Fight for Your Man Caves and Your Comfort Foods

By Dato’ Dr. Ooi Kee Beng; Editorial in Penang Monthly, December 2023

YOU HAVE YOUR favourite places to be in. Favourite rooms within whose walls you feel safe, where you feel at home. There, you relax. The knot in your stomach loosens, your breathing slows and grows deeper, and your frontal lobe gives way to other senses.

Your ego subsides. There is no risk at hand, no threat; you put your psychological weapons down.

When you miss home, that is probably what you miss. In these places, you can indulge in yourself. Safe from the world, safe in the world.

You refuel, reset and rejuvenate. And you re-emerge prepared, your thoughts in order, your place in the world reassured.

Equally important to your sanity while out in the world are the reserves, the asylums, the refuges you develop in life. Situations where you can catch your breath. Your safe houses. Your security blankets. Your man caves.

These can be people whose presence you prefer; friends and acquaintances who stimulate you, and encourage you.

These can be preferred activities, like a jog or browsing in a bookstore or a stationery shop.

Or these can be food. You have your favourite food, your favourite hawker stall, your favourite restaurant.

But meals are one thing. Beyond that, and way more remarkable, are your comfort foods, and your comfort drinks.

These can be anything. There does not have to be any logic to why you would have a certain comfort food and not another. These foods are snapshots of your psychological journey through life, of the happy spots in your emotional life to which you return whenever you can.

Conservatism Where It Counts Most

It is probably here, in what you wish to put into your mouth to soothe your stomach and to reassure your soul, that you are most conservative. While you would be conscious whenever you retreat into your place of solace that you are resting your soul, you may not be as aware when you eat a comfort food that you are, just as surely, sneakily taking a break from the challenges that life never stops lobbing at you. But you surely are. And you need to be doing that.

What I wish to do here, in talking about man caves and comfort foods, is to remind us of how much we actually need them. Urban living is about confronting new situations, new people, new possibilities. Day in and day out. With social media, and more so after Covid-19, work life and home life are fused. Private life and public life have coalesced. Individual space has shrivelled.

You and I need solitude more than ever. Why? Because when in your favourite room, what do you tend to do nowadays? Go on social media? Binge on Netflix? Drown in TikTok?

Solitude requires silence. And silence requires minimal stimulation.

When you feel like getting away from things, what do you do nowadays? You are prompted to take a vacation and fly off somewhere new. More challenges, more things to worry about, and often under the excuse of experiencing new things, under pressure to keep up with the Joneses, or under the illusion that you save by spending on flight or hotel rebates.

My bet is that we do not really know where our refuges lie nowadays. They have been camouflaged, absorbed into public life. I bet we seldom recognise our comfort foods as our comfort foods anymore. I bet we no longer know when we are in retreat and resting, because retreating and resting are consumer products done in groups and by groups. Our comfort foods are consumer products too, so how are we to know that we have withdrawn to fight again, and not merely consuming and flowing with the series of choices in daily modern life?

Answer? Well, I would think we can do that by making our choices conscious. By being mindful of our need to seek asylum, to find comfort and to reset our soul every now and then.

In short, crowding is a growing human problem. Not only in population density, but also in psychological space, in daily activities. Meaning gets diluted in such crowded existence.

So, make sure you make space for yourself, in your head, in your stomach, in your life. Outside of external demands.