Where to Start with Michael Easter: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Michael Easter — how to approach The Comfort Crisis, his adventure-journalism investigation into why optimising for comfort is making us worse, combining 33 days hunting in Alaska with the science of beneficial hardship. A complete reading guide.
By Priya Anand
Michael Easter is an American journalist, professor of journalism at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and contributing editor to Men’s Health. He writes about health, fitness, and the science of human performance for publications including Outside, Men’s Journal, and Vice, and has become a prominent voice in the movement arguing that contemporary health and wellness culture’s focus on optimising for comfort is counterproductive. The Comfort Crisis (2021) was his first book and became a significant bestseller; he followed it with The 2 Rule (2023).
Where to Start: The Comfort Crisis (2021)
Easter spent 33 days hunting caribou in Arctic Alaska while writing The Comfort Crisis — using the expedition as a contrast case for his research argument that modern comfort optimisation produces specific physiological and psychological harms that voluntary hardship can reverse. The Comfort Crisis opens with a diagnosis that most health and wellness discourse would prefer to ignore: most people in developed countries have successfully eliminated the physical and psychological challenges that constitute the baseline condition for human flourishing, and the results — rising anxiety, obesity, physical fragility, boredom, and a specific kind of spiritual depletion — are visible everywhere.
The evolutionary mismatch argument is the book’s foundation. For approximately 200,000 years, humans lived in conditions of intermittent hardship: they walked long distances while carrying loads, they endured cold and heat, they experienced genuine hunger and genuine physical exertion, and they had extended periods of boredom and reflection. Natural selection shaped human bodies and minds to function optimally in these conditions. The past two generations have largely eliminated all of this hardship — through climate control, motorised transport, abundant cheap food, and constant digital entertainment — in ways that the body and mind have not had time to adapt to. The result is physiological and psychological systems operating without the inputs they were designed for.
The Alaskan expedition is the book’s narrative spine. Easter spends 33 days in Arctic Alaska hunting caribou with guides in conditions that are cold, physically demanding, genuinely uncertain, and entirely absent of digital distraction. The expedition provides a contrast case — what does it feel like to live in conditions closer to those humans evolved for? — and also a testing ground for the research claims he makes in the alternating scientific sections.
The boredom argument is the book’s most intellectually distinctive contribution. Easter presents research showing that boredom is not a problem to be solved with entertainment but a necessary psychological state that precedes creativity, self-reflection, and the kind of insight that continuous stimulation prevents. The complete elimination of boredom through smartphones and streaming platforms is, on this view, not a solution to discomfort but the removal of a functional process.
Reading Michael Easter
The Comfort Crisis is Easter’s essential book. The 2 Rule (2023) is the follow-on — applying the Pareto principle to health and identifying the small set of habits that produce most of the benefit.
For the full Michael Easter bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Michael Easter author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Michael Easter?
The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self (2021) is Easter's essential book — an adventure journalism investigation into why modern optimisation for comfort is producing physically and mentally worse outcomes, structured around his 33-day hunting expedition in the Alaskan wilderness. Easter is a health and fitness journalist who combines narrative reportage with research across physiology, psychology, and anthropology, and the result is one of the more persuasive popular health books of the early 2020s. The central argument — that humans evolved for hardship and are damaged by its absence — is supported by specific science and grounded in an adventure story compelling enough to read for its own sake.
What is The Comfort Crisis about?
The book weaves two strands: Easter's first-person account of spending 33 days hunting caribou in Arctic Alaska with minimal resources and technology, and research sections examining the specific mechanisms by which modern comfort is producing specific harms. He covers why boredom is psychologically necessary (it is the state that precedes creativity and self-reflection, and its elimination through constant entertainment has measurable negative consequences), why rucking (carrying heavy loads) produces health benefits that other exercise does not, why the absence of physical challenge damages both physical fitness and psychological resilience, and why caloric restriction through challenge differs physiologically from caloric restriction through dieting. The practical recommendations are specific and graduated — small voluntary hardships are presented as accessible entry points.
What is the rucking argument Easter makes?
Rucking — walking while carrying a weighted pack — is one of The Comfort Crisis's most specific and most frequently cited practical recommendations. Easter argues that humans evolved as load-bearing creatures: for most of human history, people carried significant weight over significant distances as a matter of daily life, and the body adapted accordingly. Contemporary exercise often emphasises cardio and strength training while neglecting load-bearing, which the body has specifically adapted to produce. Rucking produces cardiovascular benefits comparable to running with significantly lower injury rates, engages postural and stabilising muscles that other exercise misses, and can be scaled to any fitness level. It is the closest available approximation to the physical demand pattern humans evolved for.
What should I read after The Comfort Crisis?
After The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter's 2 Rule (2023) covers the 80/20 principle applied to health — the small set of high-impact habits that produce most of the benefit. David Goggins's Can't Hurt Me covers voluntary extreme hardship as a psychological development practice with more personal intensity and less journalistic framing. Christopher McDougall's Born to Run covers the evolutionary fitness argument from a running perspective. Jesse Itzler's Living with a SEAL covers voluntary discomfort as a lifestyle practice in a more accessible and amusing format. For the scientific foundations, John Ratey's Spark covers the brain benefits of exercise with the depth that Easter's broader scope cannot provide.
