010: Material versus Psychic Comfort
Hi friends!
I turned 30 last week! For the last few years, people have been telling me how much better this decade is than one’s twenties and I’m already seeing that ring true. I wrote two weeks ago about feeling quietly surprised that I’d made it to my thirties, and now that I’m here I feel that low-grade anxiety shift into a new perspective on things.
This is not to say that I’ve become a New Person in the last 8 days. I still struggle to get out of bed before 9 am and I still toss and turn for hours before falling asleep. I still sometimes stare at my kitchen counters for five minutes hoping lunch will just sort of appear so I don’t have to cook for the eleventy thousandth time. I still let my apartment become a mess followed by absolute cleaning binges instead of just, you know, cleaning a little every day. No one’s perfect.
But I feel a little more grounded in who I am. I’m starting to find clarity on what I want from jobs and from relationships in a way that I couldn’t articulate even a month ago. I’m starting to finally see a path forward, and just the knowledge that there is a path forward, even if I can’t see more than a few steps ahead, is a confidence boost all on its own.
Part of that path forward has been creating a Patreon to finish the research I was doing for my Master’s thesis. While I did enough back then to turn in my thesis and graduate (and impress my advisor, something I thought would be impossible), there was more that I wanted to do. A lot was technically “outside the scope” for my thesis, but certainly not outside the scope of my interest. The Patreon will help me fund the last bits of research I need to do, as well as publishing my research someday (hopefully soon)! If you can support, I would love that. Three months of support costs less than one cocktail in any major city! Check it out.
I remember a period on the internet when we were all deriding comfort and equating it to complacency. And sure, that absolutely happens. Consider the Karens who have long remained silent on issues of feminism because they already got theirs. Speaking up about the women who weren’t included in 20th century white feminism feels risky to them for myriad reasons. Sometimes we can feel like going for more, in whatever capacity, will risk our access to what comfort we already have. Investing in the stock market, for instance, or starting a business, can both risk your financial comfort.
And isn’t financial comfort what a lot of us have been trained to think of as comfort, period? Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can sure pay for the things you need to be happy: A home to live in, a bed to sleep in, good food to eat, supplies for your favorite hobbies, access to medical care, the ability to pay for an experience out with friends, etc. The more money you have, the more you can invest in these things and get better food and bigger hobbies and more experiences. If you’re an adult in the United States, I think this is mainly what we were all taught comfort is.
But there is so much more to a comfortable life than just making a good income so you can pay for things. There’s the comfort of good weather, of talking with friends, of having a loving family, of doing work you think is good, of trusting things will be okay even when times are hard, of knowing there are leaders who are steering your country/state/city in a direction you’re okay with. (And yeah, okay, anyone can argue that those things can be influenced by money, but your money doesn’t necessarily correlate with any of them.)
We were never taught that there is a difference between material comfort (money) and psychic/spiritual comfort (everything else).
A lot of people are materially and psychically uncomfortable right now. We’ve never experienced a worldwide pandemic! A lot of us are unemployed or working from home in spaces that we (consciously or unconsciously) only ever intended to spend a fraction of our days in. However you usually feel about politics, it’s hard to deny that the pandemic is putting a strain on our government that leaves millions of people feeling like things are going the wrong direction. (Just look at the return-to-school debate.)
We’ve all been going through a period of realizing that the things made us comfortable pre-pandemic are not necessarily the same things making us comfortable now. And I think this balancing act is only going to get harder and more necessary as the pandemic drags on in the US. There’s a reckoning happening with the way we spend our money and exist as financially comfortable people (or don’t) and how that actually impacts our day-to-day psychic comfort.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when I still had a job and we got those $1200 stimulus checks (remember that?), I bought a television. I had never bothered to own a television pre-pandemic because I had never felt a need for one because I could watch Netflix from my laptop. Plus, I was never financially comfortable enough to be willing to spend a few hundred bucks on something that I didn’t see a need for. That money could always go somewhere else. But when I saw the writing on the wall—we’re in this for a while—I ordered a television and I also finally replaced my latte-soaked laptop with a desktop (I was working off an old iPad for 4 months). I was kind of materially comfortable enough to do so (then), but more importantly, I knew I was going to need both for my physical and psychic comfort.
A laptop would have been a few hundred bucks cheaper, yes. But hunching over my desk every day to see on a smaller screen and type on a smaller keyboard was starting to impact my physical comfort. It made my back and wrists hurt. The price difference was worth slightly sacrificing some material comfort (that money could! have! gone! elsewhere!) to have the psychic comfort of just feeling comfortable in front of my computer (where I would soon spend hours a day applying for jobs).
Same with a television. I could have just used the computer I bought to watch television, but I knew that if I never left my desk I’d feel like I never “left work.” When I live in a 320 square foot apartment that I shouldn’t leave and I work from home, the shift of standing up from my desk and taking the two steps to my armchair to watch the TV that is 28 inches away from me all day (really) is a huge mental shift. It brings me so much emotional and mental comfort to turn work off and entertainment on.
Obviously, material comfort is tied up in these things. Without a job and the stimulus check, these thoughts couldn’t have crossed my mind. And the Valorie of today, who is staring down the barrel of losing the additional $600/week from the CARES act and has only one tentative job lead, is screaming that, uhhh, maybe I should have bought neither and saved more money for today.
And that’s a completely valid concern! One I considered back then, even. But I weighed the mental damage of constant hoarding resources and worrying about the future against the mental comfort of clearly delineating phases of my day while stuck at home and decided that the television was worth it. I considered my future material comfort against my immediate psychic comfort and let psychic comfort win. I’m not saying it was the right choice, but I’m also not saying it was the wrong one.
Now, I’m facing other choices that pit material comfort versus psychic comfort against each other. Do I seek out a job as a barista again, knowing that a) it’s a step back in my career and b) it potentially exposes me to COVID-19? Are those risks to my psychic comfort worth the material comfort of having an income? Millions of people are facing similar choices in the US right now, and it borders on arrogant to try to tell them yes or no. We’re asking them to pick between material comfort and psychic comfort, and while the two things are often intertwined, they’re not the same.
Appreciating that the weather is beautiful doesn’t keep a roof over my head. Having a job doesn’t ensure I’ll feel safe.
How are we supposed to pick between the two? Have we really set up a system where the logical answer to that question is, “Pick the least bad option”? Choose what makes you feel the least scared? Sure, now is an exceptional time. Maybe usually balance is possible. Maybe usually there’s a way to balance things in a way that makes you feel okay all around. But frankly, I don’t know if there is a fair way to ask people to choose right now.
I’m curious—how does your material comfort intersect with your psychic comfort? What do you do when the two come into conflict?
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xx,
Valorie
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