restless

“Take the stairs.” A YouTuber, by the username of Lindsiann, posted a video four days ago repeating this message. I came across it early this morning, as I propped my phone across my vanity and blended my foundation. A once consistent habit, the ritual of watching YouTube while completing my morning makeup is one that’s grown difficult in recent weeks. Lately, my mind has been running a thousand miles per hour, making it hard to concentrate on anything. But today, I had the sudden urge to watch a video—not the usual investigative piece on data centers or the current political climate, but one more inspirational, one that would ready me for my interviews later that day. Yet, what I found wasn’t inspiration, but a lack thereof.

Lindsiann starts her video by describing the life she’s created, perfectly engineered to avoid discomfort. She gets her lunch delivered, she gets her coffee delivered, she gets her dinner delivered—all while sitting on her couch and watching TV. She keeps her apartment at the same temperature year-round. She does all these things and, in her own words, her reward, “for building the most frictionless life to have ever existed is a low-grade untreatable restlessness,” which she details as an endless feeling that something is wrong.

Almost immediately Lindsiann introduces The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. In this book she found advice that would change her life: only 2% of people take the stairs when there’s an elevator right next to them. “Only 2% of people, when given a slightly easier option, choose the harder one anyways.” Lindsiann does in fact take a second to get to the actual advice. However, I feel as though I don’t need to describe the remainder of the video in great detail. The general gist is somewhere along the lines of “life begins at the end of your comfort zone.’“

Here’s the thing: everyday, approximate an hour after I’ve sprayed setting spray on my face and closed the YouTube app, I arrive at my works underground garage where I have three options to reach our street-level office (the third being an escalator). A surprisingly large portion of the time I take the stairs, and if I don’t take the stairs I take the escalator, and when I take the escalator I walk up them instead of standing idle on a single step. This isn’t to say I’m perfect. For example, this Monday I stood on a single step.

This past weekend was a long weekend, one that contributed to my inability to concentrate. I believed, for almost seventy-two hours, that my guinea pig was dying. Because I have limited time left at my current position, and therefore am uncertain on the financial front, I couldn’t afford to take my guinea pig to the vet. I cancelled my plans, rolled her in a blanket, and syringe fed her the last of the medicine from a previous visit. Miraculously, she made it through, and to celebrate, on Sunday night I went to a club on the Sunset Strip I’d only ever been to twice. This, though eventful enough to be a story on its own, is only important because it’s the reason I stood on the escalator.

Monday morning I was dealing with the vague remnants of a hangover, leaving me avoidant of fast movements prior to our team’s weekly standup meeting. Following that meeting, I sat at my desk all day feeling restless. Monday was slow, and I had a long weekend followed by a long night. I felt as if I was waiting for something to happen—as if I should have been somewhere else, doing something more valuable with my time. Something felt wrong and I naively believed that doing anything other than what I was doing in that moment could fix it.

While I wish I had a better point to make, and something more inspirational to say, my takeaway is this: taking the stairs will not make you less restless. Going to a club on a work night with girls you barely know after a long weekend contemplating death will not make you less restless. I don’t know what makes people feel at rest, but I know it’s not shallow acts of self-discipline, or the actions we take just because we think they may feel right.