Why We Pay To Be Uncomfortable

Author: Katie Wood

There is something wonderfully strange about modern life. We have spent centuries inventing ways to make ourselves more comfortable, and now a growing number of us are spending considerable amounts of money trying to become uncomfortable again. We have heating, air conditioning, cars, elevators, food delivery, mattresses designed by sleep scientists and watches that tell us when we should rest. Almost everything around us has been developed to reduce effort, save time or eliminate some small inconvenience. Yet people are signing up for ultramarathons, paying to climb freezing mountains, sitting in tubs of ice water and travelling halfway around the world to hold their breath and descend into the ocean.

And we're not talking about a handful of eccentric people. Endurance events sell out months in advance. Cold-water immersion has become an entire industry. Adventure travel companies offer experiences that involve sleeping badly, carrying heavy equipment and spending days in conditions most people would normally go to great lengths to avoid. Freedivers invest in equipment, coaching and training camps so they can voluntarily enter an environment where breathing is impossible. There is something almost comical about paying for a flight, accommodation and professional instruction just to spend several days doing something that makes your ears hurt if you get it wrong.

The obvious question is why. Why would somebody who spends their working week trying to make life easier deliberately make their weekend harder? Why does a person who complains about walking fifteen minutes to a restaurant happily run forty-two kilometres on a Sunday morning? Why does someone who turns up the heating when the house gets chilly voluntarily sit in water cold enough to make them gasp? And why would anybody spend years developing the ability to descend deeper underwater when there is absolutely nothing down there they need?

Part of the answer lies in the difference between discomfort we choose and discomfort that happens to us. Being stuck in traffic is uncomfortable, but it rarely feels meaningful. Having to work late because somebody else made a mistake is stressful, but it doesn't necessarily create satisfaction. Running up a mountain until your legs burn is also uncomfortable, yet the experience can be deeply rewarding because you decided to do it. You selected the challenge, accepted the difficulty and retained some control over what happened next.

Psychologists have long recognised the importance of autonomy, the feeling that our actions are self-directed rather than imposed upon us. Self-Determination Theory identifies autonomy, competence and relatedness as fundamental psychological needs. Challenging activities can satisfy all three. We choose to participate, we develop abilities that allow us to handle the challenge, and we often share the experience with people who understand exactly why it matters.

That last part is worth remembering. People rarely describe their most memorable experiences in terms of comfort. Ask somebody about a holiday and they may tell you about the terrible weather, the mountain they nearly gave up climbing or the night they got completely lost before eventually finding their way back. The comfortable hotel room may have been lovely, but it often isn't the part of the story that survives ten years.

Perhaps that tells us something about what we actually want from life. Comfort makes existence easier, and there is nothing wrong with that. But ease and satisfaction are not the same thing. Sometimes the experiences that leave us feeling most alive are precisely the ones that required us to tolerate something difficult.

The Difference Between Suffering And Choosing A Challenge

It would be easy to romanticise discomfort and conclude that modern people have become too soft. That is a popular argument, particularly online, where almost every difficult activity eventually becomes evidence of superior discipline or mental toughness. But it overlooks something important. There is nothing inherently valuable about suffering, and people dealing with illness, financial pressure, demanding jobs or difficult family circumstances do not need somebody telling them that they should introduce more hardship into their lives.

The discomfort people seek through sport is different because it usually comes with a degree of choice, preparation and control. A marathon runner can decide when to train, how to prepare and whether to enter a race. A mountaineer chooses a route and develops the skills needed to attempt it. A freediver learns techniques, trains with qualified supervision and makes decisions about whether conditions are appropriate. These activities contain genuine risks, and those risks should never be trivialised, but their appeal is not simply that they are unpleasant. It is that difficulty exists inside an experience the participant has chosen to pursue.

There is a psychological concept called benign masochism, explored by psychologist Paul Rozin and colleagues, which describes our enjoyment of experiences that initially produce unpleasant physical or emotional sensations but are understood to be manageable. Think about eating extremely spicy food, riding a roller coaster, watching a frightening film or taking a cold shower. The sensation may be unpleasant, but the brain also recognises that the situation is controlled, creating an unusual mixture of discomfort and enjoyment.

Not every challenging sport fits neatly into that category, but the idea helps explain why people sometimes enjoy sensations they would normally avoid. The cold water itself may not be pleasant. The final kilometres of a marathon may feel terrible. The effort of climbing a steep mountain may be exhausting. Yet these sensations exist within a larger experience that carries personal meaning, and that meaning changes how the discomfort is interpreted.

Freediving provides a particularly interesting example because it is not simply about tolerating unpleasant sensations. In fact, good freediving technique often involves learning to reduce unnecessary effort and remain calm. The sport attracts people who want to become comfortable in an environment that initially feels unfamiliar, sometimes intimidating and physiologically demanding. The satisfaction comes partly from learning to respond differently to sensations that once seemed overwhelming.

Anyone who has spent time around beginners will recognise this progression. During the first sessions, almost everything requires attention. Equalization feels complicated, body position is awkward and unfamiliar sensations can become distracting. Months later, the same person may move through the water with considerably less effort and much greater confidence. The environment has not become objectively easier, but their ability to interact with it has changed.

That is an important distinction because it suggests that we are not necessarily seeking discomfort for its own sake. We may be seeking the experience of becoming capable of handling something that once made us uncomfortable.

There is also a limit to how far this philosophy should be taken. More discomfort does not automatically mean more benefit. Extreme cold exposure carries risks and many of its popular health claims remain inadequately supported. Excessive endurance training can cause injury and burnout. In freediving, pushing through warning signs or treating breath-hold discomfort as a test of character can be dangerous. The goal should never be to prove that we can ignore the body's signals. Good judgement, preparation and knowing when to stop are part of the competence that makes these activities worthwhile.

The challenge is meaningful because it teaches us something, not because it hurts.

Maybe We're Trying To Feel Capable Again

There is another possibility worth considering. Modern life has made many physical tasks unnecessary, but it has not necessarily removed our desire to feel physically capable.

Most of us no longer need to walk for hours to obtain food, carry water from a well, build shelter or travel across difficult terrain to reach another community. That is an extraordinary improvement in human living conditions. But it also means that many people can go through an entire week without encountering a physical challenge that provides a clear sense of achievement.

Work can be mentally exhausting without producing anything tangible. You spend eight hours answering emails, attending meetings, managing problems and moving information between screens. By the end of the day you are tired, sometimes completely exhausted, but it can be difficult to identify exactly what you accomplished. There may be no obvious finish line, and tomorrow much of the same work will begin again.

Physical challenges offer a different kind of feedback.

You either climbed the mountain or you didn't. You completed the run, improved your technique or learned something that was previously beyond your ability. Progress may be slow, but it is often visible in a way that much of modern professional life is not. You can look at a distance, a route, a skill or a training session and recognise that your own effort produced a change.

This connects with the psychological need for competence. Human beings generally enjoy becoming better at things, particularly when improvement requires genuine effort. Research on motivation and mastery suggests that developing ability can be intrinsically rewarding, even when the activity offers no obvious external reward. We do not necessarily need a medal or financial incentive to care deeply about progress.

Consider somebody learning freediving. Their first achievement may be completing a comfortable duck dive or learning to equalize reliably. Later they may work toward a particular depth, but the number itself is only part of the satisfaction. What matters is that they have developed a skill through repetition, patience and attention. They have changed what they are capable of doing.

The same principle applies to somebody running their first marathon. From the outside, travelling forty-two kilometres on foot might seem unnecessary when transport exists. But the runner is not trying to solve a transportation problem. They are trying to accomplish something that requires months of preparation, and the effort is precisely what gives the achievement meaning.

This is why simply purchasing the result would not produce the same satisfaction. If a helicopter carried you to the summit of a mountain, you might enjoy the view, but you would not have experienced climbing it. If a boat took you to a point above a deep freediving line, you would still be looking at the same ocean, but you would not have developed the ability to descend through it yourself.

The experience is valuable partly because it cannot be separated from the work required to achieve it.

There is a broader philosophical idea here. Perhaps modern convenience has reduced many forms of necessary struggle without removing our psychological appetite for earned achievement. We no longer need to perform difficult physical tasks simply to survive, so we create challenges that allow us to experience effort, progress and competence on our own terms.

That does not mean previous generations were happier because their lives were harder. Involuntary hardship is not a lifestyle advantage. It means that removing unnecessary difficulty from life does not automatically remove the human desire to pursue difficult things.

We still want to find out what we can do.

When Discomfort Becomes Another Product

Of course, once people discover something meaningful, it rarely takes long for somebody to find a way to sell it.

Cold plunges are a particularly good example. Cold-water immersion has existed in various cultures for centuries, but modern wellness marketing has transformed it into an expensive lifestyle category. There are designer tubs, temperature-controlled systems, subscriptions, recovery studios and influencers explaining why everyone should spend several minutes in freezing water before breakfast.

Some people genuinely enjoy cold-water immersion, and certain applications have evidence behind them, particularly for short-term recovery after strenuous exercise. But many broader claims about immunity, metabolism, longevity and mental health are far less settled than the marketing often suggests. A simple physical experience has acquired a complicated commercial identity.

Something similar happens in endurance sports. Running is one of the most accessible forms of exercise available, yet participating in modern running culture can involve expensive shoes, watches, nutrition products, coaching subscriptions, race entries and increasingly elaborate recovery equipment. None of these things is automatically unnecessary. Good equipment and professional support can make an enormous difference. But there is something worth questioning when an activity that requires relatively little equipment begins to feel incomplete without a shopping list.

Freediving is not immune to this either. Specialist equipment matters, and high-quality fins, appropriate wetsuits, reliable safety systems and competent instruction can have very real consequences for performance, comfort and safety. But equipment should serve the experience rather than become the reason the experience exists. A new pair of fins can improve how someone moves through the water, but it cannot replace the patience, technique and training required to become a better freediver.

The irony is that an industry can eventually begin selling us the feeling of escaping another industry. We pay for a weekend without technology, book expensive retreats to experience silence, purchase devices that encourage us to disconnect and sign up for adventures designed to remove us from the comforts we spend the rest of our lives purchasing.

Perhaps the strangest part is that the discomfort itself becomes a status symbol.

Some people no longer simply run. They run extraordinary distances. They don't just swim in cold water. They measure how cold it is and how long they remain inside. They don't simply climb mountains. They collect increasingly difficult summits. In freediving, depth can become a similar measure, turning a deeply personal experience into a number that can be displayed and compared.

Social media accelerates this tendency because extraordinary discomfort makes excellent content. A quiet morning swim rarely attracts the same attention as somebody breaking ice before entering a lake. A relaxed training session receives less attention than an athlete visibly suffering through the final kilometres of an ultramarathon. The harder something looks, the more impressive it can appear.

But there is a difference between pursuing difficulty because it matters to you and pursuing difficulty because it makes you look impressive to other people.

The first can be deeply satisfying. The second can become exhausting.

Once discomfort becomes part of an identity that must constantly be demonstrated, the activity risks turning into another obligation. The runner feels pressure to enter a longer race. The climber needs a harder route. The freediver needs another personal best. The cold-water enthusiast feels compelled to stay in longer, even when there is no sensible reason to do so.

At that point, something has gone wrong. The activity that was supposed to provide freedom from everyday expectations has simply created another set of expectations.

Perhaps the healthiest relationship with these experiences involves remembering that we are allowed to enjoy them without continually escalating them. You can love running without becoming an ultramarathon runner. You can enjoy cold water without treating it as a competition. You can be a committed freediver without needing to reach increasingly extreme depths.

Discomfort does not become more meaningful simply because there is more of it.

What We're Really Paying For

Maybe the most interesting thing about all of this is that people rarely describe their reasons for pursuing difficult activities in terms of discomfort itself.

Ask someone why they climb mountains and they will probably talk about the landscape, the challenge, the people they climb with or the satisfaction of reaching somewhere through their own effort. Ask a marathon runner why they keep running and they may talk about routine, mental clarity, friendships, discipline or the extraordinary feeling of finally achieving something that once seemed impossible.

Ask freedivers why they keep returning to the water and the answers become even more varied. Some love the silence. Others enjoy the technical challenge. Some are fascinated by the physiology, while others simply feel unusually calm underwater. For many, the friendships and shared experiences matter just as much as the diving itself.

The discomfort is part of the experience, but it is rarely the entire reason for being there.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow offers another way of understanding the attraction. Flow describes a state of deep involvement in an activity, often occurring when the challenge is well matched to a person's skills. The task demands enough attention to keep the mind fully engaged without becoming so overwhelming that the person loses control.

This helps explain why difficult activities can sometimes feel mentally restorative. During an ordinary working day, attention is divided between dozens of competing demands. Messages arrive, notifications appear and unfinished tasks remain somewhere in the background. During a technically demanding activity, much of that noise becomes irrelevant because attention has a clear purpose.

A climber concentrating on the next movement has little room to worry about an unanswered email. A runner navigating difficult terrain needs to pay attention to the ground. A freediver performing a controlled descent is occupied with technique, equalization, relaxation and awareness. These activities can create periods of unusually focused attention, although freediving safety always requires appropriate training, supervision and sound decision-making rather than chasing an altered mental state.

There is something deeply appealing about that simplicity.

For a while, life becomes less complicated, even when the activity itself is difficult.

Perhaps this is what people are actually paying for when they book an adventure, enter a race or travel somewhere to train. Not suffering, exactly, but the opportunity to experience effort with a clear purpose. They are paying for an environment where the relationship between preparation, action and consequence feels more immediate than it does in everyday life.

There is also the matter of memory. Difficult experiences often become important personal stories because they contain uncertainty, emotion and a sense of transformation. You remember the mountain you almost abandoned, the race you thought you could not finish or the dive that required months of preparation before everything finally came together. The discomfort becomes part of the story, but what remains is often the knowledge that you handled something you once believed was beyond you.

That is a very human desire, and it probably has very little to do with whether modern society has become too comfortable.

We want lives that contain meaningful experiences. We want to develop abilities. We want to feel connected to other people. We want to encounter things that surprise us, occasionally frighten us and sometimes change how we understand ourselves.

Comfort is valuable because it protects us from unnecessary hardship. Nobody should feel guilty about enjoying it. But a life built entirely around avoiding effort would probably become unsatisfying for many people, not because suffering is essential to happiness, but because growth, curiosity and achievement often require us to move beyond what is already familiar.

The trick is choosing challenges that add something to our lives rather than turning discomfort into another thing we feel pressured to achieve.

A cold plunge does not make someone morally superior. Running an ultramarathon does not automatically make somebody more disciplined than a person managing a demanding family life. Reaching one hundred metres does not make a freediver more valuable than someone who enjoys exploring a reef at ten.

These experiences are meaningful because of what they mean to the people undertaking them, not because they establish a hierarchy of toughness.

And perhaps that brings us back to the original contradiction. We have created a world where physical comfort is easier to obtain than at almost any previous point in history, at least for those fortunate enough to afford it. Yet we still seek out challenges, sometimes paying considerable amounts of money for the privilege.

Maybe we are not rejecting comfort at all.

Maybe we simply understand, somewhere beneath all the marketing and expensive equipment, that comfort alone was never going to be enough.

We don't necessarily want harder lives.

We want lives that occasionally ask something of us, and give us the satisfaction of discovering that we can answer.