The Comfort Conundrum

Or, the wisdom of scratchy towels

The bath towels at my parents’ house were plentiful but thin, small, and scratchy. Not one to expect those two depression babies to acquiesce to my bougie needs, I bought them a couple of big fluffy bath sheets. Inexplicably, they refused to use them. They lived in the back of the linen closet and came out only when my sister or I visited.

Compared to my parents’ modest three-bedroom home, ours is a palace. It’s a big four bedroom colonial on the northwest side of Columbus, Ohio. It has a fenced yard that backs up to an easement and beyond that a copse of woods that can never be developed. The kitchen cabinets are new and there are granite countertops. And there’s a linen closet that contains among other things, a dozen big fluffy bath sheets.

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash

What got me thinking about this was a random Facebook reel with a guy who referred to “comfort addiction.” I poked around the Oracle (aka Google) and my takeaway is it’s not that we are addicted to comfort as much as we’ve experienced comfort “inflation.”

Could I live without fluffy bath sheets? Yes, of course. Without the latest iPhone? Again, yes. Without an iPhone, i.e. a cheap Android phone? Yes. Without a cell phone? No. (And I think about how crazy that is, often.)

Wanting to be comfortable is not the problem. That’s human nature. The problem is that the cost of maintaining the level of comfort we’ve become accustomed to (or aspire to) is steadily increasing. We’re already making adjustments, mostly in the form of more aggressive attention paid to prices and experimenting with different stores. That’s how I discovered Aldi usually has goat cheese for $1.99 a log. (You’re welcome.)

Air travel on the other hand, has undergone radical comfort contraction. Ten years ago, a standard seat was a perfectly acceptable experience, even for a long trip. Now that same ticket sends you to the back of the plane where your knees hit the back of the seat in front of you and God forbid the person in front of you decides to recline. So that’s a situation in which something that used to be adequately comfortable has been made wholly uncomfortable and we now have to pay to get back to what used to be par.

Comfort comes in different flavors. For example, I’d love to replace the useless microwave/fan over the stove for a real range hood so we don’t set off the smoke detectors every time we pan fry a steak. So, I bought a $450 Hauslane range hood only to discover I would need to spend $2,000 more to install it and fix the tile. Ooof.

My parents would have lived with the microwave. Just sayin’

We ended up selling the range hood on Facebook Marketplace for $200. (Ouch.)

The other thing driving this rumination is that the last week of every year I look at spending and develop budgets and the net net is unless our resources go up, our comfort level is gonna have to go down. Maybe not a lot and maybe some of it can be achieved by eliminating things that don’t deliver on their comfort-y promises. (I’m looking at you $5 bricks of butter.)

We could continue as is, but it would be at the expense of our future so we can afford to replace those worn out bath sheets with new fluffy towels when the time comes.

If there are prescriptives, they are this:

• It’s OK to live with the scratchy towels (or whatever your equivalent is) if it is allowing you to meet your financial goals.

• It’s OK to change your mind, i.e., live with the microwave. Your future self will thank you.

Love and fluffy towels. xo hb