December 19, 2025
I come from a community where safety is encouraged. It’s rewarded with comfort.
You’ll live in a six-bedroom house, vacation in Europe, drive around in a Range Rover, and carry your belongings in the finest vinyl-covered canvas.
Your kids will follow in your footsteps, offered the same promise of generational comfort. Grow up comfortable, live comfortably, and die in comfort.
I love comfort. We all do. But here, comfort comes bundled with safety, and safety comes with a cost.
To be safe, you have to follow the beaten path - where rules of engagement are clear. Do the same things, talk to the same people, live in the same place, and drink the damn Kool Aid. As long as you don’t venture outside the mythical, magical citadel, all will end well. You’ll have your stereotypical white picket fence life - but perhaps a tad bit more luxurious.
Human nature is to seek a balance of adventure and comfort.
From Snow White to The Truman Show, every symbol of human maturation is tied to crossing the chasm into the unknown. I wholly believe that there’s an unrelenting, irrefutable human desire of curiosity to wander outside the walls of the citadel.
But almost every one of those stories carries the same lesson: when you step outside the walls, you get hurt. You suffer. You risk failure, loss, even death. The message is clear and it’s taught early: staying inside keeps you safe. Follow the rules, stay in line, don’t wander too far, and you’ll be protected.
Curiosity is stifled, and risk is suffocated.
But my assertion is deeper.
Safety doesn’t just protect you from harm. It protects you from becoming yourself. A life structured to eliminate risk also eliminates the conditions required for growth. When everything is planned, buffered, and approved, you never have to confront uncertainty on your own. You cannot know your strength until you try to conquer the demons. You never develop judgment, resilience, or real confidence. You remain dependent, even if your life looks successful from the outside.
But why? How? I think Dr. Jordan Peterson does a good job of explaining this:
A son cannot become an adult until his father, literally or metaphorically, dies. The father stands between the son and the unknown, providing necessary shelter, but this same protection prevents the son from developing the strength to face chaos on his own. Only when the son confronts this unknown directly, by entering the space his father once shielded him from, can he integrate his father's wisdom and become autonomous.
Doing hard things is how you earn the right to take your own life seriously. When you choose situations that might break you, you stop outsourcing your decisions to rules, expectations, or approval. You start acting based on what you’ve seen yourself survive. That’s when life stops being something you manage and starts being something you actively live. Without that confrontation with the unknown, there’s nothing at stake, and without something at stake, there’s no reason to be here beyond maintenance.
Without adventure, without risking it all, why live life? You’re here to find out who you really are, and be the best you that you can be.
Maybe you win big. Maybe you risk it all and lose. But regardless, you learn who you really are.
There’s no one and nothing I’d rather bet on than myself.
I dare you, dive head first into the unknown. Safety is nothing more than a pacifier. Time to grow the fuck up.