I’ve spent a long period of time living inside the illusion that there’s one kind of self-deception that does not depend on lying. It suggests only that you stop questioning, and that you embrace the form your life has taken, mirroring a reflection of who you are instead of a reflection of what you have grown accustomed to. It is because comfort has subtly replaced self-awareness.

What I learned recently in my psychology course that has made it clear of behavioral avoidance is that people are more prone to minimize internal discomfort rather than stepping out of their bubble to seek the truth about themselves. Experiential avoidance is identified as one of major causes of psychological decline, as it is essentially the same as feeling satisfied. Something that didn’t really cross my mind or made me realize for a long time, was that the brain won’t physically tell you the difference when your life is truly fulfilling and when it has simply stopped creating friction, the kind of resistance that occurs when reality pulls you back against who you thought you were. When this silence of friction hits, that is the moment your identity starts to wear away. Where it feels like a comfort zone, in reality, is a place rarely with real security. More accurately, it is a behavioral storage that is a collection of responses so strongly conditioned that it overcomes conscious cognition. This process by which consistent behavior is taken into unconscious processing, which occurs to free cognitive resources for fresh stimuli, known as automaticity, in other words, the brain stores that behavior in autopilot to save mental energy. However, when this is overly abused, it made me wonder about the issues that occur when automaticity doesn’t just take over routine tasks, yet also the processes of thinking and growing as an individual: the developed beliefs, decisions, and understanding of one’s self. This limits the control over your life when making decisions based on yourself is no longer present. 

I became aware of this through moments of silence and recognized that I’ve been carrying values and beliefs without examining them fully. I’ve always had solid opinions on relationships, ideas, and values, but never was able to link them to any genuine moment of time to reflect. Now it has come clear to me through social reinforcement and recurring events. They felt personal because I had never questioned them, and I had never questioned them, as doing so would have created the exact discomfort that my behavioral patterns were meant to prevent. As a result, this is why comfort is shaped to be philosophically unstable. It subtly and silently replaces your true identity unconsciously. And this is what makes it most unsettling because there’s no clear distinction of the  before and after; it just narrows down who you will turn out to be in the most hidden and normalized way. I’ve sat with that realization enough times to find out the self isn’t something easily dominated, it is constructed through friction and exposure to real uncertainty. And to remain present in that uncertainty awakens you to realize that the comfort zone is a life interruption. A long, pleasant interruption.