Easter went thirty-three days into the Arctic on a caribou hunt with no resupply, and uses that trip as the spine for the rest. His case is that we engineered away every discomfort humans evolved with — hunger, cold, heat, boredom, physical labor, silence, any encounter with our own mortality — and got sicker for it. So he reports on rucking, on Japanese forest bathing research, on a Bhutanese practice of contemplating death daily, on the misogi idea of one very hard thing a year, on what boredom does for creative thinking. To me, the Arctic sections aren’t the least bit interesting—they’re an adventure to prop up the science—and you can skip them if you want the practical takeaway.
The Comfort Crisis