The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

– Thoreau

Do most live lives of quiet desperation? If so, why?

Are they quiet because they lack a voice? Or do they not know how to speak?

What is the source of the desperation? Is it due to a lack of a path forward?

Or maybe the desperation itself is quiet. A desperation lurking but still unknown.

It is an intriguing and troubling quote. Thoreau hits upon a nerve that our lives are not what we want nor what they could be.

This same sense that has prompted countless quests – to find self and place. Frodo needed to take the ring to Mordor, as much as the ring needed to go.

There is an elegance and nobility to the great quest.

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

Jack London

I am troubled by the state of many in our modern culture. We live in a time of comfort and limitless entertainment, a steady drip of dopamine and escapism.

For far too many have anesthetized themselves into a place of comfort and perceived happiness. They arrive into a place that is good-enough, if not great.

Living according to this playbook has a singular mandate – maintain the comfort. It is devoid of forward motion, instead subsisting in a state of pure reactivity – defense of the status quo. But we would hardly say these are lives well lived.

There is an alternative – a place of movement. A step away from desperation.

But a step to where?

There are quiet places also in the mind…But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupation in my head—round and round continually.

Aldous Huxley

Direction requires contemplation – space to consider the path ahead. This sort of self-reflection is ground trodden by the few. As Pascal observed,  ‘that most will do anything they can to avoid sitting quietly in a room alone.’ Our smartphones mean we are never truly alone.

Within the space for contemplation though, a first step can emerge – a moment of intention. It is hard to write about intention without sounding like an infomercial. 

I grow more convinced that intention is a primary difference we see in some lives vs. others. Intention is making a decision.

Choosing a direction and setting off towards it. It resists the passivity of standing still, as well as the reactive mode of the superficially contented.

In its nascence, the Edenic earth received a mandate for growth. “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” instructed the Creator. This command is as close to an operator’s manual for life on earth.

Fruit, multiplication, filing – these are all words of growth. There is an imperative to live with a growth, not comfort, orientation.

Do you / I possess the desire for continued growth? Do we have the intention to observe where growth can be cultivated? Are we willing to engage in the suffering and sacrifice to move towards it.

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

Socrates

To do so requires a sense of restlessness with the status quo. It envisions a future where new growth becomes possible. 

Can we stomach the quiet of contemplation long enough to allow intention to emerge. Do we have the fortitude required to bring growth to bear?

Or is the siren song of perpetual leisure too loud?