If You Want To Ruin Your Life, Remain In Your Comfort Zone

Your comfort zone is not a paradise. It’s a prison. It’s holding you back from reaching your fullest potential. You’re too scared to take a leap into the unknown even if you aren’t entirely happy where you are right now because you keep insisting that where you are is good enough. You’re happy enough. Successful enough. Fulfilled enough. You don’t want things to get worse so you won’t even ask yourself what life would look like if they got better. You stop yourself from dreaming because you assume anything more than what you have right now is too good to be true.

At the end of the day, you’re sticking in your comfort zone because you’re a pessimist. You don’t want to be greedy. You don’t want to ask for more. You don’t want to lose what you already have because it’s better than nothing. But you shouldn’t settle for the middle of the road, for fine, for I can live with that. Your expectations should be in the stars, not buried beneath the dirt. You should be trying to get as much out of this life as possible, not settling for the first comfortable situation that comes along, the first person who does the bare minimum, the first job that doesn’t make you want to tear your hair out.

Don’t mistake tolerable for exceptional. Don’t mistake convenience for destiny.

At the end of the day, you’re lingering in your comfort zone because you would rather deal with an unsatisfactory situation that you know really well than jump into a new situation where everything is new and uncertain. So you convince yourself that this is what happiness looks like. You tell yourself things are good exactly the way they are, even though there are countless nights you spend crying, even though there’s an aching in your gut and you can’t pinpoint the cause.

You don’t want to switch things up. You would rather continue in your mindless routine. So you never let yourself imagine that there is more, that there are galaxies that you’re missing out on, opportunities that you should be grabbing and refusing to let go. Change is scary, so you would rather convince yourself that comfort is all you need. That playing it safe is better than risk-taking, smarter, healthier.

After all, you know what it’s like to be uncomfortable. You have been in situations where you were walking on eggshells, where you were awaiting an explosion, where you were wondering whether you were going to make it through the day—and you don’t feel like that anymore. Today, things are so much better than they were yesterday, so you assume that means you’ve reached your peak. But there could be even more. Just because you’re no longer uncomfortable doesn’t mean you’re in the right space.  

Remember, it’s okay to linger in your comfort zone for a while, but you don’t want to make a home there. You don’t want to grow so used to your routine that you never stop to question whether it’s making you happy or whether you’re simply doing the things you do because that’s the way it’s always been done.