My read of The Comfort Crisis is that it's the outdoorsy counterpart to David Brooks's The Second Mountain: they're self-help books for straight white guys who work comfortable jobs that aren't serving any profound purpose. And there's a real audience of guys who grew up in suburbia with a functional middle class family, got ushered into a reasonable college, and now look at spreadsheets all day.
But writing about how hard your fly-in caribou hunting trip was, or any other super expensive "challenge" that you can concoct was, comes off pretty hollow to people who haven't been on the glide path in life. It's probably not going to resonate with someone who grew up with unstable housing in New York, or in a refugee camp in Kenya, or as a gay teenager in rural South Dakota with evangelical parents in the '80s.
There's a reasonable message for a somewhat narrow audience in books like The Comfort Crisis, and that's great so far as it goes. What irks me a bit about them, though, is a tendency to pretend that everyone is similarly comfortable, and an avoidance of any suggestion that the intended audience needs these books as an anecdote to the massive tailwinds and privileges they've had in life, while the vast majority of people on earth and even in the US don't need it because their lives are not comfortable. The presumption that the straight white male keyboard jockey is the norm covers over the genuinely uncomfortable reality that they're really not the norm.
