Hi, I’d like to present an idea:
“Live outside the pursuit of happiness.”                        
 
There are two traps, I’d say, that’ll lead you to gorge on supernormal stimuli; overextension and excess. Overextension occurs when you’ve strained yourself past your tolerance, you’re unable to calm or pay attention, and your subconscious takes over—engaging in activities you wouldn’t choose mindfully. Excess occurs when you’re well-rested, full of energy, but not engaging in anything meaningful or productive; lazing about. You crave fulfillment, and by not attending to this need, are driven to cheap domanergic gratification.
 
 
This is what it means to be consumed by your own passion. It is the common starting position for those enlisted into the Comfort War. See, a great desire will lead you to one of two certain outcomes: it either bolsters your efforts, or consumes you entirely—and the Comfort Warrior has been consumed. To achieve the former he/she must be willing to become obsessed, and confront their fears.
 
 
Here, I’d like to go past the first two fundamental methods of the Comfort War—the MR and unconditional ruleset—and suggest a variating that specifically targets these traps of excess and overextension. To do this, we’ll take the 24h day cycle as our level of analysis, and implement a pre-dawn and post-dusk MR. Obviously, each of our lives comes with unique constraints that may or may not fit this model; decide for yourself if this applies.
 
To start, let’s look at these terms: overextension occurs when you require rest and sleep, excess occurs when you require taking action and enduring difficulty. So in a sense, the post-dusk MR is to extract you out of a state of restlessness and into the embrace of sleep, and the pre-dawn MR is to extract you out of lazy fatigue and into confronting life (and potentially pain).
 
The savagery demanded of you, willing to accept hardship, to confront your fears and thrive of stress—to ‘unleash the beast’ sort-of-speak—is congruent with the normal conduct of the pre-dawn MR; self-discovery and the practice of leaving yourself ungratified by cheap stimuli to the point when your ambition erupts and ensues entirely.
 
As for the post-dusk MR, yielding to the clutches of rest and sleep, there’s a slightly different angle I’d like for you to consider. Sleep is a strange dynamic, and lately, I’d say we haven’t been good at it. We find ourselves awake at night, until we’re not, and tired in the morning, just until the moment we aren’t. Superstimuli has had a profound effect in this regard; in the US alone, an estimated 86 million people are literally incapable of preforming this basic bodily function, requiring an annual total of $41 billion in sleeping aids and remedies to sleep[1].
 
Sleep is when we are at our most vulnerable, and it is often associated with death. We’re helpless in that state; the threat “I’ll kill you in your sleep” signifies just that. There’s an old religious myth that sleep in equivalent to one sixtieth of death[2] , and to die in your sleep is often considered the most peaceful way to go. It’s remarkable, really, how well we’ve been able to integrate this fragility as a staple of daily life to the point of seamless reliability. During his time with the Amazonian Pirahã tribe, Daniel Everett noted that they took naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours, and rarely slept through an entire night—warning him: “don’t sleep, there are snakes”[3].
 
If you’ve ever been able to stop and calmly observe yourself when caught-up in one of those zero dark thi...