I Want You to Be Uncomfortable
Comfort and fear — two sides of the same illusion.
The promises of comfort and fear. One tells us we’ve arrived. The other tells us not to leave.
Both keep us stuck.
Two of my recent artworks, Comfort Is Slow Death and Imaginary Fears Kill Real People (see below), are my response to that trap. They’re reminders that what we call “normal” often hides the slow erosion of our spirit.
The Art of Staying Uncomfortable
Comfort is seductive. It suggests that you’ve made it, that you’ve earned your rest, that you can finally stop struggling. But it’s the moment curiosity fades, creativity dulls, and we start mistaking numbness for peace.
That’s why I made the piece Comfort Is Slow Death. It’s not just a critique of modern life; it’s a reminder to stay awake. Comfort isn’t the same as contentment. One keeps you grounded; the other keeps you asleep.
Buddhism, understood this long before I did.
The Practice of Discomfort
If I were to translate the Buddha’s teaching into the language of creative living, it might sound like this:
Be with things as they are.
Not as you wish them to be. Not as you fear they’ll become. But as they are.
That sounds simple, but it’s the hardest work I’ve had to do. Because being with things as they are means sitting with discomfort instead of fixing it, explaining it, or escaping it. It means facing your fear.
That’s what Imaginary Fears Kill Real People is about. It’s about how we construct entire worlds out of illusions. Most of what we fear never happens. And yet, fear shapes our choices, our identity, our politics, our relationships. It drives us to defend what doesn’t need defending and destroy what doesn’t need destroying.
The Buddha didn’t teach that we should eliminate suffering. He taught that we should understand it , and even become intimate with it. To see its causes. To stop running from it long enough to watch it dissolve.
The Four Tasks of Creative Liberation
Here’s how I now think about the Four Noble Truths, not as dogma, but as daily practices that make a creative life possible:
Be intimate with suffering. The way out of pain is through it. When something hurts, don’t hide from it. Lean in and explore it. Every heartbreak, every failure, every uncomfortable moment holds information. Discomfort is the curriculum of awakening.
Let go of reactivity. Not everything needs your defense. Not every challenge requires a counterpunch. Sit with the urge to react and you’ll start to see how much of your suffering is self-created.
Savor moments of non-reactivity. These are the quiet spaces between effort and outcome. The moments between thoughts when you’re just present. For artists, leaders, and builders, these moments are sacred. They’re where intuition speaks and creativity blooms.
Cultivate a path. Not the path. Not some guru’s version, but your path. This means testing, adjusting, experimenting. What I call “thin slice experiments.” Don’t wait for the perfect plan; take small steps that let you learn, fail, and recalibrate with grace.
Discomfort as Dharma
Pain is unavoidable. It’s the friction of existence. Resistance is optional. The stories we add to the pain when we make up reasons why it happened to us. The victim mentality.
When I stopped resisting discomfort I experienced a big shift. I stopped needing life to cooperate before I could be at peace. I didn’t need others to change for me to find my happiness. I started finding meaning in the chaos instead of in control.
And that’s where the real liberation began. Personal liberation isn’t about transcendence, it’s about intimacy with your own peace. It’s not about escaping the mess, it’s about meeting it fully, eyes open, heart open.
The Cult of Comfort
Comfort Is Slow Death is a critique of the dusty old American dream. Once an ideal, it’s now unavailable to most Americans. The materialist idea that happiness lives somewhere between granite countertops and a corner office is hollow.
We’ve been sold an entire mythology around comfort. The suburban house, the two-car garage, the pool out back. These superficial symbols all packaged in the same promise: If you can just get here, you’ll be safe.
But comfort rarely brings safety. It brings sedation. And it comes at a cost.
We work ourselves to exhaustion to afford the very things that quietly drain our vitality. The mortgage, the lease, the endless cycle of maintenance — they’re not rewards; they’re chains. Comfort becomes the velvet prison of modern life. You stop taking risks. You stop questioning. You stop feeling.
And then one day, you wake up and realize that all the things you accumulated have been living off of you. They’ve taken your time, your energy, your creativity. You became the caretaker of your possessions instead of the creator of your life.
Comfort Is Slow Death isn’t about rejecting ease entirely. It’s about rejecting the slow decay that comes when growth stops and convenience becomes the highest value. Creativity and vitality dies the moment comfort becomes the goal.
The Economics of Fear
If comfort is one illusion, fear is the other. That’s where Imaginary Fears Kill Real People comes in.
We live in a time when fear has become the most valuable commodity on earth. Every headline, algorithm, and political slogan is engineered to weaponize it. Fear keeps people clicking. Fear keeps them compliant. Fear keeps them hating.
The tragedy is that most of what we fear isn’t even real.
We build entire identities around hypothetical disasters. Fear of losing status, losing security, being judged, being different. We create elaborate stories about what could go wrong and then live as if those stories were fact.
Meanwhile, real life is happening right in front of us, and we’re too afraid to participate. We’d rather borrow other people’s lives by watching them on our screens than actually show up in our own.
On a global scale, imaginary fears become catastrophic. Nations build narratives about other nations. Religions about other religions. People about people. And when those fears harden into ideology, we start wars, build walls, and destroy one another in the name of things that never existed in the first place.
The Invitation
I didn’t make these artworks to decorate walls. I made them as provocations. To wake myself up. To wake others up. To remind us that we are built for something more than safety.
Comfort tells you to settle. Fear tells you not to move. And both are liars.
Move towards the struggle and the pain. Embrace the discomfort, face the fear. When we stop organizing our lives around avoiding pain or chasing pleasure, something remarkable happens. We start living in the vivid edge of experience where truth resides. It’s not a comfortable place, but it’s real.
It lives in the creative mess of being alive, in the heartbreaks and the triumphs, in the moments that surprise us because we didn’t see them coming. So yes, I want you to be uncomfortable.
I want you to be curious again. I want you to make things, break things, test things — and trust that the mistakes are not detours, but directions.
Because where the art of living begins is participation, not perfection.
You can see more of my artwork at richardbanfieldart.com
