January 13, 2026
Most people live life at room temperature.
That line landed hard when I first wrote it down. Not because it is cruel. Not because it is clever. But because it feels observably true in the way uncomfortable truths usually do.
Room temperature is safe. It is tolerable. It is fine.
Room temperature is waking up, getting through the day, doing what is required, and calling that enough. It is not misery. It is not failure. It is simply a life lived without heat or cold. No real risk of being burned. No real chance of being frozen awake either.
And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. In conversations. In routines. In the way people talk about their lives without actually describing how they feel inside them.
This is not a judgment. It is an observation I make about myself first.
I think about moments when life pushed me out of that comfortable middle and forced me to feel something sharper. Moments like the ones I wrote about in Life Finds a Way, when circumstances made staying comfortable impossible. Those moments were not fun, but they were alive. They had temperature.
Thought of the Day
Most people live life at room temperature.
Not cold enough to demand change. Not hot enough to demand action.
Room temperature living looks like routines that never get questioned. Jobs that drain but do not quite break us. Relationships that function but do not deepen. Goals that sound respectable but do not scare us even a little.
And the thing is, room temperature feels reasonable. It feels adult. It feels responsible.
But it also slowly numbs you.
You do not notice the numbness right away. That is the trick. It creeps in quietly. You stop expecting much. You stop risking much. You stop being surprised by yourself.
I do not think most people choose this consciously. I think it happens when effort becomes associated only with exhaustion, and not with meaning. When we confuse peace with comfort. When we decide that avoiding discomfort is the same thing as living well.
Sometimes it takes disruption to remind us what temperature feels like. Loss. Change. Failure. Even joy. Something that breaks the seal of the middle.
I was reminded of that while rereading A Reminder About Life. Not because it offered answers, but because it asked better questions. The kind that raise the thermostat whether you want them to or not.
Question of the Day
Is not trying hard the same as not working hard?
This question sits right in the middle of that room temperature space.
Because a lot of us work hard. We show up. We grind through tasks. We handle responsibilities. We do what needs to be done. And yet, if we are honest, we are not really trying in the places that matter most to us.
Not trying hard often looks productive. It comes with calendars and checklists and tiredness to prove it. But it also avoids risk. It avoids vulnerability. It avoids the possibility of discovering that we might care more than we want to admit.
Trying hard means emotional exposure. It means admitting that something matters enough to fail at. It means raising the stakes beyond effort and into meaning.
Working hard keeps you busy. Trying hard changes you.
And maybe that is why room temperature living is so common. Trying hard requires choosing heat or cold. Comfort lets you stay in the middle indefinitely.
If this question stirred something in you, even slightly, that might be your signal. You are not numb. You are not broken. You are just standing near the thermostat.
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