Imagine yourself submerged in the ocean. The water’s freezing cold and every nerve in your body is urging you to get out. Your lungs tighten. Your skin burns. Time goes on forever. After twenty painstaking minutes, you finally step ashore, wrap yourself in a thick towel, and settle in front of a roaring fire with your favourite hot drink in hand.
Warmth seeps back into your fingers and a quiet relief spreads through you that feels euphoric.
Now imagine sitting in front of that same fire, holding the same drink, but without first enduring the freezing sea.
The scene is identical, yet the experience is not. The comfort would feel pleasant but it would not feel exhilarating.
Why is that?
In Morgan Housel’s latest book, The Art of Spending Money, he attributes much of this feeling to contrast. Housel argues that the experiences we enjoy most are those that stand in sharp contrast to what came before. As he puts it: “What actually brings happiness is the contrast between what you have now and whatever you were just experiencing. The best drink you will ever taste is a glass of tap water when you’re thirsty. The best meal you will ever eat is cheap food when you’re starving. The best sleep you will ever experience is when your newborn allows you to sneak in a quick nap.”
While contrast is a compelling explanation, I am not convinced it captures the full picture. I suspect that it is not contrast alone, but discomfort that sharpens our appreciation of comfort. Put differently, we value good things when they are preceded by something worse.
If contrast alone were the mechanism, then negative contrasts should also generate pleasure. A person accustomed to five-star dining should, in theory, find joy when forced to eat consistently poor meals. A billionaire who gets chauffeur-driven should enjoy the novelty of a crowded subway commute. We know this is not how it works. Contrast only brings pleasure when the new experience is an improvement on what came before.
It is reasonable to assume that most of us are striving, in one way or another, to improve our lives. Yet as circumstances improve, expectations tend to rise in parallel, and the range within which we are able to experience joy gradually narrows. When the baseline shifts upward, what once felt indulgent soon feels ordinary. If you only ever stay in five-star hotels, accommodation that most people would regard as perfectly acceptable is likely to register not as comfort, but as disappointment.
This isn't just about wealth. The impulse to improve our lives also expresses itself through ease. We streamline, refine, optimise. If home delivery of groceries once felt like a luxury, it now feels routine. That’s why companies such as Walmart now take this further by offering services that place the groceries directly into your kitchen cupboards and fridge.
As a result of all this convenience, when a delivery arrives outside its one-hour window, or worse, a day late, frustration flares. When an Uber is five minutes behind schedule, it feels unacceptable. The more convenient life becomes, the less tolerant we become of reality.
Over time, this erodes our resilience.
For most of human history, life was uncomfortable and often dangerous. Comfort came in brief, infrequent bursts: a successful hunt, the warmth of a fire, or the rare sweetness of honey discovered by chance. Life oscillated between hardship and relief, and comfort was deeply appreciated because it followed difficulty.
Here in the UK, we talk endlessly about the weather. The cold, dark, wet days of January are miserable. Yet, it is precisely this greyness that makes the arrival of spring feel so special. Without the winter, the lighter and slightly warmer days followed by first birdsong and the sight of daffodils would lose its magic.
Counterintuitively, contentment is not found by eliminating discomfort, but embracing it. The constant pursuit of ease, efficiency, and pleasure weakens our ability to appreciate what we already have. Anything left “on” for too long, whether comfort, indulgence, convenience, or stimulation, eventually produces dissatisfaction.
Life needs oscillation between difficulty and comfort.
When I lived in the UAE, an environment that is almost entirely temperature-controlled, I noticed that my internal "thermostat" withered. When I returned to the UK, I found myself shivering in mild weather.
Tolerance behaves like a muscle: when it isn’t tested, it weakens. This extends beyond temperature to effort, boredom, and friction. By chasing “easier” living, we are effectively making ourselves more fragile.
Cold-water swimming offers a similar lesson. The first immersion is shocking and unpleasant. Yet within a few sessions, tolerance increases rapidly. The discomfort does not disappear, but your relationship with it changes.
Most of us can think of things we dread doing, a long walk in bad weather, an awkward obligation, a tedious chore. And yet, more often than not, we feel better afterwards. Not because the task itself was enjoyable, but instead it reminded us that ease feels good precisely because it is not constant.
“People have more comforts and conveniences than ever, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high. One reason is that discomfort isn’t an obstacle to happiness, it’s the path to it, for it’s only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment.”
—Gurwinder, The Prism
In parallel, doing things ourselves rather than outsourcing it to an app or service designed to remove effort gives us a sense of agency and achievement. That positive feeling does not come from comfort, it comes from competence.
We are encouraged to believe that life should only get better. A better house, a newer car, more automation, fewer chores. We are constantly told that inconvenience is a problem to be solved. But as soon as life improves, we adapt. What once felt luxurious becomes normal. Then insufficient. Like any tolerance, it demands ever-greater doses.
A contrarian way to look at life is to limit the amount of nice things we consume. Housel captures this idea well when he writes: “My own desire to live a relatively simple life is not because I don’t enjoy nice things. It’s quite the opposite. When you live a simple and modest life, your occasional experience with nice things can generate more joy than if you had those things all the time.”
I would take this further. Alongside limiting indulgence and convenience, we should deliberately include effort, discomfort, and things we are not looking forward to. Not out of self-punishment, but because difficulty restores perspective.
Completing something hard, whether a task, a responsibility, or an uncomfortable experience, recalibrates our expectations. It makes everyday life feel sufficient again. It quiets the constant urge to optimise, upgrade, and escape.
The mistake is not enjoying comfort or pleasure, but normalising them. When everything is designed to please us, nothing rewards us. By allowing space for effort, inconvenience, and moments we would rather avoid, we preserve our capacity for joy. Life does not need to be relentlessly improved. It needs to fluctuate.
A life that never asks anything of us eventually gives very little in return.
ooh, what to do about work then? That certainly constitutes some substantial discomfort to provide some contrast in my life. Should I stick at it lest I lose my capacity to appreciate anything?
This article really resonated with me. I cycle to work pretty much in all weathers - this hardship of doing this through the cold wet winters days means I REALLY enjoy the spring & beyond, until the annual cycle of dark nights comes again.
Seperately - you missed the key phrase that broadly cover the subject matter in your post: Headonic adaption.