The Comfort Zone Trap

The rest is noise in a town of a thousand inhabitants whose name, Galluccio, means nothing to you.

If you're not guided by your vision of the future, you stay clinging to the emotions of the past. And your personality, instead of pushing you forward, drags you back. To where you've already been. To where you don't want to return but where it feels safe, at home, in a familiar place.

I showed a version of me built to survive. A pile of habits collected over time — some from childhood when I was looking for attention, some from my teenage years when I was looking for respect, others from adulthood when I was trying to prove I could make it.

But I knew it was a lie. I had trained my brain to understand when it lies to itself. I knew that if I stayed in that comfort zone I would never leave it. That I would continue building someone else's dream while telling myself I was building my own.

Last week I told you about choosing who to be. About deliberate behaviors. About new habits that create new identity.

Happiness is not a destination. It's a habit.

Nothing. You stay stuck. And you call that stability "normal."

For me it happened around seventeen. I didn't understand it right away. At first it seemed like healthy ambition. It seemed like hunger. It seemed like the engine that would take me far from a town of a thousand inhabitants.

I'm still trying to figure out whether to stay in this hotel tomorrow, or try a new bed, maybe further south on this island.

There was a phrase, caught in passing from a video I shouldn't have paid attention to, that stayed with me:

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of tube.

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

Those who don't come downThose who chaseStay where they areStay where they will beThe day is already enoughThe day is a stageKnow what they'll do tomorrowDon't even know where they'll beKnow ten people, wellKnow a thousand people, poorlyTheir life isn't a storyTheir life is already a narrativeHave no dreams to fulfillHave dreams to fulfillHave no dreams to fulfillHave dreams to fulfill

While we're there trying to figure out who we are, our habits are building. Our fears are taking root. The noise in our head — that monkey mind I told you about a few weeks ago, remember? — is getting louder, not quieter. Internal dialogues carve themselves in like water drops on stone. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves solidify.

They stop because uninstalling is more tiring than installing. They stop because life goes on anyway. They stop because at forty you have a mortgage, a family, a routine, and the price of redoing everything has become too high.

I felt it, you know, that it was bullshit. Inside I thought: maybe I should cross, it's safe, I'm not hurting anyone. But I stayed there, with the decision to cross already made in my head — clear, final — but my feet wouldn't move an inch.

Taking the risk. And taking responsibility — because in the end we're the ones who choose, we're the ones who live our life minute by minute, on our piece of road. And we're the ones who pay the consequences, even when we're wrong, even when we cross and realize it would have been better to stay put. The one who crosses pays, not the one watching from the other side. Never once has someone else signed off on screwing up my life.

I came back to Italy, and for a few days my body stayed in Argentina. Jet lag does that: you wake up at four in the morning with your eyes wide open and your mind already running. The other night I was exactly there — awake, dark, head on the pillow and the phone a hand's width from my face.

We think too much. We wait for the perfect action, the right moment, the ideal conditions — and in the meantime we do nothing. The champion, simply put, does. And by doing, understands. We want to understand before we do, and that's exactly why we stay stuck.

And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is the price you pay without noticing. I let go of people I loved, because staying meant stopping, and stopping is something I've never known how to do. I watched people cry over me without being able to cry myself — I haven't done it since I was a kid. I sat at dinner across from a woman, in silence, and felt that there was nothing inside, as if I had died in that silence. That's the real price. Not sleep, not money. The people. Yourself.

Except that in those ten minutes I started thinking. (I know, I know. I can't help it. This newsletter is also that: someone who can't stay quiet inside his own head even on the way to dinner.)

Then I caught myself. Because doing things in a rush, not checking, not looking twice, not doing that one extra step that would clear the doubt, not going a little deeper into things — that's not a my brother thing. That's a me thing. It's the exact same habit I carry around. I just saw it from the outside, for one evening, from the passenger seat.

I'm writing to you from Budapest — and more precisely, I'm writing from inside a sauna. Yes, I'm obsessed with saunas, in case you didn't know. I go in knowing I have fifteen minutes: either I use them to make a list of things, or to untangle a list of thoughts. And inside my head I tell myself: either I figure everything out right now, or I stay here and die from the heat.

And I'm not joking. Once I stayed in for thirty-five minutes and nearly passed out. I'm serious about this stuff.

That tiny gap is a bridge. On one shore stands who you are right now. On the other, who you want to be. And here's the part that floored me: if your body doesn't trust that bridge to hold, it won't let you cross. Full stop. Not with a new thought, not with good intentions, not with discipline, not with yet another well-worded resolution. If the body doesn't feel safe, you stay on this side. And it keeps you there by force.

I'd already mentioned it to you once — the alcohol, the nights that never ended, the diets started and abandoned — the monkey mind jumping from one thing to the next. It's the same beast. I know the script by heart: you go out, you spend, you drink, you stay out late, and you ruin the next day; the routine you'd been building crumbles in a single evening. I've been writing this down for years. And for years I've been doing it again exactly the same.

This week I was in Mykonos. Before that, Barcelona. Celebration days, the kind that destroy your routine, shift your schedule, drag you away from where you'd arrived with such effort. Pleasant, yes. But they threw me off track again.

None of us chose the parents we got. No one chose what country to be born in, what school to attend, what phrases to hear repeated at the dinner table for twenty years. "Dreams stay in the drawer." "Be content." "Someone like us can't do certain things." You didn't choose those words — they started drilling them into you when you were too young to defend yourself. And after hearing them over and over, you believed them. They became your own voice.