The Curse of Convenience

There’s an old saying that comfort is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there. We used to laugh at it, nodding knowingly as we microwaved dinner and ordered another gadget to make life easier. But lately, I wonder if the comfort we worked so hard to achieve has quietly robbed us of something far more valuable.

In the name of progress, we’ve built lives so cushioned that we’ve forgotten how to fall. We’ve replaced patience with Prime, effort with automation, and struggle with subscriptions. Everything arrives at our doorstep now, except meaning.

For several months now, I’ve been living full time in Costa Rica, where life runs at a different speed. The air hums with a kind of simplicity that feels both humbling and refreshing. People fix things instead of throwing them away. Meals are slow, conversations slower, and the only rush is when the rain starts coming down. They don’t have half the luxuries we do back home, yet according to research from the Happy Planet Index and the World Happiness Report, Costa Rica consistently ranks among the happiest nations on earth.

It makes you think. Maybe happiness isn’t a matter of what we add to our lives, but what we stop needing.

Comfort, as it turns out, can be a subtle thief. It creeps in under the guise of reward and security, whispering that you’ve earned the right to relax. And you have, of course. But when everything is easy, we stop testing our edges. We stop getting blisters, and in doing so, we stop building calluses, the kind that form not just on our hands but on our spirits.

Once, people found satisfaction in making things. Fixing things. Growing things. Now we buy, replace, and upgrade. We’ve traded sweat for convenience and effort for ease. The strange thing is, the more comfortable we get, the more restless we seem. Depression and anxiety rise in the same societies that boast the most convenience. Maybe it’s not a coincidence.

In Costa Rica, comfort looks different. It’s not found in luxury SUVs or climate-controlled homes. It’s found in laughter echoing through open windows, in families gathering around a shared meal, in children running barefoot through puddles. It’s in the joy of enough.

Meanwhile, in our world of endless upgrades, comfort has turned into expectation. The Wi-Fi is too slow, the coffee’s not hot enough, the flight’s ten minutes late. We’re surrounded by miracles of technology that our grandparents couldn’t have imagined, yet we sigh as if we’ve been wronged by the universe.

Maybe the problem isn’t that comfort made us soft. Maybe it made us forget what we’re made of. Hardship, after all, is the forge of character. It’s the thing that once taught us patience, grit, and gratitude. Without it, we lose not only resilience but the quiet satisfaction of overcoming.

There’s a peculiar beauty in struggle. The climb up a mountain means nothing without the burn in your legs. The taste of clean water means little if you’ve never known thirst. Comfort dulls those edges until everything feels muted, pleasant but flat.

So maybe the real price of comfort isn’t weakness. It’s disconnection. We’ve insulated ourselves not only from hardship, but from wonder, gratitude, and growth.

I genuinely feel that when I return to Canada for a visit, I will find myself missing Costa Rica’s uneven roads, the power flickers, the rooster that thinks sunrise is optional. Those small inconveniences remind me that life isn’t supposed to be seamless. It’s supposed to be felt.

True comfort isn’t the absence of hardship. It’s knowing you can handle it.

You see, we traded struggle for ease, but it’s in the struggle that we remember who we are. Perhaps the key to happiness isn’t in having more comfort, but in being more comfortable with less.