Less Is More, Even When It’s Hard…
In my last post, I talked about a concept from The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter called prevalence-induced concept change—the idea that when problems become rare, we expand the definition of what counts as a problem.
The more I think about it, the more it connects to a theme I’ve been writing about here for a while: Less Is More.
At first glance that phrase sounds like minimalism. Fewer possessions. Less clutter. Maybe a clean desk and three shirts hanging in the closet.
But the idea Easter is getting at goes deeper than that.
It’s about removing some comfort on purpose.
The Problem With Perfect Comfort
Modern life is incredibly comfortable.
- Climate-controlled homes
- Food is available 24 hours a day
- Entertainment instantly available
- GPS so we never get lost
- Online shopping, so we don’t even have to leave the couch
None of these things are bad. In fact, they’re amazing when you step back and think about them.
But there’s a strange side effect.
When life becomes frictionless, our tolerance for friction disappears.
Small inconveniences suddenly feel like real problems.
The internet is slow.
The coffee line is long.
The streaming service doesn’t have the show we want.
None of these would even register as issues to someone living a hundred years ago. But our brains recalibrate to the environment we live in.
And our environment has almost no hardship.
Humans Were Built for Some Hardness
Easter argues that humans evolved in environments that regularly included challenge:
- physical exertion
- hunger between meals
- cold
- uncertainty
- boredom
Those weren’t occasional experiences. They were normal parts of life.
Today we’ve engineered most of them away.
Again, that’s mostly a good thing. I’m not advocating bringing back cholera or food shortages.
But when everything becomes comfortable all the time, we lose something important: contrast.
Without occasional discomfort, comfort itself stops feeling good.
Parenting and the Discomfort of Letting Go
This idea has been bouncing around in my head lately in a place I didn’t expect: parenting adult children.
When kids leave home, graduate from college, and start building their own lives, they run into all sorts of struggles.
Jobs don’t work out.
Friends drift away.
Money is tight.
Plans fall apart.
And as a parent, your instinct is to fix it. Remove the discomfort. Smooth the road.
I catch myself worrying about their struggles as if they’re something that went wrong.
But maybe they’re not.
Maybe that discomfort is the point.
Struggling through those early adult years—figuring things out, making mistakes, recovering from them—is exactly what builds the qualities we all hope our kids will have:
- resilience
- independence
- self-confidence
- the ability to handle life when things don’t go perfectly
If parents successfully remove every hardship, we may accidentally remove the very experiences that create capable adults.
Which is a hard thing to accept when the instinct is to protect.
Sometimes the best thing we can do is step back and let them handle their own discomfort.
The Less Is More Version of This
This is where my own “Less Is More” idea overlaps with Easter’s argument.
Sometimes adding more comfort doesn’t make life better.
Sometimes removing comfort does.
Examples from my own life:
Riding my bike for two hours in the cold doesn’t sound comfortable, but afterwards, a hot shower feels incredible. Plus, I feel great for having completed the ride!
Spending a weekend camping without constant screens somehow makes ordinary life feel richer when you get back.
Even something as simple as being bored can lead to reading a book, going for a walk, or thinking about something new.
The hardship creates the appreciation.
The Strange Trick
What Easter suggests—and what really stuck with me—is intentionally adding small amounts of voluntary discomfort back into life.
Not suffering for suffering’s sake.
Just doing things that remind your brain what effort feels like.
Walking instead of driving.
Working out hard enough to be tired.
Going outside when it’s cold.
Leaving your phone behind sometimes.
None of these is dramatic.
But they reset the calibration.
Why This Matters
If prevalence-induced concept change means we redefine smaller and smaller inconveniences as problems, then the solution might be surprisingly simple:
Reintroduce a little difficulty.
Not because life needs to be miserable.
But because a little hardship restores perspective.
It reminds us that the things we complain about most of the time…aren’t actually problems.
And maybe it reminds parents of something else, too:
Sometimes the hard parts of life—the ones we want to protect our kids from—are exactly the parts that will make them strong enough to build a life of their own. This is why I’m trying to get.