All animals, Scott Carney tells us, seek comfort. But human beings are a bit different. We don’t need to spend much time actively seeking it. He’s right: it’s all around us — in your nice warm house, your air-conditioned car, your shoes, your bed, the temperate shopping mall you visit. Here in the affluent west, we eat comfort food in comfortable chairs, and then we recline on cushions, tweaking our dimmer switches and thermostats and adjusting the brightness on our screens.
Good for us, you might think. We can ‘control and fine-tune our environment so thoroughly that many of us can live in what amounts to a perpetual state of homeostasis’. That’s a scientific way of saying we’ve designed the world around us so we can feel good all the time.
But there’s a problem — ‘a hidden dark side’, as Carney puts it.
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