HOW TO ACHIEVE COMFORT
How to Achieve Comfort began as an attempt to answer the question, “Why do I do the things I do?” through data collection and self-surveillance. Over the course of three months, I meticulously documented everyday actions — from media consumption and calorie intake to step counts and time stamps of routine activities like waking up and going to bed, in hopes of constructing a body of evidence that might lead to some kind of clarity or conclusion.
What unfolded instead was an unraveling. Confronted with the repetition and patterns in my data, I began to question the very foundation of what I had labeled as “comfort.” Rather than offering insight, the process surfaced feelings of complacency, self-doubt, and disconnection. The more I tried to quantify my life, the more I felt disoriented by its apparent mundanity, both in public and in private. This booklet is the result: a reflection on my failure not just as a data designer, but as someone attempting to find meaning in patterns that only seemed to reinforce a sense of insignificance. How to Achieve Comfort is, in many ways, a failure — not in a self-deprecating sense, but in how its original purpose gave way to something messier, more introspective, and deeply personal.