Comfort and Contemporary Culture: The problems of the 'good life' on an increasingly uncomfortable planet

The pursuit of comfort has become an aspiration of modern times, defining what it means to live a good life. However, by consuming comfort in ways that harm the planet, we limit its capacity to provide for life's requirements. Comfort and Contemporary Culture explores the concept of comfort through case study accounts and questions what it means to live in the modern world. It emphasizes the need to revise our understanding of comfort and address its ecological, social, and intrapersonal implications. The book is relevant for students and scholars of cultural studies, sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography, and community studies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 162 pages
Publication date: 08 November 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

To be comfortable stands as an aspiration of the times; to be comfortable defines what it means to live 'the good life. We talk about such things as maintaining a comfortable home, a comfortable lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. We seek out comforts in the relationships we sustain, the leisure practices we enact and the possessions we accumulate. We look for promises of comfort in the words of a close friend and our next pair of shoes. Furnished in the home, optionally outfitted in cars, scrutinised in holiday brochures and brushed up against in the clothes we wear, comfort is there, marking distinctions and framing decisions about what it means to live well. But by consuming comfort in the ways that we do, we do ourselves harm and limit our only planet of its capacity to provide for the requirements of life. This is a world that grows ever more uncomfortable because of comfort and when linked to consumption and excess, indulgence and apathy, it occurs that comfort carries effects that have existential consequence.

Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comforts enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now. Comfort and Contemporary Culture poses alternative renderings of the idea of comfort to return the concept to its earliest roots in notions of confortāre. The revisioning of what we take as comfort requires urgent attention, with the ecological, social and intrapersonal implications of comforts current excesses demonstrative of this need.

This book will be relevant reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography and studies of community.

Weight: 480g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032536538