Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Sahar Khallaf
So here is the thing about me,
I hate hiking.
and yet I've hiked three major times in my life
Granted, they were three of the most beautiful places one can ever hike.
I hiked the Yosemite, a forest in southern California
and the beautiful mountains of Sinai in Egypt.
Still, all through three experiences
I genuinely wondered: Why?
Why on earth would anyone consider it a fun experience
to climb up a mountain for hours
stay at top for 30 minutes, and then descend again?
I never got it, but the one thing that drove me to hike a second
and then a third time, was the fact that I am a byproduct of a culture
that promotes fear of missing out,
stigmatizes the comfort zone,
and glorifies the constant chase of experiences.
This event revolves around just that idea, right?
It's the substance of the unseen that drives us out of the comfort zone
to explore the "what if?",
and although this has positively improved humanity as a collective,
we're here to question the patterns ingrained in every one of us
and, so I wonder,
how might this constant chase of the "what if"
be negatively impacting us?
And as she said, "Please don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the 'what if'."
Just one look at how I’ve spent my life so far
is enough to see that I'm a loyal seeker on the invisible possibilities.
I’ve already been to 27 countries since 2010,
I studied pharmaceutical sciences for five years
only to abandon my degree and pursue my passion for technology.
By the age of 23, I published two poetry collections, one prose,
and I focused on Arabic literature,
I quit my corporate job my horrible corporate job
and my terrible boss, and bought myself a musical instrument.
I completed several projects at the intersection
between technology and civic engagement, one of which was aimed at
monitoring the performance of the newly elected president
in a country with 50 years of military dictatorship.
I even got engaged at 21 and it didn't work out so well.
My parents still wonder what I do for a living,
and 80% of my friends believe I'm a spy.
So that is me and my comfort zone,
But let's step back a little bit and try to look at the big picture
I'll be tackling the comfort zone on two main levels;
a macro level and micro level.
So on a macro level of humanity, we can't possibly talk
about leaving our comfort zone and building a brave new space
without mentioning technology and modern education.
By modern, I mean the school system
that was modeled after the factories of the industrial revolution.
So technology, the most living embodiment of this brave new space
is changing the world in an exponential way
Our computational power doubles every 18 months
according to Moore's law,
and the world seems to be heading towards a state of singularity.
But there is still an ugly face to that.
We've built tools to connect but we became disconnected;
we built platforms to interact but remained isolated.
Social media is showing you all the great things
that are happening to everyone else,
but yourself.
While implanting this addictive need for instant gratification
and attention, like never before.
This is the age of loneliness.
A recent study in the UK found out that
severe loneliness takes the lives of 700 000 men,
and more that 1.1 million women above 50, and its rising with astonishing speed.
And when it comes to education through schooling
we are led to believe that there is only one pattern of education.
And those who do not mimic the very same pattern
are not educated, and they remain stigmatized.
The western school system has led hundreds of thousands of people
even in the most basic and distant villages to buy into this idea
that their existence is obsolete,
through a structured process of planned obsolescence on human beings.
Offering this urban modern consumer culture as the only inevitable option,
But what's truly happening is, - and their actively pursuing that
and they do want to secure that to the children -
according to what I see what's truly happening is that
we're pushing them away from their comfort zone;
the relevant, sustainability fostering traditional forms of education
through which they've managed to survive for decades, independently,
and then moved them to an alienated model of knowledge in the city
and the school that’s totally disconnected from their surroundings,
force them to get a "good" job, as we define it,
and eventually become part of the global economy.
The result is, every single day 200 000 people
are moving from sustainable environments to the city, and many to live in slums,
but when they fail they don't know how to survive in their original environments.
They become disconnected from their own identities.
And while the purpose of education
is to produce human beings fully qualified to deal with life
and its problems while communicating their best traits and ideas to society,
the western school system
has transformed us into unified economically viable commodities
in the form employable citizens.
And if we dive deep into the micro level
of the individual,
we're witnessing the rise of a culture
that is actively marketing "breaking free from the comfort zone"
as the only way towards self-realization
But what's "the comfort zone", right?
When I reflect on those two words, let me try to do that:
"comfort"; comfort is the paradox of capitalism,
the incredible technological progress and the rise of industrialization
have been trying to make the lives of everyone easier
through automation and products.
Here is the paradox ..
with this planned obsolescence of products
and this kind of comfort comes more demand.
You want more,
and then you have to leave your comfort zone, work harder to get more resources
so that you can sustain your product based comfort.
An empty loop of workaholism and empty consumption
that just misses the point.
When it comes to the word "zone",
zoning is at the roots of our contemporary urban practice,
and those two ideas together tells you a lot about how I feel towards that term.
But psychologically speaking, the comfort zone is any type of behavior
that keeps your anxiety level constantly low.
Imagine something you are familiar with and do all the time,
like cooking dinner, community work, or dancing the Waltz if you are in Austria
And we know that because,
back in 1908, two psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson
explained that sustained comfort creates steady level of performance
and in order to maximize that performance,
we need to create a space
where our stress levels are slightly altered to be higher than normal.
But too much stress, our performance will suffer significantly.
So the entanglement of this performance-driven model
and our capitalistic world creates a definition of "comfort zone"
that is built on a narrative of performing and achieving.
Instead I want to deconstruct this model
and use a narrative of being, gratitude, and serenity
So today the comfort zone is being marketed over three main propositions.
The first proposition: "It's essentially bad, don't stay there."
Inspirational quotes all over social media
encourage people to step out of their comfort zone
and embark on a post-heroic journey into the depth of the unknown.
Because theoretically, it’s where the magic happens
Everything you want in life is over there,
totally away from where you stand.
I believe this model is inherently a self-defeating model
assuming that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,
influences you to perceive yourself as extremely self-deficient.
And on the road towards self-realization,
every single day we are asked to be different, nonconformist,
and take the path less-traveled.
And when Debbie Mandel argued that this notion is now so overly prevalent
that it has become cliché there was some truth to it.
So is it possible that by taking the common and ordinary path
while, with feelings of comfort and confidence,
that might actually be the non-conformist path?
For example, me, sitting in my easy chair, listening to a good piece of music
while reading a good book.
That might have been the nonconformist path instead of hiking.
So maybe we don't need to step out of our comfort zone,
but just change the model.
An alternative model by “Karl Bimshas” invites us
to visualize our discomfort as an orange block,
surrounded by sea of comfort and certainty.
This model focuses on the areas surrounding the block,
and it focuses on that we don't need to run from our core self to grow.
From what gives us strength we could rather use that strength
to rather erode away our source of discomfort.
Proposition number two is: now that you know it's bad,
leave it as soon as possible.
Last July, I turned 26, and I felt a bit unhappy,
For the first time I was officially closer to 30 than I am to 20.
(Laughter)
And let me tell you there's something particularly disturbing
and alarming about this.
And with the rise of our social isolation,
we talk less about society and more about individuals
with a narrative of heroic individualism and holy competition.
And since achieving anything
worthy of achieving is now linked us to leaving our comfort zone,
the world today glorifies the invincible 20s like never before,
and expects every 20-something
to succeed financially, romantically, socially,
and even come up with the next big thing before he hits the scary 30.
In a recent study by Dr Oliver Robinson,
an esteemed professor psychology at The University of Greenwich in London
found out that 86% of the 1100 young people participating in the survey,
they were constantly feeling under pressure to succeed
in finances, their jobs, and their relationships.
But the question is, "has it always been like that?"
The answer is, probably not, this is a very modern idea.
By the age of 30, Da Vinci was a typical loser by any of today's standards
Marie Curie spent seven years in poverty researching radioactive materials,
and Faraday worked for seven years as a lab assistant
before he was even allowed to conduct any experiments.
Proposition number three is: leaving is ultimate good.
When we respond to the call to leave our comfort zone
and indulge into experiences,
we often think this comes at a little or no cost.
But within a perspective of happiness, gratitude, can it be costly?
It seems to me that in experiencing life, people gain the knowledge
that put them at a crossroads of two directions;
one of happiness and one of suffering.
And there seems to be -in some of the scenarios- no way to avoid
the burden that comes, that may come with knowledge
or the negative impact it might have on people.
And nothing could wrap this up more than the story of “Candide”.
A novel by the French enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire,
written more than 250 years ago.
So Candide was a very simple innocent man, living at the Barron’s castle.
He fell in live with the baron’s daughter, “Cunégonde”,
but of course he wasn't a noble enough for her, so he got kicked out.
Candide's mentor, Pangloss, teaches him that in the best of all worlds
everything happens for the absolute best that makes him very happy.
Later Candide engages in a serious of adventures,
through which he manages to learn about the various aspects of life,
and throughout the novel his purpose
was to find and marry Cunégonde.
He's so persistent, he eventually succeeds.
He evolves from an innocent little boy to an experienced and practical man.
But Candide starts to realize that not everything
can be looked upon positively
and some of the things happening are just not for best interest of anyone.
He developed a sense of the world as disappointing,
and he started to cultivate his own suffering,
becoming, ultimately, unhappy.
In the course of gaining experiences, we might come across certain knowledge
that may destroy our core convictions, beliefs, or ignorance.
And as a result, our happiness.
But I'm not promoting ignorance;
choosing to remain ignorant is just not our human nature,
it’s against our human nature
but the question that remains to be answered is whether or not
acquiring more knowledge is always better.
And when it comes to happiness, by and large,
it doesn't really matter so much whether things were going well.
It matters whether they were going better than expected.
And this is not only a philosophical thesis;
a recent study published just this August,
a group of UCL researchers found out
conducting experiments where they involved 26 subjects
where they take decisions that lead to financial wins or losses
all while being monitored by an MRI machine,
later 18 420 people played a game called “The Great Brain Experiment”,
- you can download it on your smart phone -
which replicated the same experiment but with points instead of money.
And they were able to reach an equation that can predict momentarily happiness.
Here you go:
[Equation on-screen]
Without going into details of the equation,
what really matters is
they found out that it wasn’t the amount of total money won
or points won that mattered
it was how winning or losing stacked up to our own expectations.
In plain mathematics,
the more expectations we have, the less happy we become.
In our everyday life, we consume experiences falling under the magic
and the power of first experiences.
It's the heroine of experiences;
it's ecstatic and you always want more of them.
But when you consume more experiences,
you have the probability of collecting more expectations
and with more expectations
it becomes really difficult to maintain the same level of gratitude.
The Lebanese poet, Wadee Sadaa says,
“Desires spoil outings.
Those having desires no longer see the beauties of the road.
Their eyes come to be elsewhere
in the locus of desire, which does not settle.
They come to be in the absent, the stolen, the nonexistent.
They come to be in no-place."
The infinite search for the new and interesting
has pushed the new and interesting to quickly become
commonplace and boring sooner than it should.
A phenomenon which they mention that’s called hedonic adaptation,
which is our natural tendency
to adapt to our extraordinary surroundings
that we become immune to its existence.
For example, it’s why if you eat every single day, this mind-blowing ice cream
everyday from Zanoni & Zanoni near Stephansplatz, it may feel mediocre.
And it's why we have this amazing comprehensive repository human knowledge
ever created right in our pockets; Internet on our smart-phones
and all we can think about, is "Why is it so slow? Can it be faster?"
So in one way, it helps to advance.
But in another, it prevents us from appreciating the subtle and the everyday.
If we maintain this relentless pursuit and fascination of the unprecedented,
we risk slipping into a vicious cycle of never being satisfied
And I'm not suggesting to stop learning,
experimenting, or testing the limits of our comfort zone.
But merely to develop a self-aware relationships with them;
understand the choices that we make and how they impact us
At the end, the purpose of this talk was not to provide
any conclusions or statements.
But rather to provoke questions, thoughts, and drive conversations.
So that's what I will be leaving you with
If Candide has held on to his simple life he may have held onto his happiness.
If you were Candide, would you trade experiences for happiness?
Knowledge for well being,?
Achievements for serenity?
The choice is yours.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)