The Psychology of Comfort Recalibration

I’ve noticed a psychological trap that people employ on themselves for consolation when they need the solace of not being all they have the potential to be. Let’s give it a name…..er….let’s call it comfort recalibration. I’d say comfort recalibration is basically like this. If an individual cannot attain some element of the subset of all they have the potential to be – like, say, creatively, morally, vocationally, in discipline, in effort, in treatment of others, in goodness, in intellectual progress, in taking responsibility, etc – they prime themselves not to desire or value it. Like a striving cat that wants the mouse in the shed but forgoes the effort to find it by teaching itself that it’s not really hungry. Cats don’t really do that, by the way, it’s just an illustration.

And in human behaviour, it’s not just priming yourself to believe you don’t really desire what you do, or what you should, at the same time it’s priming yourself to be satisfied with what you can easily obtain. Like if the cat can’t catch the mouse he’s desperate to eat, he pretends that insects and grass are what he really desires (a bad medium to long term strategy, as he’ll soon be malnourished).

Observe people in life and you’ll see how frequently they behave like this, often beneath their own conscious inspection. They can’t get the girl they want, so they tell themselves ‘she’s not all that’ anyway. They can’t get any girl, so they tell themselves that relationships are more hassle than they’re worth. They lack the motivation for health and fitness training, so they tell themselves everyone in the gym is just a performative egoist. They can’t obtain the status they crave, so they denounce it all as a tyranny of unjust inequality. They don’t have the combination of will and skill to think through a complex matter proficiently, so they tell themselves their over-simplified opinion is sufficient to state their case.

The problem is, with enough people like this in society opting out and resorting to their own extension of Wittgensteinian games, not only do the truth narratives get bent all out of shape, but the shared values and standards that can make humanity thrive begin to dissolve. I think this is one of the most prominent assaults on our society and our language, where so many people are rewriting the rules to protect their comfort and their ego. We’ve sleepwalked into becoming a culture that normalises comfort recalibration, and I think that’s why truthseeking and truthtelling are becoming like endangered species.