The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
It seems to me self-evident that a person’s happiness stems directly from the relationship between what she takes the meaning, value, and purpose of her life to be and how closely she perceives herself to be living in accordance with whatever such meaning, value, and purpose she has defined. If a person is miserable, in almost every case I can think of the cause of her misery is either that her life is out of alignment with her values, or else that her values are out of alignment with reality. In order to attain happiness, an unhappy person must be willing to change either her behavior or her beliefs.
Looking closely at what we value today, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that masses of people are horrendously dissatisfied with their lives, that depression has arguably become a bona fide epidemic, and that genuinely tranquil, self-assured people come so few and far between that it often seems they don’t exist at all. Consider what we value, at least on a broad, societal level, as one can readily detect simply by glancing at the images of our mass media: money, preferably in excessive amounts; constant sexual stimulation and preoccupation with physical beauty; intellect, perhaps (but intellect expended on what?); sport; celebrity; and, lest we forget, regularly bearing witness to grotesque images of violence and gore—that covers just about everything, as far as I can tell. Why should we be surprised, then, when we find ourselves overworked to the brink of insanity; disappointed with our romantic lives; incapable of gracefully accepting the weathering of the years on our bodies; obsessive and anxious about producing “the next big thing,” whatever that might mean; emasculated by regular, unnecessary, and superficial comparison to athletes and film stars; and, perhaps on account of being constantly stuck in a state of mild anger owing to all the above, impervious to scenes of human suffering and bloodshed. The culture that envelops us from our earliest youth teaches us to value everything wrong.
Let us first examine this mythical belief that money brings happiness—a belief which has long poisoned so many people’s minds, and which has a doubly pernicious effect nowadays because great sums of money seem so attainable. It is true, I concede, that a man like Warren Buffett may derive a certain kind of freedom and pleasure from his vast fortune, having the ability to buy, quite literally, anything in the world he wants, anywhere, at any time. But to admire this sort of freedom is to acknowledge only one side of a double-edged sword, the other side of which is just as sharp and particularly liable to cut you to the quick. We must recognize that a man like Warren Buffett is, in spite of his tremendous financial freedom, also partially enslaved by his riches. Here is how you must think of it: if you lived a life in which you had as much money as he does, how much time do you think you would have to spend managing that money? The liberty that a man like Buffett lacks, and which simpler people have, is the leisure to neither know nor care about which way this or that market is moving. Buffett may be able to buy his dream mansion five thousand times over and have change to spare (which, as I understand, he actually refuses to do, being a man of more sincere character than we are accustomed to),1 but no matter what sort of home he lives in, he must always keep up to date on stocks, exchange rates, interest rates, supply and demand curves, and other hallmarks of trade. He may travel in comfort wherever he likes, cruising on a private jet—but no matter where he goes, I imagine he almost always has some sort of business meeting there, precluding the possibility of a real vacation. With his freedom limited in such a manner, what does a man so astronomically wealthy have that I may not have myself? Do the sun, moon, and stars shine any brighter for him than they do for me? Does he enjoy a good swim in the ocean any more than I do, and is he any safer in the water? Is a winter’s evening by the fireside any cozier, the hot chocolate any tastier, for him than it is for me?A
By no means is our quality of life so drastically improved by an abundance of wealth that we must spend all our time and energy straining to achieve it, countless thousands of people by such an error failing to achieve either a superb life or a great fortune. As Thoreau put it, “This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”2B Meanwhile, when it comes to the things we often picture ourselves doing with a large sum of money, like making a tour of the world, I am of the opinion that anyone (having cleared himself of debt, at least) may after a year or two of work take the next year off, purchase a bicycle, strap a tent onto the back of it, and carry himself straight across the country—no, the continent—no, the whole two continents of North and South America together! And while he gets to see the entire countryside up-close in its natural splendor, Buffett sees only fuzzy, indistinct patches of it from the window of his plane.C
When it comes to the next topic I have named—sexuality—unfortunately we cannot simply turn down the volume on this basic aspect of our nature as easily as we can our desire for wealth. Though I haven’t tried it myself, I imagine a complete abstinence and celibacy would be just as disappointing and unfulfilling as the absurd fantasies we often find ourselves burdened with in today’s world, thanks to the ceaseless bombardment of masculine and feminine beauty we receive at every commercial center we visit, however great or small, in this nation, in our northern and southerly neighbors, or anywhere else we might happen to go! Constant stimulation of the human sex drive is, in the modern world, unavoidable, pervasive, and inimical to our natural functioning, and we must face up to it honestly if we intend to make any progress away from its insidious effects.
I often get the sense that, deep down, each of us feels he or she would be better off dating one of those people of unparalleled and near-universal attractiveness: the men expect their girlfriends to look like Natalie Portman, and the women expect their boyfriends to be the spitting image of a 1990s Brad Pitt—at least, this is what we hope for in our more misguided moments, when we lack awareness of how absurd our desire is. To make myself clear, I see nothing wrong with our appreciation and admiration of beauty, per se: I like an attractive person just as much as the next guy, and I find our gravitation towards physical beauty altogether natural and evolutionarily sensible; surely the traits we seek in a partner are the ones our children stand to benefit from the most, and certainly we cannot expunge our DNA of the traces of code that give us our sexual preference—the love for this particular complexion of the skin, this hue of the iris, this shade and texture of the hair, this structure of the face, this curvature (or lack thereof) of the body, and so on. If we were given the choice to relinquish this aspect of our nature, most of us would only want to do so temporarily, or perhaps not at all, having no conception of what it would be like to live without it. The problem arises, though, when we become so obsessed with beauty, or perhaps just so accustomed to it, that we come to believe for no particular reason at all that our partner ought to look like a supermodel, and that something is wrong if she doesn’t. Instead of allowing our expectations to be set by whatever we see on TV, on the covers of magazines, on billboards by the highway, or, for Christ’s sake, even on the news,D we should acknowledge that, past a certain point, the quality of one’s sexual experience ceases to increase with the attractiveness of one’s partner. In other words: an orgasm is an orgasm regardless of who gives it to you, and as long as you are having sex with someone you admire and don’t find repulsive, you can pretty much be assured you are having good sex.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with pursuing the most attractive partner(s) you can find, if that’s what you want to do. Nor can I be bothered to go about slut-shaming women or accusing men of being womanizers. People should feel free to have consensual sex with whomever they want, whenever they want (except maybe at board meetings, community fundraising events, family reunions, holiday parades, and other such functions; I kindly suggest that you keep it in your pants at those times). However, if at some point you come to desire—as most of us eventually do—a more consistent and fulfilling relationship, and you long for genuine intimacy, then you must be willing to acknowledge that casual affairs based primarily on your partners’ level of attractiveness simply are not going to get the job done. No matter how much beauty you come by, and no matter how much fun you might have along the way, all your flings, one-nighters, and “mutually beneficial situationships” will ultimately leave you unfulfilled. All I have ever known to sustain a relationship is the kindness and good cheer of my partner. A loving, respectful person with compassion and humor will capture your imagination more and keep you satisfied longer than a perfectly sculpted human being who is arrogant and sour. Your partner may have his/her/their/its (okay, maybe not its) physical flaws, but as long as they arouse your desire and demonstrate a unique capacity to open the shutters on your better nature even in your darkest hour, you will have an abundance of happiness in your relationship.
If our romantic lives by and large tend to be frivolous and misguided nowadays, then our intellectual pursuits border on downright absurd. “Knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” we say, and then go about memorizing the names of each species of butterfly to be found in the United Kingdom, or perhaps some other such trivia as the capital city of every country in the world. What next—the name of each species of spider in the Western Hemisphere? The definitive list of all hamlets, villages, and country towns established in Germany since the late 1700s? What use have you for this knowledge, what purpose can knowledge serve if it lacks any sort of human practicality? Even our most brilliant physicists sometimes strike me as overly obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge, and I wonder if what really motivates them to solve problems about the nature of the universe is not so much the desire to do good for their fellow man as it is the desire to conquer a difficult challenge and claim everlasting importance by having some equation named after them. I have little admiration for an intellect that occupies itself with trivial pursuits, regardless of whether that intellect has the caliber of Einstein or an imbecile.
Yet what do we see droves of our most brilliant, misguided young people do year after year once they graduate from college, if not immediately set about wasting their time on petty, trifling, and vain matters of no consequence?E We all must have witnessed such a phenomenon at some point—upon conferral of his degree, a talented, smart, energetic individual with loads of potential willingly chooses to commit some forty, fifty, maybe even sixty or seventy hours a week to developing a marvelous new marketing strategy for Who Gives a Fuck, LLC, or else to take on an investment banking role for Oldman Ballsacks, Inc., so that he may help the rich make more money. A truly useful intellect, having no time for such inane affairs, bravely puts itself to work towards the sort of exalted purpose of which Thoreau spoke in his masterpiece, a practical achievement which enhances man’s experience of life in a way that can be felt and understood:
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.3
Now that is the task of a noble mind, not all this dabbling in useless information and excessive focus on “practical living”—practical for YOU, that is, insofar as it puts bread on your plate. Until our strongest intellectuals once again become dreamers who can combine a Romantic sense of meaning and beauty with a pragmatic benevolence and goodwill, humanity will not achieve anything of much value; rather, we will continue to stagnate, as we do today, in a cesspool of vanity and distraction, whilst meanwhile our planet and our fellow men suffer the consequences of our carelessness.
You will understand by now what I am getting at. When it comes to athleticism and celebrity it is more of the same. I appreciate Cristiano Ronaldo’s unbelievable handsomenessF and unmatched handling skills as much as everyone else, but what could any of his gifts mean in the context of my life? Watching men like Ronaldo play makes for an admirable spectacle, to be sure, but, as with the sleepless machinations of the startup-crazed yuppies who flock to our coastal tech centers—or even the legislative hubbub of Congress, for that matter—it serves no practical purpose and adds no meaning to my existence. The strength and skill of the athletes we praise so fervently moves me little, and, at the end of the day, I could go without watching another match; in fact, I would rather just play a match of my own, with my friends, even if it means setting up dirty trash cans for a goal and kicking a poorly inflated ball around an abandoned lot. The best kind of experience is the one you actually have, not the one you live vicariously.
The same reasoning applies even to the movies and TV shows I love so dearly, although I admit I would have a harder time relinquishing them than I would the sports broadcasts I watch from time to time. Ed Harris gives a stunning performance in Westworld, and, unlike Ronaldo’s handling skills, that does move me quite a bit, so I spend an hour checking in on what he’s doing every Sunday. Meanwhile, I don’t even spend an hour with my neighbor in the whole week. This is precisely where our obsession with celebrity comes from: we spend so much time viewing the faces and hearing the voices of popular actors that we think we have a more intimate relationship with them than we do with people we actually know, so when we see them in public we ogle them and fawn over their privacy-bereft bodies, even though in reality we don’t know them at all, but only the characters they play. This is why most celebrities—especially the more introverted ones, I would imagine—quickly grow weary of their admirers’ sycophantic behavior, become brash with their fans, and eventually cease to interact with the public at all (I mean, has anyone even seen Johnny Depp lately? Are we sure he still exists?). I would not be even remotely surprised to hear that the very famous see shrinks on a more regular basis than the common citizen; we may think we want this lifestyle for ourselves, but in reality we want no part of it.
The normalcy of violence is the final generational scourge I wish to speak of here. Regular, grotesque instances of brutality have become preeminent among the symptoms of our national sickness here in America, and it often seems we can hardly go a week without hearing of another tragic and fatal shooting,G either by a member of the public or by a member of the police—policemen shooting unarmed people, for Heaven’s sake! These are all, as Sebastian Junger recently commented during an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience (since removed from YouTube), symptoms of a national psyche that is tearing itself to pieces, and its people along with it. I am not one of those to make the ludicrous argument that video games and television shows cause violence, and surely it is preposterous for one of these public shooters to say that, at the moment he committed his crime, he was simply absorbed in the game, or whatever other sorts of ridiculous defenses these people have attempted to use in trial. Nonetheless, I will say this: it should strike us as a bit odd, and we should regard it with a fair dose of skepticism, that we are routinely exposed to such a vast amount of animated, choreographed, computer-generated, made-for-TV violence—that hardly a day goes by without us viewing an image of someone stabbed, shot, wood-chippered, axed, chainsawed, acid-bathed, or rocket-launchered to death. I can’t help but wonder how many such images I myself have seen in just twenty-four years of existence. And while such sights certainly do not make us violent (I don’t see your average video game addict going around killing people; in fact, to the contrary, I think most of them have a good deal of trouble just getting out of the house), I do believe they have the unintentional effect of partially desensitizing us to violence, of making violence seem unreal, since we always witness it at a distance and without any genuine consequences—and when we do actually see violence firsthand, many of us find ourselves traumatized, lacking any sort of mental framework with which to process the reality of human gore. It is quite possible that all the public shooters we have had in recent years were people who completely lost the sense that there would be real consequences to their actions—that other human beings had become, to them, no more significant than pixels on a screen.
This is the tragic downside of all the “progress”H the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age have brought us: The defining features of our generation are a lack of spiritually felt purpose and meaningful communal life. We graduate from college and go off to New York or San Francisco or Chicago or Houston—it doesn’t matter where; all cities are basically the same—only to be locked up in some “filing cabinet for widows and young professionals,” working a job whose meaning we know not for an indefinite period of time, all the while wondering who benefits from all this and why it has to be this way (Answers: “Only the rich” and “It doesn’t”). In our professional lives as in our romantic lives, little is seen of genuine commitment and deep fulfillment. I have seen, in my limited experience alone, a man who sweated blood through three years of law school at a top university to win himself a position at a major, high-status law firm confess that he was happier working his old job at $30,000 a year. I have heard a wealthy and successful doctor with an independent practice to her name say that medical school “wasn’t worth it.” I have heard a slew of young consultants complain that their jobs are “pointless.” Yet still we rise, early in the morning, often too early, skipping our breakfast—or any sort of morning nourishment, for that matter, physical or otherwise—only to work bizarre, unhealthy hoursI at jobs we hate, sacrificing our lives to the machine of capitalist production, money-mongering, and the only kind of self-improvement we know—that is, self-enrichment. I can count on one hand the number of professors I had at (Fancy Top-Tier University) who made me feel as though work could be something meaningful, worthwhile, sacred and divine, not just a paltry means of winning bread. Do not label me an out-of-touch idealist when I say these things: I am well aware of the harsh reality that we all have to compromise, to some extent, with the insatiable machine of capitalism—but allowing oneself to be swallowed alive by it is not a compromise; that is an acceptance of defeat on a moral and spiritual level.
How stupendously sad! A thousand geniuses at each of our top universities, yet you would be hard-pressed to find even three or four happily, tenaciously, self-assuredly pursuing a worthy cause. For every person of courage and character who strikes out into the world to chase a noble ambition, there are several hundred tech-world drones who fall into place behind her at Google and Facebook. At places like (Fancy Top-Tier University) especially, where we pride ourselves on innovation and risk, it seems to me that, contrary to the maverick image the school likes to project, hardly anyone there does anything novel, and fearlessness in the face of risk is practically nowhere to be found. Halfheartedly committing to work at a tech startup for a few years in the hopes that it will take off, and then promptly quitting in favor of a well-paid position at Facebook as soon as it runs into the inevitable hiccups, does not constitute authentic courage and risk; that is a commonplace, calculated economical decision of which anyone is capable. Furthermore, such people’s lack of concern for whether or not their company succeeds or fails reveals their lack of commitment to the cause and lack of faith in whatever their supposed dream was. A worthy dream comes with serious consequences attached, one of which is a painful, soul-crushing sense of failure when things do not go according to plan. A righteous person will follow her heart to engage in such a pursuit even with full knowledge of what is on the line: that is true risk. The realization of her dream demands a spirit capable of constantly revitalizing itself and renewing its hopes in the face of adversity: that is true courage. There can, of course, be great heroism in leading an ordinary life as well, but let us not pretend to be something magnificent when in reality we are quite average.
If, then, things are indeed as bad as I have made them out to be—and I think they truly are—what remains for us to do? In a world where obtaining money beyond the amount required to pay for our necessities does us no good; where our sensuality by and large leaves us disappointed and distracted from what we actually want in our relationships; where our intellect is, perhaps more often than not, wasted on matters of absolutely no consequence; where the lure of celebrity is merely an invitation to a different, perhaps even more psychologically disturbing, form of hell than the one we are used to; where our country suffers a sort of deep-seated, widespread mental illness on account of our spiritually bankrupt lives of loneliness and exhaustion—where, in such a world, is satisfaction to be found? How can we recover a true contentment and ease of life—a sense of meaning, duty, and worth within a loving community—when we live in a society that encourages us only to lock ourselves away in an apartment until, after many years of hard toil, we can finally afford to lock ourselves away in a suburb?
I am no doctor; I do not prescribe remedies for anyone. I can only urge you to embark on a long journey inward to answer these questions for yourself. In my own life, I have struggled greatly to arrive at answers that are suitable for me, and to strike some reasonable form of compromise with the bizarre, amoral freak show that is our social and economic order. My answers, however, are unique to me, and they need neither translate to nor serve as binding judgments for everyone else. The only advice I can offer to a reader as confused as I once was is to find a place of peace and quiet and build a routine that allows you to hear yourself think. After all, why should we be so surprised to hear thousands of our young professionals say their jobs are pointless when they spend four years of college positioning and preparing themselves for work, with hardly any time to actually think? Is that really what college is supposed to be—a prep program for office drones? There you go once again, saying your job is not worth doing—but when was the last time you actually spent a day thinking about what sorts of things would be worth doing to begin with? And do you honestly even think a single day would be long enough to establish your own personal value system and unique set of goals? Isn’t it much more likely to take a month? Mightn’t you need a whole year? Or, if it’s not already too late, you were to decide once and for all to stop being so afraid of what might happen if you use your time in college to sort out what life is for, perhaps you would spend a whole four years thinking things through—and then, finally, you would arrive at some provisionary form of certainty, or at least you would learn enough to be aware of how much you do not and cannot know, which is a victory in itself, and might just be so great a discovery as to repaint your entire picture of the world in more vibrant hues, as it did mine, a boy so thoroughly convinced, back then, of the absolute horror and emptiness of all things. The world we live in, far from being a meaningless void, is rich with beauty and possibility, and each of us has every right to define the meaning, value, and purpose of his life within it. At length, then, I return to my initial piece of advice: find your place of peace and quiet, a place where you can hear the voice of your true self; it is only a rare soul, like Einstein, who can simply block out all stimuli even in the heart of a bustling city and focus singlemindedly on his task. The more common among us need quieter places, away from the world’s useless churning and chatter. Make a habit of going to some such place as this—it is there that you will most readily develop a sense of your calling. Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately,J and we would be wise to do the same. A good number of us might never come back.
I will tell you also that life consists of felt experience, and that figuring out what constitutes your truth can only be a matter of felt experience as well. Be the one playing the soccer match, not the one watching it. Try a handful of jobs instead of settling for the first one that comes your way. See what works for you, what leaves you feeling happy, centered, and fulfilled even at the end of a long day. Be flexible; be open to change. Do not spend too long in a field that is clearly a waste of your time, but do not give up on a job too easily, either. If necessary, take some time off. Find a place of retreat and sanctuary, and begin anew there—this is something I have done. Know that the gentle, energizing feeling of a wind on your face may often serve as a better reminder of what you truly want in life than the wisdom of even the most brilliant philosopher.
Be kind and easy in your dealings with people. Drop the barriers which normally stand in the way of open and free interaction, and project your honest self, without reservation. We are all so similar at heart; there is no use in concealing your identity behind a wall of formality and politeness. Approaching someone with a confident and kindly gaze, with a spirit of curiosity and admiration rather than desire and self-interest, will always inspire immediate trust and a sense of warm camaraderie—which, I think, is the primary comfort each of us needs to survive in this chaotic mess of a world. To cultivate this attitude of persistent positivity, generosity, and kindness is the first step in overcoming the pervasive loneliness which characterizes our time.
It may be leveled against me that I speak only from a position of privilege—that I, a (Fancy Top-Tier University) graduate, clearly must have more leisure than other folks, more resources to draw upon so that I may buy myself time to think, and that I therefore do not understand the practical realities of life which drive so many decent people into a seemingly inescapable cycle of meaningless labor. I assure you this is not the case: whatever thinking I have taken the time to do has come at great expense to me, and most of my personal growth has stemmed from the necessity of dealing with copious, almost unendurable amounts of pain and suffering throughout the past few years of my life, during which I suppose I should have been busy “building a network” and “establishing myself” in the world of commerce. So much for noble values and codes of conduct like “protect and serve”; nowadays, the highest goal a man seems capable of conceiving for himself is “connect and earn.” Is gaining stable employment at a large bank, tech company, or consulting firm really the most valuable and glorious human achievement you can think of? Is being a doctor the only way to help people at the same time as making money? Or might it be the case that there is more richness to be attained in this life, more value to be drawn from it, than any such profession can offer—a wealth neither so obvious nor so easily attained as money, but a thousand times more valuable on account of its rarity? Life is a malleable thing; sculpt yours into a shape you can love, and you will be happier for it.
Wishing you way more than luck,
– Dan
This piece was originally published on the old Timeless Typewriter website on October 27, 2018.
Published: February 28, 2021.
Last edit: March 23, 2022.