Note To Future Self: It is 5am, I am writing this at the Atlanta International Airport after a weekend with my friends Nandin and Anu who just got engaged. I am running on 7 hours of sleep over 2 days. I wish them congratulations and a long, happy life!

How can you truly understand how you’ve changed if you haven't fully accepted who you were? Life looked very different for me as a suburban boy. I had finished high school, university, and a year of my career, all from the comfort of my family home. Looking back, as my life progressed, my environment remained stagnant, and with it, so did I. I had been in the same neighborhood for over eight years, cocooned from the outside world. The qualities that defined my adolescence—shy, timid, insecure, self-unaware—all normal for that age, had followed me into my adulthood.

This stagnation had real-life consequences for my personal growth. I struggled to define myself, my beliefs, and who I truly was. I couldn't hold steady in the face of opposing lifestyles and opinions because I lacked an anchor for my identity. I had found haven in what was familiar, and caught in the jaws of comfort. Essentially, I lacked a defined identity as I transitioned from my sheltered world into the real one.

This manifested as a lot of indoor time, solitude and isolation, social perfectionism, and complacency. If this sounds familiar to you, let’s dive deeper into why a lack of challenge and change could lead to this, and where to begin turning things around.

We have a primal urge to explain away our circumstances. Why? Because the alternative is to face our reality, to pry open the cocoon and let in new, unknown light—light that will brightly illuminate the fact that some of what we tell ourselves we want are actually things we are settling for. A lack of real-life challenge and exposure may push us, over time, to find comfort in solitude, to a peace that cannot be disturbed by the world. This same peace, however, can poison our well-being. When we are not sufficiently capable of confronting our complacency, we fall into the Cozy Paradox—convincing ourselves that our comfort isn’t the very obstacle to our growth.

I spent months in a routine that fed my own complacency. I fitted my room with all the gadgets and technology needed to bring the world to me, and called that success. I had no social capacity outside of my small friend circle, I struggled to hold a conversation with my own family, and I grew an increasing dependence on always maintaining a sense of control, fueled by the need for comfort and familiarity, and avoiding the long-term consequences it would have on my health. The fragility of this lifestyle surfaced when a back injury threw my comfort compass into a spiral. Suddenly manhandled by life, I endured my first bout of real depression and anxiety, and came to the stark realization that true control must lie in the embrace of life’s uncertainty.