Is There, as Thoreau Said, a Quiet Desperation of Ordinary Life?

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Few sentences from nineteenth-century literature have survived quite as successfully as Henry David Thoreau's observation that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It sounds modern enough to have been written yesterday. The commuter staring through the train window, the office worker counting the years until retirement, the businessman with a mortgage he cannot escape, the lonely pensioner eating dinner in front of the television: we immediately know what Thoreau meant.

Yet there is a temptation to treat his observation simply as a criticism of modernity. Industrial society alienated us, capitalism trapped us, technology isolated us, suburbia bored us, and now social media makes us compare ourselves endlessly with everybody else. There is something in all of these explanations, but desperation certainly did not begin with the steam engine.

Imagine human beings 30,000 years ago. A hunting party pursuing a large and dangerous animal faced the possibility of being gored, trampled or simply returning without food. A mother watching a sick child had no antibiotics and no emergency department. A broken leg could become a death sentence, while a failed hunt or bad season could threaten an entire group. These people surely knew desperation, perhaps at a level that most inhabitants of affluent societies can scarcely imagine.

What they may have known less often was Thoreau's quiet desperation.

Facing an immediate existential threat focuses the mind brilliantly away from pondering the meaning of existence. If a large animal is trying to kill you, there is little opportunity for an existential crisis about whether your life has meaning. If your family needs food before winter, the purpose of today's activities is not especially mysterious. Life presents a problem and you either solve it or suffer the consequences.

The same point applies throughout much of human history. The peasant spending the day swinging a chipper hoe may have wondered about God, death and the meaning of existence, but sheer physical necessity placed fairly strict limits upon the available hours for navel-gazing. Significantly, the people who leave us lengthy written reflections upon the emptiness, absurdity or meaninglessness of existence have generally not spent twelve hours a day behind a hoe. Writing existential philosophy requires, among other things, enough food, enough security and enough leisure to sit down and write it.

That is not to suggest that working people lack rich interior lives, or that hardship somehow makes people happy. Both propositions are obviously false. The point is simpler. Urgent necessity supplies its own purposes. If the crop must be planted today, today's purpose is reasonably clear. If a predator is approaching, the meaning of life temporarily reduces to remaining alive.

Affluence can remove those externally imposed purposes without supplying replacements.

Once the immediate battle for survival recedes, the mind gains the leisure to ask questions that survival previously answered for it. Why am I doing this? What is all this for? Why am I dissatisfied when I possess almost everything I once thought would make me satisfied?

I am reminded of Eugène Ionesco's Hunger and Thirst, which I read around half a century ago. My distant recollection is of the protagonist acquiring enough material freedom to gain something potentially more troublesome: time for introspection. Whether every detail of that fifty-year-old memory survives checking, the underlying idea fits Thoreau beautifully. Remove the urgent problem of obtaining bread and human beings may begin wondering why they are eating the bread in the first place.

There is consequently a paradox at the centre of civilisation. Human beings have devoted thousands of years to creating enough security and abundance to free themselves from the desperate struggle for existence. To a remarkable degree, modern civilisation succeeded. Then some of us used the resulting free afternoon to become anxious about the meaninglessness of existence.

That sounds flippant, but there is a serious point underneath it. Material progress can answer the question "How shall I survive?" It cannot answer "Why should I live?" The first question can be solved by engineering, medicine, agriculture and economics. The second belongs to philosophy, religion, family and the individual's conception of a worthwhile life. Quiet desperation arises in the gap.

That is why Thoreau's adjective is so powerful. The desperation is quiet because respectable modern life requires it to be quiet. You get up, wash, eat breakfast, travel to work, answer messages, pay bills, come home, watch something, sleep and repeat. From outside, nothing is obviously wrong. Indeed, by historical standards almost everything may be remarkably right. You have heating, refrigeration, dentistry, anaesthesia, clean water and instant communication, luxuries beyond the dreams of emperors. Yet material security does not answer the question of what one's life is for.

Thoreau saw this long before smartphones and office cubicles. In Walden, he attacks the strange way people become servants of the lives they have constructed. They acquire property and obligations, then discover that maintaining those possessions and commitments consumes the very life they were supposed to improve.

That insight has aged remarkably well. Modern society has perfected the art of turning luxuries into necessities and necessities into monthly payments. A person can earn more than his grandparents could have imagined and nevertheless feel permanently behind. The larger house requires the larger mortgage. The better income creates expectations of the better car and more expensive holiday. Technology that supposedly saves time makes the employee reachable at every hour. Convenience eliminates one burden and creates three subscriptions.

But economics explains only part of Thoreau's desperation. Human beings also live with time, and unlike animals we possess an uncomfortable awareness of its passage. Birthdays accumulate. Children grow up. Parents become old. Friends die. The face in the mirror changes gradually enough that we scarcely notice until an old photograph suddenly tells us what has happened.

At twenty, life appears almost infinitely renewable. A career can be changed, a country crossed, a relationship begun again. There is always next year. Later, arithmetic begins intruding upon possibility. There may still be many good years ahead, but there are plainly fewer of them than there once were. That knowledge produces its own quiet desperation.

So does regret. Almost everybody eventually encounters the roads not taken: the person one should have married or perhaps should not have married, the profession one might have pursued, the book never written, the business never started, the apology never made, the journey indefinitely postponed. Most of these things do not produce operatic misery. They simply sit quietly in the background.

Perhaps that is why Thoreau's sentence continues to resonate. Most human unhappiness is not theatrical. The desperately unhappy man does not necessarily stand on a cliff shouting at the heavens. He may be sitting beside you on the bus. The woman wondering where her life went may be smiling at the supermarket checkout. The apparently successful professional may privately wonder whether forty years of meetings, promotions and paperwork added up to anything worth having.

Nor should we imagine that wealth cures the problem. Poverty creates desperate material problems, and it would be foolish to romanticise them. But once basic material needs have been satisfied, another set of questions emerges. What am I doing? Who needs me? What have I made? What will remain when I am gone?

The prehistoric hunter probably had brutally clear answers to some of these questions. His group needed him. His children needed food. The fire needed maintaining. The animal had to be tracked. Survival supplied purpose whether he wanted it or not. Modern abundance can produce the paradox of having fewer immediate threats but vastly more opportunities to wonder what anything means.

This does not mean we should envy prehistoric humanity. Anyone genuinely nostalgic for the Stone Age should try dentistry without anaesthetic before making a final decision. The point is subtler. Civilisation can solve the problem of physical insecurity without solving the problem of human purpose. Indeed, by removing some of the constant struggle for survival, it gives us enough leisure to notice the second problem.

Thoreau's own answer was simplicity. Strip away unnecessary wants. Refuse to measure life by possessions. Pay attention to nature, thought and experience. Do not discover at the end that you have spent your life maintaining the machinery of living rather than actually living.

There is wisdom there, although few of us are going to build a cabin beside Walden Pond. The practical lesson is not necessarily to abandon society but to distinguish between what matters and what merely demands attention. Modern life is extraordinarily good at confusing the two. An email can demand attention without mattering. A bank balance matters but is not the meaning of life. Status can consume enormous energy while disappearing almost completely after retirement. Possessions that once seemed indispensable eventually become things somebody else has to clear from the house.

Relationships, useful work, intellectual curiosity, family, friendship, creation, faith, service, physical activity and contact with the natural world have a different character. They connect daily existence with purposes extending beyond the next purchase or notification.

Perhaps Thoreau was therefore both right and slightly unfair to "the mass of men." Desperation is not proof that ordinary people have foolishly chosen bad lives. Some desperation is built into being human. We are vulnerable creatures who know that we are vulnerable. We want things we cannot always have, lose people we love and possess the peculiar intelligence required to understand that our time is limited.

The caveman knew desperation when the hunt failed and winter approached. We know that desperation too when illness, unemployment, bereavement or disaster suddenly breaks into ordinary life. But civilisation added another possibility: being safe, fed and comfortable while feeling that something essential has nevertheless escaped us.

Desperation is probably as old as humanity. Quiet desperation requires quiet. And quiet, historically speaking, has been something of a luxury.

Perhaps that is the deeper truth hidden inside Thoreau's famous sentence. Our ancestors struggled desperately to obtain what we possess: safety, food, warmth and time. Having obtained them, we discovered that time itself can become a problem. It gives the human animal enough room to contemplate not merely how to remain alive, but what being alive is supposed to mean.

Thoreau went to the woods because he wanted to "live deliberately." That may ultimately be more important than his diagnosis of desperation. We do not need his cabin. We need the deliberateness.

The ancient hunter had necessity to tell him what mattered. Modern people have considerably more freedom, which leaves us with the harder task of deciding for ourselves. Perhaps that is both the privilege and the burden of civilisation. We have escaped many of the desperate struggles of our ancestors, only to discover a form of desperation they had less leisure to entertain. The trick is not to confuse having time to wonder what life means with having no reason to live it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden