem.
And that is precisely what is happening at this moment, with the younger generation at far higher risk of exposure.
Here is the part the coaching industry gets wrong, though. The instruction to leave your comfort zone is useless, because a comfort zone is not a place you can exit by deciding to.
It is the accumulated result of a thousand small defaults — the delivery, the app, the route you did not have to learn. Each one individually is trivially sensible. Collectively they constitute a life in which nothing is ever difficult, and therefore nothing is ever mastered.
You do not leave that by an act of will on a Tuesday. You leave it by reinstating friction deliberately, in small specific places, and tolerating how stupid that feels.