I was approaching sixty-five when the idea of something being cozy or not became the operating principle through which I viewed the world. The mildly entertaining, sentimental TV show Best Medicine was cozy because the small coastal fishing village of Port Wenn, Maine, was built on community connection and trust, qualities increasingly scarce in a country becoming paranoid, isolated, and unhinged by weaponized misinformation and cultural and political polarization.
The LG TV interface I had to use was bonkers, with flashing lights and a runaway cursor that produced chaos rather than efficient navigation. Replacing this frustrating operating system with a Roku device would make the TV cozy. Having a lightning-fast Chromebook with premium hardware and guaranteed security updates was cozy, but its buggy replacement, the supposedly more premium Googlebook with half-baked software, was not cozy.
Having nostalgic Folgers coffee in the morning was cozy. Shaving with my vintage Gillette razors, which evoked childhood memories of admiring my father during his morning shaves, was cozy. Using a bar of soap for all my shampoo and body wash needs instead of relying on liquid soap in plastic bottles was cozy. Wearing a solar Multiband-6 G-Shock Frogman, with its reliability and atomic accuracy, was cozy. Wearing a tank top emblazoned with Maui or Kona and gray nylon gym shorts, which served as my uniform for sleeping, working out, and running errands, was cozy. Watching true crime and animal documentaries, which sometimes lulled me into a blissful state of half-sleep, was cozy. Learning that the 2.0-liter turbo engine in my 2018 Honda Accord might be susceptible to a blown head gasket, contradicting Honda’s reputation for long-term reliability, was definitely not cozy.
I had gone overboard with cozy. It had become an operating principle governing all my thoughts. This cozy craze exposed my obsessive personality, which was always searching for an absolute system that explained everything. I knew it was crazy, sometimes laughable, and often annoying, but I couldn’t stop it. Against my will, I had become a terminal patient in a movie titled One Flew Over the Cozy Nest.
I had to do something. I had to cure myself of my cozy obsession before it was too late. I had to interrogate the flaws of the cozy quest. I began with the foremost principle for combating my pathological desire to cocoon myself in a warm, cozy state. I called it the Universal Law of Diminishing Comfort: The pursuit of comfort can become a source of discomfort. What begins as a sensible effort to eliminate unnecessary aggravation gradually becomes an obsession with eliminating uncertainty itself. In other words, the cure becomes worse than the disease.
The astute Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified my folly long ago when he warned about the dangers of trying to secure ourselves against life’s uncertainties. We attempt to manage our lives to create an illusion of security while hollowing ourselves out from within. As the cozy lifestyle becomes more cultivated, the soul atrophies.
Life is chaotic to the point of being terrifying. I turn on my LG TV, try to scroll to Netflix, and inexplicably the cursor exits the Home screen. Suddenly, I’m lost inside a hostile green screen that reads webOS. I need my Roku Ultra 4K so I can find my way back home.
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