Why a Comfort Zone Is No Comfort — and No Zone

For quite some time now the phrase comfort zone has been around: It’s supposed to describe a ‘zone’ people make themselves like, in spite of more promising opportunities.
Even the first time I heard the phrase used I felt it to be all wrong and it made me even angry.
Because people who seem to be in a ‘comfort zone’ as per definition, are neither comfortable, nor in a ‘zone’…

Why I say this with so much confidence?

When you know about people a little you know how it works, really: Those who feel well about themselves and confident usually will try and reach out — perhaps even try the apparently impossible. Be daring.
Because they have a scrap, even an atom of belief in their own power inside of them, as in: “Yes, I can.”
This would be the real comfort zone.

But the phrase ‘comfort zone’ typically is used to admonish someone, even scold them for apparently being too lazy to change an apparently difficult or inapt situation. Or for not trying harder to fulfill their potential…

These aspects are very important to keep in mind:

• People will always move forward or into different directions, if they feel strong and confident enough, and feel the need.
• An outside person never would really be able to see at a glance if a fellow being is comfortable — or just seems so.
• Judging another person by some appearances, concluding that they must feel the same way as oneself about it and therefore are just hiding from the challenge, is a lot of assumptions in one go:
  -> One assumes to be able to see everything that is there to know about that person at one glance.
  -> One further assumes that this person just must feel the same way as oneself —such as being ‘ambitious’ about things as one does oneself.

Ambition is a very relative term. Some people believe that moving upwards in a hierarchy and earning more and more money over the years means ‘ambition’/’aspiration’.

But there are people who know about their lives well. Who have an inborn instinct almost, where to turn, when, and why.
Who crave fulfillment, not applause.

Such people may be extremely comfortable in a place someone else would not even enter for fear the community might fail to applause.

The funny thing about the applause of the community that is not matched with inner contentment is this:
That kind of external applause is never enough.