![]() And on the cycle goes you always seem to be running after something, but you’re really just running in place, stuck in a hamster wheel of desire. You then seek for another “hit” of pleasure, only to become similarly desensitized to it. You’ve risen a level, but so have your expectations, so that your happiness falls right back to where it was in the first place. This puts men on what modern scientists call the “hedonic treadmill” once you make more money, or get a new possession, or reach a goal, it at first makes you happier, but then you adapt to the new circumstances. The problem with the desire for externalities is that they ever multiply and never reach an end the fulfillment of one merely begets the itch for another. This was essentially an inward journey, rather than an outward one, and in fact, externals could often get in the way of the quest.ĭesperation, Thoreau thought, came from having too many wants. His aim was to know himself, and to preserve this self sovereign in the face of the pressure to conform to deadening conventionalities. He was ever on the hunt for the sublime and transcendent, and the wild that hid not only beneath civilization, but in a man’s own spirit. Life in its fullest form.Īpproaching the world with imaginative openness, Thoreau lived for intense insight and for direct experience life was not to be experienced second hand. For while Thoreau wasn’t ambitious for the traditional status markers held up by society, he was ambitious for something else: life. Yet in some ways this criticism misses the mark. Indeed, Thoreau’s friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, thought that if his protégé had one flaw, it was a lack of ambition. And even when it came to that writing, while he did care about his works being read and praised (at least by those he respected), he was unwilling to alter them in order to court a broader audience. Instead, he structured his life to allow for as little work, and as much writing and meditative leisure as possible. He refused to dedicate himself full-time to his father’s pencil manufacturing business, though he possessed the mechanical acumen and inventiveness that could have turned him into something of an industrial magnate. True success in Thoreau’s view thus cannot be understood in terms of monetary or conventional values, or even in the kinds of epic adventures that show well on Instagram.Ī dedicated homebody, he rarely traveled far from home. “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,-that is your success.” Less quoted, however, is the way Thoreau defined “success”: “if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” And indeed, another one of Thoreau’s most frequently quoted lines is this: ![]() Thoreau’s famous quote - “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation” - is most frequently used as a reason for following one’s passion and achieving a life which avoids the mediocrity of playing it small and attains to extra-ordinary success. So what did Thoreau mean, anyway? And if a private plane isn’t necessary to make an escape, how can men truly avoid living a life of quiet desperation? The Desperate Treadmill of Desire Yet while his oft-quoted observation is not typically used in contexts quite as incongruous as that, it is still thrown around a lot in ways that don’t align with the philosopher’s own intention. The aphorism is a paraphrase of what Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walden (the actual quote begins “The mass of men live lives…”).Īnyone with even a pretty cursory understanding of Thoreau’s life and philosophy knows that such a hedonistic, materialistic, jet-setting lifestyle isn’t exactly what he had in mind with that line. Most men live lives of quiet desperation. ![]() Several years ago I saw a photo on Instagram in which a playboy-esque lifestyle guru was sitting on a private plane, surrounded by sexy women in bikinis, piles of money, bottles of champagne, and a cache of semi-automatic rifles.
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