The phone rang the other morning. It was my ex-husband, letting me know that a longtime friend of ours—someone I had dated in my 20s—had died of a heart attack related to drug use. My heart sank, but sadly, I wasn’t surprised. I get these calls multiple times per year now. Two of my three best friends from high school have lost their younger brothers. Countless kids I went to school with are gone. The amount of senseless death—whether from illegal drugs or legal pharmaceuticals—is staggering. And it’s heartbreaking.
What has happened to our ability to sit in discomfort? What has happened to our stamina for life, especially life when it gets hard?
As an employer of more than 350 people over the past decade, I’ve seen a shift in the younger generation. Many don’t seem to know how to tolerate even mild discomfort. There’s a deep urge to escape anything that doesn’t feel good—whether through substances, screens, sugar, or distractions. And I can’t help but trace this trend back to childhood: When we hand kids a screen so we can finish dinner in peace, when we give them sugar to soothe a meltdown, when we teach them—without ever saying it out loud—that the goal is to feel good all the time.
We’ve created a culture that treats discomfort like a pathology. If something is hard, we assume it must be wrong. But that’s not how life works. Humanity has been uncomfortable for most of its existence. Pain, struggle, and uncertainty are baked into the human experience. Maybe it’s not discomfort that’s the problem—but our inability to face it.
And maybe—just maybe—that inability is linked to something deeper than parenting, media, or education.
As a regenerative farmer, I look at the world through the lens of soil and microbiology, and I can’t help but wonder: Is part of our spiritual and emotional fragility rooted in the literal lack of microbiology in our bodies?
One in three children born today in the United States never passes through the vaginal canal, missing the crucial exposure to the mother’s microbiome. Rates of breastfeeding continue to drop, leaving babies without the microbial foundation that nature designed. Add to that a diet made up of sterile, processed food from nutrient-depleted soils, and we have a recipe for a generation physically and emotionally disconnected from the natural systems that support resilience.
Healthy soil and a healthy gut share more than 70 percent of the same DNA. That’s not a coincidence. We are meant to be part of that living system. And when we separate ourselves from it—through our food, our birth practices, our lifestyles—we suffer.
Cultures that still live in close connection to nature—who cook over fire, grow and harvest their own food, and sleep on dirt floors—don’t experience the epidemic of suicide and overdose we see in modern society. Do they experience hardship? Of course. But their drive to live is still intact. They have a rootedness that protects them from the kind of existential despair we’re drowning in here.
And there’s science to back this up. Studies have shown that working with your hands in the soil can be as effective—or even more effective—than SSRIs in treating depression. The microbes in soil literally activate serotonin production in the brain. So why aren’t we prioritizing reconnection with nature in our solutions? Why isn’t getting kids outside, getting their hands dirty, and building real, physical resilience a national conversation?
Yes, we should limit screen time. Yes, we should cut back on sugar. But more importantly, we need to stop teaching our children that discomfort is something to be avoided at all costs. It’s okay to be bored. It’s okay to be hot, tired, or challenged. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. Most worthwhile things—motherhood, entrepreneurship, marriage, community, growth—will feel hard at some point. That’s not a flaw. That’s the path.
Are we raising a generation of escape artists, or are we raising people who can stay present through difficulty, learn from it, and grow?
Our society turns to drugs, food, porn, social media, and endless forms of distraction to escape the simple reality of being human. But what if we taught our children—and reminded ourselves—that emotions are not emergencies? That pain is a teacher? That we don’t have to be ping-pong balls to our thoughts and feelings, believing every one of them as truth?
We can learn to sit in discomfort and listen. Sometimes, discomfort is just life asking us to change, to grow, to stretch, or to sharpen a skill. And sometimes, it’s just part of being alive.
I believe our disconnection from nature, from hard work, and from each other is at the root of the mental health and drug overdose epidemic. I, for one, am tired of getting phone calls letting me know that someone else has died from escapism.
So how do we stop the cycle?
We start by embracing discomfort—not running from it. We model presence instead of avoidance. We raise kids who know how to work hard, wait, be bored, get dirty, and stay with what’s real. We reconnect with nature, with food grown in healthy soil, with people we trust, and with rituals that remind us of who we are.
We stop outsourcing our resilience and reclaim the tools that make us human.
