Making people comfortable is not your responsibility.
Making yourself comfortable isn’t even your responsibility.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes, you can be responsible for making others comfortable. And being comfortable is fine, sometimes. Comfort is for healing. To live your life in a state of seeking comfort is to avoid growth. Discomfort is for growth. If you’re busy making the people around you comfortable, they probably aren’t growing. Your relationship with anyone that you are trying to make comfortable or appease is probably not growing.
And if you’re busy trying to make yourself comfortable, you’re probably not growing.
Think about a manager/employee relationship:
If your boss is giving you more work than you think you can handle, you have to grow your bandwidth to handle it or grow your network to disperse the work. If you’re pushing your boss to improve the quality of their work, they will likely have to grow as a leader.
If you have a boss who doesn’t give you much to do, you probably don’t need to develop your skills. And if you never push your boss to improve their managerial style, they may not see a need to develop as a leader.
Sure, you both might develop eventually. But you’d have to push yourselves to do more than what is comfortable. And while other people might perceive this as trying too hard, it’s not your job to make them comfortable. It is not your responsibility to make them look good.
It’s also not your responsibility to seek growth.
Wait-.. What?
You heard me right. It’s not your responsibility to seek growth.
Seeking growth, is a choice. One that you commit to. Your whole life is this way. It’s made of choices. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life. I’m here to remind you that you have endless options as far as how to do that. I’m not here to judge the choices you make, I’m here to help support you in making the ones you’re going to be happy with.
You don’t have to argue with me about how you live your life. Cause I’m not telling you what to do. If you’re trying to argue right now, you’re justifying your choices to yourself, not me. And if you’re offended, you can always leave.
For those of your who do feel personally responsible, I’ve got an important reminder.
You don’t have to shrink yourself to fit into your environment anymore. We aren’t limited to the small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers we were born into anymore. We don’t have to cut away the bits of ourselves that don’t fit with the tribes culture in order to not be exiled.
Now we can find a bunch of internet misfits with the same interests as us. We can exile ourselves. Sounds trendy right? We can become part of small tribes of digital nomads who wander the world through screens to take on challenges and connect with things we actually care about. Exiling yourself to find a new tribe is weirdly one of the more successful strategies a person can adopt in this day and age.
Look at the people flocking to Vishen Lakaihani, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Tony Robbins. Today, you can find the ideologies that fit with you and a whole slew of people who are willing to support you. Today, you can essentially find and create your own culture. You can search for mentors that have achieved what you would like to achieve from anywhere you can connect to the internet.
If you’re reading this, you likely have never been more free as a human being than you are in this current moment. And sure I can think of a few exceptions, but even then, the only limits that matter are the ones you decide matter. Creating happiness for yourself is an art that you as an individual must decide to master.
So go. Find happiness. Invite everyone you can.
The actions of everyone matter when it comes to making the world a better place. So help me. I’m just a poet.
My book:
https://www.amazon.com/SYLLABLE-MISCHiEF-George-Akolade-Coker-ebook/dp/B07HBPV1KM
My Poetry Collective:
Just me doing a wheel pose on a bridge. Nothing to see here.