Getting Uncomfortable

Now we’re doing it all over again, and people keep asking why we’d leave a comfortable setup to deal with the logistics, the heat, the uncertainty, the paperwork, and all the friction that comes with rebuilding a daily life somewhere else.

The honest answer is that the comfort was the problem.

Everything in Canada worked. The routines were optimized, the days were predictable, the work happened on autopilot in a lot of ways.

And that predictability felt like stability until I started noticing that the absence of friction was also the absence of any real forward movement. The days blurred together, the weeks felt efficient and forgettable.

I was producing output but I wasn’t growing, and the difference between those two things is easy to miss when you’re inside it.

The Comfort Plateau

There’s a point where comfort stops being a reward for hard work and starts becoming the thing that prevents the next phase of it.

Psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson identified this dynamic back in 1908 when they found that performance increases with moderate levels of stress and anxiety, but only up to a point. Too little stress and you stagnate, too much and you shut down.

The sweet spot they called "optimal anxiety" sits just outside the boundary of what feels comfortable, in a zone where the challenge is real but manageable and where actual learning and adaptation happen.

I was firmly below that threshold in Canada.

The challenge level of my daily life had dropped to a point where nothing required real adaptation anymore. My brain was running familiar patterns with minimal effort, and while that felt productive on the surface, research on cognitive function shows that prolonged comfort without novel challenges leads to measurable declines in creativity, problem-solving ability, and overall cognitive engagement.

Your brain needs friction to stay sharp, and mine had been running smooth for too long.

You’ve Done This Before

This is my second time leaving the comforts of Canada for another country, and that changes the experience in ways I didn’t expect.

The first time we moved to Belize and then from Belize to Mexico, I expected the discomfort to be temporary.

I thought I’d adjust, settle in, learn the rhythms, and eventually feel at home. Boy was I wrong!

What actually happened is that the adjustment never fully completed. I carved out a life there, built routines, found friends, got my little shops and my grocery store and all that.

But I never fully belonged, and that was fine because the friction of being somewhere unfamiliar rewired how I thought about problems.

Everything required more effort.

Bureaucracy that would have taken 30 minutes in Canada took 4 hours, internet issues couldn’t be solved with a quick chat to your ISP, and explaining what you need at a hardware store when your Spanish is only halfway there becomes an exercise in creative problem-solving that transfers to every other area of your life.

Then I went back to Canada and something strange happened.

I didn’t fully belong there anymore either, because the experience had changed how I saw everything. The comfort that used to feel earned now felt numbing, the routines that used to feel productive now felt automatic. I mean, the same city I’d lived in for years suddenly felt smaller than it did before I left.

Now I’m back in Mexico, and the feeling is familiar in a way that’s both comforting and unsettling.

I know what’s coming, I know about the bureaucracy, the adjustment period, the days where nothing works the way it should.

I chose it anyway because the alternative was another year of comfortable stagnation, and I’ve learned that the cost of stagnation is higher than the cost of friction even though it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

The Nowhere Feeling

When you keep moving, physically and professionally, you lose what french-speaking people call “points de repère,” the fixed reference points that tell you where you are in life.

Most people have these anchored deeply.

The city they’ve lived in for fifteen years, the career title that defines them, the friend group that’s been consistent since college, the routines that ground their weeks.

These reference points provide a sense of identity and belonging that’s so fundamental most people don’t even notice it’s there until it’s gone.

I’ve systematically dismantled most of mine, partly by choice and partly as a side effect of the life I’ve built.

I live between countries now. My work spans photography, developer tools, newsletters, client projects, open source, and a personal blog. No single label captures what I do, and “what do you do?” has become genuinely hard to answer in a way that doesn’t sound like a rambling elevator pitch that confuses people more than it clarifies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The feeling that comes with all of this isn’t freedom exactly.

It’s more like a persistent, low-level rootlessness. I don’t belong in Belize or Mexico the way locals do. I don’t belong in Canada the way I used to. I don’t belong fully in the photography world or the dev world or the indie hacker world.

This isn’t a complaint, and I’m not looking for sympathy. It’s the honest cost of choosing discomfort repeatedly, and I think it’s worth naming because the “get uncomfortable” advice rarely mentions what you lose in the process.

You gain adaptability, resourcefulness, and a broader perspective on how life can work. But you also lose the easy sense of belonging that comes from staying put and going deep in one place, one career, one identity.

Professional Discomfort

The same principle applies to work, and every meaningful step forward in my career as a builder came from doing something that felt uncomfortable at the time.

• Writing publicly on this blog when I had no audience and no idea if anyone would read it.
• Starting newsletters and sending emails into the void for months before anyone responded.
• Putting my name and face on content when the shy part of me wanted to hide behind a logo.
• Building products and putting a price on them when the inner voice said “who are you to charge for this?”
• Having difficult conversations with partners and clients about scope, money, and expectations when it would have been easier to avoid the conflict.
• Reaching out to people I admire and asking for their time when every instinct said I was bothering them.

The comfortable path would have been to keep building things quietly, never publish anything, never put my name on it, and never expose myself to criticism or rejection.

That path is also the one where nobody ever finds your work.

The same rootlessness shows up here too. When you keep pushing into new categories and new audiences and new products, you never build the deep expertise identity that comes from doing one thing for twenty years.

I traded depth of identity for breadth of experience, and most days that tradeoff feels right.

But some days I watch someone who’s been doing one thing for a decade and I feel a pang of something like envy for how clearly they can answer the question “what do you do?”

Discomfort Inventory

If I’m honest about which specific moments of discomfort produced the most growth, the list is surprisingly consistent:

The pattern across all of these is that the discomfort was temporary but the returns have been permanent. And the pattern has been consistent enough that I’ve started treating discomfort as a signal that I’m moving in the right direction rather than a warning to turn back.

Comfort Is Expensive

I keep coming back to the idea that comfort has a cost, and the cost is invisible because it shows up as the things that didn’t happen.

The comfortable choice (stay in Canada, keep the routine, don’t publish the essay, don’t raise your prices, don’t reach out to that person) always feels like the safe choice.

But what you’re actually paying is the opportunity cost of everything that would have happened if you’d chosen the harder path.

I wrote about opportunity cost in the context of building someone else’s dream, and the same math applies here.

Every day spent inside a routine that’s stopped challenging you is a day where your skills, your perspective, and your capacity for handling the unexpected are slowly degrading through disuse.

Your brain adapts to whatever you give it, and if you give it predictability for long enough, it loses the ability to handle anything else gracefully.

What Discomfort Actually Looks Like

I want to be specific here because the “get uncomfortable” advice usually comes wrapped in Instagram aesthetics and sunset photos, and the reality is much more mundane.

Moving to Mexico doesn’t look like a travel influencer’s feed. Far from that!

It looks like sitting in a government office for four hours waiting for paperwork, or trying to explain a complex issue in your third language (French being my first language, English second, and Spanish third).

It also looks like missing your friends and your favorite store or the specific brand of fucking peanut butter that doesn’t exist here. It can also look like your partner having a tough day and neither of you having a support network nearby to lean on.

Professional discomfort doesn’t look glamorous either.

It looks like staring at a blank screen knowing you need to write something honest and being afraid that people will think it’s stupid, or like pricing a product and bracing for the first refund request (cause it'll happen!) Or, opening your email after publishing something vulnerable and not knowing what you’ll find.

It looks like sitting in a meeting where you have to tell a client that their timeline isn’t realistic when you know they don’t want to hear it.

The discomfort is mundane, persistent, and deeply unsexy. That’s exactly why most people just avoid it, because the growth you get from it doesn’t make for a good story until long after the fact.

Home Is a Verb

I’m writing this from a kitchen table in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, still figuring out the rhythms of a city I’ve lived in before but that still doesn’t quite feel like home, though it feels the most homey to me right this moment.

Canada doesn’t feel like home anymore either, and I’m starting to wonder whether the word even applies to people who keep choosing to leave.

Maybe home isn’t a place you find. Maybe it’s something you keep building wherever you are, knowing that you’ll probably build it again somewhere else eventually.

The same applies to professional identity. I mean, I’ll never be “the photography guy” or “the dev tools guy” or “the newsletter guy” in a clean, simple way. I build things across all of those worlds, and the discomfort of not fitting neatly into any one of them is the price of the life I actually want.

I guess I don't care much about labels anyway.

The reference points are gone though, and some days that feels like freedom and other days it feels like vertigo. But the comfort plateau I left behind in Canada was its own kind of trap, one that felt safe while quietly costing me the growth I needed to keep going.

I’d rather feel lost and moving than comfortable and stuck.

And if that means rebuilding from scratch every few years, in a new country, with a new set of problems, that’s a trade I’ll probably keep making.