Dennis Anderson: The pursuit of ever more comfort can exact a steep price from your mind, body and Minnesota's wildest places

MINNEAPOLIS - Drive up the North Shore to Grand Marais, then head along the Gunflint Trail before backtracking to Hwy. 1, which will lead you west to Ely. En route you will see Lake Superior, blue and bluer still all the way to the horizon. You might spot a deer and maybe even a moose.

What you won’t see are one-room cabins of the kind the late Ely ecologist and author Sigurd Olson erected in the late 1950s and visited regularly for solitude and inspiration until his death in 1982 at age 82.

In fact, almost nowhere in Minnesota will you find lakeshore cabins similar to Sig’s being built or even saved from the wrecking ball.

Simple in design, with no running water and only a wood-burning fireplace or stove for heat, such relics of the past are regularly demolished to make room for “lake homes,” and oftentimes the bigger, the better.

This is old news, of course; a trend in the making for decades, and the product, seemingly, of people’s never-ending pursuit of convenience and, more specifically, comfort, the latter a cunning temptress whose wiles know no bounds.

Why, after all, suffer the disquiet of weekending up north in a vacation place any less palatial than the one you left behind in the Twin Cities?

Yet the trend toward ever-more opulent getaways is only one symptom of a larger and far more insidious societal problem - people’s insatiable appetite for comfort, even when it endangers their emotional, physical and mental health.

I was reminded of this recently when I picked up a copy of the book, “The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Regain Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self,” by Michael Easter.

Easter argues that many of Americans’ problems - among them a lack of exposure to the outdoors, an unwillingness to exercise, a propensity to overeat, all resulting in a discomfited mental state - can be traced to our pursuit of comfort.

This isn’t universally true. Some people run marathons, others seek fish or game in a fair and responsible way, and still others climb mountains or paddle canoes into vast wildernesses.

Similarly, some people hike or camp using only the bare essentials, hoping to engage the struggles, and reap the rewards, of activities that require exercise and work, and produce exhaustion.

Yet those are the exceptions. Comfort, whether measured by the time we spend on computers or watching TV, or the pleasantness of our homes, so pervades our everyday life that most of us have come to expect it and even demand it.

The only way out of the resulting malaise, Easter believes, is to “re-wild ourselves” by consciously eating less and better, by getting outside more and by undertaking periodic outdoor adventures that challenge and reinvigorate us.

The “outdoors” is an important component here because only natural environments provide the sense of awe and wonder that keep a person coming back for more.

“The answer isn’t going back to days spent working for our food rather than for a paycheck,” Easter writes. “Our comfortable world is great. But our trip into comfort has created a world that rarely presents us with physical challenges, and we have, in turn, paid for it with our health and hardiness.”

In Minnesota, the replacement of old-style cabins with lake homes counts among its collateral losses fewer opportunities for solitude and silence. Both would be more readily available in and around a cabin like Sig’s than in a four-bedroom lake home surrounded by jet skis and other water toys.

“Comfort creep,” in my view, has become so embedded in our lives that, as one of many results, its presence has cultivated a softness among hunters and anglers that the DNR is only too happy to satisfy, license sales being a benefit to the agency.

Does the DNR, for example, outlaw forward-facing sonar units for muskie fishing to prevent the harassment and disproportionate hookups of these rare and beautiful fish? Or do fisheries managers instead accommodate the state’s least sportsmanlike anglers by allowing them to use one, two, three and even four of these fish-finding gadgets on muskie boats?

Answer #2 is correct.

Similarly, in a nod to Minnesota archers who can’t be bothered to practice with a compound or traditional bow to improve their aim, the DNR now allows hunters of any age to deploy rifle-like crossbows to slay whitetails, and over a season that lasts three and a half months.

Essentially a non-hunter, Easter details in his book an extended Arctic caribou hunt he took with a couple of experienced outdoorsmen as a means to re-wild himself.

Such an exotic locale isn’t the only place a person can achieve a similar end, Easter reminds us. A park or even a backyard will suffice. The point is to do a little more than we’re doing now, and a little more after that.

“Only 20% of Americans meet the national guidelines for weekly endurance and strength exercise,” Easter writes. “And 27% of us don’t do any type of physical activity at all. Literally nothing - life as a sort of prolonged shuffle from bed to office chair to sofa to bed.”

Add to Americans’ lethargy periodic mass shootings, underachieving school kids, the polarity of politics, and the generalized pall of discontent that hangs over this country, and things aren’t going well - that part seems obvious.

Maybe spending more time outdoors, facing challenges great and small, is one answer.

Perhaps also we should consider the relative discomforts that simple cabins can bestow upon us, and their benefits to our psyches, before tearing them down to build lake homes.

“I was thinking less and noticing more,” Easter wrote after returning home from the Arctic. “I sought more connection, silence, and solitude both at home and in nature. I spent less time in front of screens and was more of an active listener in conversations with my wife and family.

“Alaska provided me with another heavy dose of discomfort, and its lessons changed me. But I also understood that they wouldn’t be everlasting, that comfort creep would gain inches each day.”

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.