Wolfy Chai

Introduction

Many Buddhists would argue that when everything goes right for a person—money, health, stability, freedom, comfort, ease—it often means they have a great deal of positive karma ripening in this lifetime. In past lives or earlier in this one, they cultivated actions that now produce favorable conditions. But the paradox is that when life becomes too easy, too smooth, too frictionless, there is little to know growth. Comfort allows an ego to fester in the background because it is never challenged. This ignorance exists because they never needed to develop depth, resilience, insight, or compassion. So instead of using their good conditions to evolve, they end up burning through their good karma without generating new awareness—in fact, they often revert to ignorance.

The very advantages that give them a prime opportunity and resources to attain higher states of awareness instead lulls them into a pleasure-filled sleep. This results in a stagnant life. The person’s “happiness” is merely the absence of irritation, not the presence of understanding. Their world remains small and self-focused because nothing has challenged them to see beyond themselves.

From the Buddhist view, the purpose of favorable circumstances is not to indulge but to awaken—to use one’s capacity to cultivate insight, generosity, service, and awareness. When a person instead uses their privileges only for personal pleasure or convenience, they are essentially using up their good karma without creating anything meaningful in return. They claim to “feel good”, but they do not grow.

While this is not harmful on its face, society often follows an initial instinct to conflate instagram pictures in the Maldives with happiness and celebrating wealth as an achievement. Even the way that different segments of society are arranged follows this model—upper, middle, and lower class. This article will explore the ways privilege and comfort can feed the ego. It attempts to reveal the true root causes of ego-motivated actions that have negative consequences and cut off compassion. It hopes to teach people to be more compassionate and accepting human beings, not only to others, but to our planet as well.

Privilege Breeds Ignorance

Privilege can take many forms—race, sexuality, wealth, opportunities, looks, health, genetic advantages, intelligence… the list goes on. However, there are certain sets of privileges that yield the most benefits in the society that we live in at this moment. Wealth is a privilege that often buys many additional privileges, thus, it is very essential. Wealth is essential for living “comfortably” and for escaping having to deal with many of the common problems one might face for not being privileged in other areas like, looks or race. That being said, no one can fully comprehend what it is like to be someone else—and I am not going to pretend to here either.

Privilege also produces a very specific blindness: a failure to perceive or understand the struggles of others. When someone has always been comfortable, they assume comfort is normal, expected, deserved—and that discomfort arises from a poor choice or a lack of effort. I talk about privilege here in the broadest sense.

Privileged people cannot comprehend the heaviness of burdens they themselves have never carried. This ignorance breeds selfishness, because the instinct becomes “protect my comfort” rather than “expand my compassion” out of fear. Their worldview narrows, only allowing what is convenient to themselves in. They often aren’t able to even recognize that they are “comfortable” because they are stuck in a cycle of craving and aversion. And because they never needed to struggle—or forget what struggling is—they lack in their capacity to empathize. Acts of service for others and compassion often come from a place of possession and fear instead of true altruism and understanding. They fear that they can’t extend themselves “too much” before it will start to inevitably eat into their own level of convenience and comfort that they work hard to maintain.

This dynamic shows up clearly in environmental destruction. Many of the people most educated about climate change, ecological collapse, pollution, and resource exploitation are also the ones contributing the most—by far—to it. It isn’t because they don’t know better—it’s because their comfort insulates them from the consequences. Their wealth buys distance from the harm they cause. The accessibility of conveniences dilute any moral discomfort. And so ignorance is warmly welcomed because they lack the willingness to sacrifice comfort for morality. Choosing comfort over compassion converts their knowlege into apathy—an intentional choice to not care.

Meanwhile, there are people with very little money who choose to live zero-waste, off-grid, or minimalist lifestyles despite how difficult these choices are and its expense to their personal comfort. They choose integrity over convenience. Their lives center around what is right, not what is comfortable. These actions result in far more growth compared to those with far more privilege. Their lives contain friction. This friction challenges the ego which is programmed by default to latch onto cravings and to be repelled by any friction. As a result, their struggles can produce depth rather than bitterness and judgment.

The contrast is clear: some people spend their entire lives living for pleasure without ever awakening, indulging in comfort after comfort with no reflection in between. Others, with almost nothing, cultivate wisdom, compassion, and morality by choice, regardless of how inconvenient or difficult it may be. From a Buddhist perspective, comfort can be a far greater obstacle to spiritual growth than hardship. Hardship forces awareness. Comfort allows ignorance. True joy exists internally and is not constructed by external ease.

It’s possible for someone to grow up with tremendous hardship, struggle, and empathy, but then lose touch once they acquire comfort. In this situation, a person could transform into a cold, dismissive, entitled, and out of touch adult. If someone starts to earn a lot of money, feels physically invincible, and avoids major health struggles, they begin to internalize certain beliefs: “I am strong because of who I am, not because of the conditions I currently have.” Their past empathy was due to their own vulnerability. Their present arrogance is shaped by insulation from discomfort.

Comfort, especially when it arrives suddenly, can erode humility. Wealth makes them forget what working hard without much reward feels like. Health makes them forget what fragility feels like. The ability to have good genetics out of pure luck such that they can operate on four hours of sleep or eat whatever they want and be fine is often forgotten. However, the reality is that they were given a highly functioning body—at least in this current moment. Their prior struggles become irrelevant. They stop identifying with their former self and allow ignorance to pull them away. They start to identify with their current privileges, which they proudly wear as signs of personal merit.

From a Buddhist perspective, this transformation is predictable. Every level of privilege weakens the mind’s contact with the truth of suffering. In childhood they had direct contact with dukkha—difficulty, constraint, fear, lack, hardship. As an adult, as soon as they experience temporary freedom from it, the ego comes in and swiftly claims credit for these favorable conditions.

For example, the ego might credit them for having a high paying job because they worked harder and went to an elite college. It might tell also them that they deserved or earned their life. They might then start equating material things like a big house or a lavish vacation with them “being happy.” The ego might get defensive and cause them to scoff at anyone who dares to challenge them for “just having a good time.” They might start to see having more success, more wealth, more trips, and more things as true gauges of happiness instead of seeing them as hedonism and craving.

Good karma ripens for them to get to where they are, but instead of utilizing it as an opportunity to gain wisdom, they use it to inflate the self. With the ego’s assistance, the mind manufactures beliefs such as “Everyone has to struggle” and “If I overcame hardship, why can’t everyone else?” Their empathy for others constricts. Their worldview hardens. They confuse circumstantial fortune with moral superiority.

This is why privileged people often become the least compassionate despite knowing better. Comfort narrows their viewpoint. Ease erases empathy. They stop recognizing that the stability and success of their adult life are built on conditions most people don’t have. Their inner narrative shifts from humility to self-glorification, from empathy to judgment, from awareness to blindness.

In psychological terms: they lose their sense of proportion—the part of the mind that can hold two truths at once: “I worked hard” and “I was lucky.” Once that second truth disappears, the first one mutates into ideology: “Everyone else should be able to do what I did.” That is the moment the ego starts to take over.
Comfort often reveals a person’s least mature parts: comfort removes humility and exposes the ego beneath it. Wealth, health, and ease do not make someone a monster; they remove the constraints that once kept the monster asleep.

Once someone becomes insulated by privileges like wealth. stability, and good health, their relationship to suffering fundamentally changes. They lose touch with the emotional memory of struggle and begin relating to life only through the lens of their current ease. This shift leads to the classic “Pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality—not because they actually overcame more, but because they ego makes them believe their present comfort is proof of their superiority. In their mind, effort alone got them where they are, so effort alone should get everyone else there too. The truth that their conditions changed or were favorable is lost; all that remains is a narrative in which they are the hero of their own story, triumphing through grit while others simply didn’t try hard enough.

They might try to justify their beliefs by referring to their own struggles as evidence of their superiority while ignoring the fact that they had sufficiently privileged conditions that led to the conquering of their struggles. A woman in a remote village in Africa isn’t going to be bringing in six-figures. There is no possibility of such a thing happening. Additionally, humans are complex and we must balance things based on our own personal capacities and life circumstances. The current model of society benefits a certain type of person and a certain type of worker. Society values certain things over others, like conformity over creativity, and compliance over ingenuity. It could be that at this time doctors or lawyers are highly valuable but a thousand years ago, there wasn’t much of a need. Needs change. Circumstances change. This society and world is not a one size fits all.

A harsh, judgmental worldview develops where empathy collapses. When someone no longer remembers what it feels like to be overwhelmed, vulnerable, lost, or unsupported, they start interpreting others’ struggles as “making excuses” rather than circumstantial realities. Instead of seeing how complex life is—how health, luck, environment, trauma, and systemic forces shape outcomes—they reduce everything to their level of personal effort within the current accepted societal model. Their worldview becomes simplistic: “I worked hard and succeeded, so if you haven’t succeeded, you must be lazy.” This is the psychological root of calling others “victims,” “weak,” “dramatic,” or “unmotivated.” It is not wisdom—it is blindness disguised as strength.

Yes, there may be people who self-victimize. That is a legitimate critique. Victimhood has no useful purpose. However, just because they might choose to label someone as a “victim” doesn’t mean that they actually are. One has to question how much time and curiosity they spend actually trying to understand another human being before slapping them with a “victim” label and swiftly discarding them and discounting all of their legitimate struggles. Additionally, easing into comfort often brings about more laziness of a mind than those with more struggles yet that aspect of “hardworking” people’s laziness is seldom called out. Everyone is on their own path. It is up to them to ultimately figure out how to overcome their unique mental struggles; where-it-be having a lazy mind, or being an avoidant victim.

The bootstraps attitude also comes from an intolerance for uncertainty. People who rely heavily on the illusion of their own invincibility cannot acknowledge that life is fragile or unpredictable, so they shame others for experiencing what they fear. By calling someone lazy or “playing the victim,” they protect their own ego from acknowledging the truth that life is not fair and that their own comfort is not guaranteed. Their criticism is a defense mechanism: if other people’s suffering can be blamed on choice, then they never have to confront the possibility that suffering could touch them too. They could lose everything they grasp onto so tightly in a second.

From a Buddhist perspective, this mentality is rooted in delusion. It is the belief that one’s current karmic outcome defines one’s inherent worth. Because they mistake favorable circumstances for personal virtue, they also mistake other people’s hardship for personal failure. The Buddha taught that clinging to identity especially to the identity of being strong, disciplined, or self-made—leads to cruelty, because it separates us from the shared reality of suffering that unites all beings. When ignorance grows, compassion shrinks, and the result is a cold, demoralizing voice that tells others to “just try harder.”
The irony is that the people who preach bootstraps ideology the loudest are often the ones who benefited most from conditions they refuse to acknowledge: stable health, supportive families, money, social safety nets, education, luck, or simply being born in a body that withstands stress better than average. Their insults reflect not wisdom, but an inability to look honestly at the forces that shaped their own lives. And meanwhile, those who struggle—often with conditions far more difficult than anything the privileged person has faced—are shamed simply for being human in a world that is not equal. If left unchecked, privilege can cause them to develop contempt and disgust for the average human, buying further into the illusion of separation that the ego creates.

People who believe their comfort is proof of their superiority completely overlook the most basic truth of human existence: conditions can change at any moment, for anyone. The wealth, health, energy, and convenience they take as evidence of their worth are nothing more than temporary arrangements of causes and conditions that can dissolve overnight. They could wake up tomorrow paralyzed, or bankrupt, or chronically ill, or allergic to everything; they could lose their abilities, their beauty, their status, their safety, or the body they currently rely on. The arrogance that “I am better than you because my life is easier” is shattered the moment reality reminds them that no one is exempt from impermanence.

In Buddhism, this is the blindness of comparing oneself at all—the delusion that one can be above others when, in truth, every being shares the same vulnerability to suffering. You are not superior because you are comfortable; you are simply fortunate. And that fortune can vanish. The deeper realization they miss is that what truly connects all beings is not achievement or strength, but the universal capacity to suffer. The recognition that you could become the person you judge—that anything taken for granted can be taken away. When you see that you are fundamentally no different from anyone else, compassion replaces contempt, and humility replaces pride.

Why True Happiness Differs From “Having a Good Time”

Many people experience moments where they are “having a good time.” While these can feel like happiness, in Buddhist terms it is not true joy—it is pleasantness, a temporary ease that arises because craving is momentarily satisfied and aversion is not being triggered. Comfort-based “happiness” is simply the nervous system experiencing an absence of threat, friction, or desire. It is warm, soothing, and enjoyable, but it is entirely dependent on conditions remaining favorable. Thus, it is simply conditional happiness. True joy, by contrast, does not rely on anything going right. It is a quality of mind that comes from inner stability, insight, and spaciousness—the kind of well-being that remains even when circumstances become uncomfortable, uncertain, or painful.

Conditional happiness evaporates the moment a job changes, a flight is delayed, money tightens, or health declines; true joy persists even in difficulty because it is rooted in the absence of clinging, not the presence of convenience. In comfort, the mind says, “I am happy because nothing is bothering me right now.” In true joy, the mind says, “I am at peace regardless of what comes or goes.” Comfort creates a feeling that resembles happiness, but it has no depth, no resilience, and no wisdom behind it. Joy has nothing to do with conditions—joy arises from freedom from craving and aversion. It does not depend on life being pleasant; it depends on the mind being free.

When someone’s daily life is relatively easy—low stress, stable finances, decent health, and predictable responsibilities—the mind is no longer struggling with survival pressures, but instead of settling into contentment. This often triggers the urge to grasp for stimulation and novelty because comfort starts to feel like boredom. To fill the void, craving grows: an unquenchable urge for “more, new, different, exciting, elsewhere.” Travel becomes an easy diversion for the mind fixate on, not because it is inherently special, but because it is a reliable way for the mind to satisfy this “need” for novelty and excitement.

People often believe they’re genuinely happy when they travel, but from a Buddhist perspective this is actually conditional happiness—the lowest and most unstable kind—because it depends entirely on external circumstances like money, freedom, novelty, ease, and the temporary escape from routine. As soon as those conditions disappear, the feeling collapses, which is why so many people crash emotionally when they return home. Their happiness wasn’t internal, rooted in insight or equanimity; it was circumstantial, propped up by ideal conditions that shielded them from craving and aversion for a brief moment.

Many people with a great deal of privilege assume they are genuinely happy simply because their lives contain few obstacles, but from a Buddhist perspective this kind of “happiness” is actually a form of ignorance—an unexamined dependence on favorable conditions that has never been tested by adversity.

When someone’s entire life has been smoothed by comfort, money, health, and convenience, their sense of “happiness” is often just the absence of friction, not a cultivated inner freedom; it is a drug-induced sleep, not an awakened joy. Because of a lack of illness, instability, or meaningful deprivation, they mistake comfort for contentment. The Buddha would say that any pleasure that relies on external circumstances is inherently fragile, because it vanishes the moment those conditions shift, and thus the person who claims to be happy merely because nothing is going wrong is not living in happiness but in a bubble of conditionality that can break at any time. Their blind spot is that they believe their emotional state is evidence of wisdom or stability, when in truth it is only evidence that life has not demanded depth from them. A life with minimal struggle can feel “happy,” but this is not the kind of happiness that survives the loss of health, wealth, youth, status, or control; it is circumstantial, not spiritual. A privileged life does not move anyone on a path to enlightenment and true liberation, in contrast, it causes them to take refuge in a cocoon of comfort.

Conditional Niceness
One of the least favorable outcomes of living a life in the manner described throughout this piece is that it has the tendency to cause conditional niceness. People can seem lovely in one moment or with certain people and flip a switch in the next because their “goodness” was never coming from inner stability and equanimity—it was coming from unchallenged craving. When a craving is blocked by something, aversion takes over.
Conditional happiness is a state that only exists as long as everything is convenient, smooth, pleasurable, and ego-affirming.

One example where this flip occurs is on dating and hookup apps. Many people operate from that exact same conditional mindset. Treating people well depends entirely on conditions being perfect. On these apps, everything hinges on whether you look exactly like your photos, respond instantly, are available right away, fit the fantasy they’ve built in their head, and never inconvenience them in the slightest. If all of those conditions align, they can seem charming. But the moment even one expectation is disrupted, they lash out or turn ice cold.
Craving causes many problems as well. In a Buddhist sense, craving is grasping—it’s the desire for convenience, pleasure, ego-boosting interactions, control, and instant gratification. Dating apps amplify craving because everything is fast, visual, transactional, and impulsive. Many people enter the interaction wanting a very specific emotional or physical payoff, and they feel entitled to it. If you don’t deliver their exact craving on cue, they perceive you not as a human being but as a failed product.
Aversion, meanwhile, becomes automatic and immediate. Aversion in this context takes the form of ghosting, rudeness, dismissals, irritation, or acting as if you “wasted their time.” It’s the mind instantly pushing away anything that doesn’t match its desire. Hookup apps train people to reject anything that isn’t perfectly frictionless, and the result is reactive, low-effort behavior.

This leads to a combination of zero resilience and zero spaciousness, which produces emotional volatility. People who rely on external conditions for their sense of desirability, confidence, mood, or control have almost no tolerance for disappointment or delay. So the moment you don’t fulfill their craving, they panic internally, and that panic emerges as hostility, coldness, or contempt. That’s why they can go from sweet to distant in a single message, lash out over nothing, dehumanize you, or act offended by the slightest inconvenience. Their happiness wasn’t real; it was conditional. Their kindness wasn’t real; it was conditional. Their interest wasn’t real; it was conditional.

Conclusion

This is by no means a compressive list of all the ways that the ego feeds off of comfort. This is not to say that all comfort is evil or morally wrong. Even in Buddhism, the need for the body to relax and rest is seen as necessary. It is saying though that grasping at material metrics of superiority and delusions can easily take over the mind, often leading to negative consequences. I challenge everyone to be more diligent about how they view their own lives, what the motivations are for their actions, and what they actually have control over. And for everyone: stop making excuses to not do the right thing.