Confucius isn't simply declaring that virtue beats comfort—he's identifying two fundamentally different ways of paying attention. The superior man has trained his mind to reflexively turn toward questions of right action, the way a compass needle finds north, whereas the common man's thoughts naturally settle on ease. What's subtle here is that he's not condemning the latter for moral weakness so much as observing it as a difference in mental habit, something grooved into how you think rather than what you choose in any single moment. Watch someone decide whether to give up their seat on the train: their mind either automatically scans for who might need it, or it simply doesn't; this isn't a heroic decision but the result of which direction their thinking habitually points.