Short Term Discomfort Avoidance, Long Term Relational Pain
Nowadays we live in a world where avoiding discomfort is something we do without even noticing it. Awkward moment? Grab your phone. Impatient waiting in line? Grab your phone. Bored by your homework? Start scrolling. You like a boy? Send a text.
We outsource an amazing amount of our discomfort. We avoid situations. We ask other people to interpret them for us. How many screenshots of conversations have been sent to friends with the question, What does this mean? And more recently, sent to your favorite AI to help you interpret what happened and figure out how to respond.
I am disturbed by this. I think we have become less sturdy in dealing with uncomfortable situations because we carry a whole world of distraction in our pockets.
There used to be so many ordinary moments where we had nowhere to go. You sat beside someone after an awkward exchange. You saw the boy you liked after he found out you liked him. Maybe you picked your nails or stared at the floor or wished desperately for the moment to end. But you were still there. You had to sit in the discomfort without treating it like an emergency.
Those ordinary awkward moments gave us information about ourselves. We expected something to be unbearable, and then we had to experience it. Sometimes it turned out to be much less terrible than we imagined. The silence passed. Someone said something. The interaction became normal again. Sometimes it really was excruciating. We embarrassed ourselves. Someone rejected us. We said something stupid. We felt our face get hot and wanted to disappear. But even then, we learned something: we could survive the thing we were so afraid of.
Anxiety often has us overestimate how bad something will be and underestimate our capacity to handle it. Those uncomfortable encounters gave reality a chance to challenge both sides of that equation. Maybe the thing was not as bad as we thought. And even when it was, we were often more capable of handling it than we had expected.
That is how we become a little hardier around the ickiness of being human.
Now we have an escape hatch. The second discomfort appears, we can look down, scroll, send a message, ask someone else what the conversation meant, or retreat into a whole other world. And it works. We get relief.
But we do not learn from relief.
And eventually this does not just affect our own capacity. It affects our relationships. The conversation we avoid still needs to happen. The person we are embarrassed to face is still there. The thing we said by text still has to be lived out when we are in the same room. Avoiding the discomfort may make the moment easier, but it does not necessarily make the relationship easier.
If I avoid the awkward conversation, I never discover that I could have had it. If I disappear into my phone when I see the person I am embarrassed to face, I never find out what would have happened if I had stayed. If I send the difficult thing by text and then avoid the person afterward, I miss the part where another human being is actually in front of me and I have to live through whatever comes next.
We have become very good at escaping discomfort before it has a chance to teach us anything. Our capacity is built by finding out, over and over again, that we can stay standing inside an uncomfortable moment and come out the other side.
Another blog you might like: A Lesson from The Post Office
