There was a time when success looked exhausting. Wake up at 5 a.m., drink coffee that tastes like ambition, answer emails before sunrise, and somehow fit in a workout, a side hustle, and a podcast about becoming your best self before 9 a.m. We watched people brag about working 80-hour weeks as if sleep were a personality flaw. Naturally, we rebelled. Now we’ve gone in the opposite direction.

The algorithm has traded hustle culture for la Dolce Vita. Suddenly, everyone seems to be living in a sun-drenched apartment with linen curtains, reading novels on weekday mornings and drinking matcha from cups that probably cost more than my first rent deposit. We’ve collectively decided that the goal is softness. Slow living. Protecting our peace. And honestly? I support this evolution.

No one misses glorifying burnout. But I do wonder if we’ve accidentally confused a comfortable life with a fulfilled one. Because comfort has an excellent publicist. It presents itself as balance, self-care, and emotional maturity. It never looks like giving up. It simply looks reasonable. Stay where you are. You’re doing fine. Don’t take the risk. It’s not the right time. Maybe next year, when you’re more prepared. Comfort never yells. It whispers. Which makes it surprisingly persuasive.

The funny thing is, almost everything we’ve ever been proud of started with feeling wildly uncomfortable. Your first presentation, where your voice did that strange thing that wasn’t quite shaking but definitely wasn’t confident either. Your first apartment, where the furniture didn’t match because neither did your bank account. Your first solo trip.

None of those moments felt comfortable. They felt awkward. Uncertain. Slightly terrifying. And yet, those are usually the stories we tell years later. No one reminisces about the Tuesday they stayed exactly where they were because it felt safe. Discomfort has terrible marketing. It feels like failure while it’s happening. That’s probably why we spend so much energy trying to avoid it.

We’re constantly looking for signs that we’re “ready.” Ready to apply. Ready to quit. Ready to start the business. Ready to move cities. Ready to ask someone out. Ready to finally publish the thing we’ve been quietly working on for months. As if confidence sends a calendar invite beforehand. It doesn’t. Confidence has always been deeply unprofessional. It tends to arrive after you’ve already done the scary thing.

Somewhere along the way, I also think we’ve become slightly obsessed with optimisation. Not just of our schedules, but of our emotions. We want growth without uncertainty. Success without rejection. Love without vulnerability. A dream career with excellent work-life balance from day one. Ideally, we’d like discomfort to send us a Google Calendar invitation so we can mentally prepare.

Unfortunately, life continues to ignore our preferences. Because the truth is, growth has always had one annoying requirement: you have to be willing to look a little ridiculous. Every successful person has a collection of emails that went unanswered. Ideas that didn’t work. Interviews they didn’t get. Projects nobody cared about. The only difference is that they kept producing enough opportunities for something to eventually stick.

Which brings me to something I think we don’t talk about enough. Luck. Success loves pretending it’s entirely about discipline. Social media certainly does. Every achievement gets packaged into a motivational quote, as though the only difference between you and the CEO is that they woke up thirty minutes earlier.

Life is rarely that neat. Luck matters. The people you meet. The family you’re born into. The mentor who decides to take a chance on you. The timing. The economy. The email that happens to land on the right person’s desk on the right day. Ignoring luck feels dishonest. But relying on luck isn’t much of a strategy either.

I once heard someone say that hard work doesn’t guarantee success. It simply puts you where luck can find you. I haven’t stopped thinking about that. Because maybe that’s what effort is really for. Not to control the outcome. To increase the number of times the opportunity has the chance to bump into you. You send the application. You go to the event. You start the project. You introduce yourself. You keep showing up. Not because any single attempt guarantees anything, but because eventually one of them might.

Luck has surprisingly bad GPS. It rarely finds people who never leave the house. And maybe that’s where the real Dolce Vita trap begins. When life becomes so comfortable that we stop creating opportunities for surprise. When every decision is designed to minimise risk. When we’re no longer chasing what excites us because we’ve become experts at protecting what we already have. Comfort is beautiful. It just wasn’t designed to be permanent.

Think about the hungriest version of yourself. Maybe it was when you were looking for your first internship. Maybe when you moved to a new city. Maybe when you had something to prove, even if only to yourself. You probably weren’t smarter back then. You were just hungrier. You asked more questions. Sent more emails. Accepted more invitations. Tried more things. When you’re hungry, you create movement. When you’re comfortable, you start waiting for movement to find you.

The irony is that most of us don’t actually regret the risks we took. We regret the ones we talked ourselves out of because they felt inconvenient. The application we never sent. The city we never moved to. The person we never called. The idea we kept polishing until someone else launched something similar. It’s rarely failure that haunts us. It’s hesitation.

Now, this isn’t an argument against peace. Please keep the slow mornings. Buy the flowers. Sleep in on Sundays. Romanticise your coffee. Life should absolutely contain softness. Just don’t confuse softness with standing still.

Protect your peace, yes. But don’t protect yourself from every opportunity that asks you to be uncomfortable. Because discomfort isn’t always a sign you’re on the wrong path. Sometimes it’s the strongest evidence that you’re finally leaving the familiar one. Maybe that’s the version of la Dolce Vita worth chasing. Not a life where everything feels easy.

A life that’s interesting enough to occasionally make your stomach flip. One where comfort is somewhere you return to, not somewhere you hide. Because in the end, the goal was never to avoid discomfort altogether. It was to build a life that makes the discomfort feel worth it.

With Love, Chaos & Jazz. Always.