A quiet desperation

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

In the book Walden, Thoreau describes a scene of going to the post office to check your box for mail. You make the journey into town to see whether or not you have received any letters. It truly is a coin flip whether or not you will have mail, especially considering you were not expecting any. And you haven’t anyone to write to. Or if you did, you haven’t put the effort in to writing them. And when you open your PO box and you pull those letters out you feel important.

We still feel this way about mail. Why do you think people have an Amazon addiction? Part of it is the joy of coming home and seeing boxes, little presents. Even when we get junk mail, it validates that we do live here and someone sees us, even if it is just as a potential customer. But when we get a letter from a loved one, it brings a smile to our face.

Modern mail is email, or better yet the text message. And we don’t just go to the mailbox once per day. The average American will check their phone 144 times. Can you imagine going to the mailbox that many times?

The first place we go when we wake up is our phone. We want the dopamine, that powerful feel-good chemical in our brain that encourages us to act in a certain way. Dopamine is activated by the colors on our phone screen. Dopamine floods our brain with every ring and ping. When a text comes in it reinforces that we are important to someone for something. We watch videos and look at pictures that inspire us or make us think or entertain us. We often see this as productive, and yet looking at our phone consumes over 4 hours of our life. Over 25% of waking hours are spent seeking for the next hit of dopamine on our phone.

We are living in the ultimate age of quiet desperation.

When Thoreau wrote his famous line, he was speaking on consumerism. That humans were living in a vicious cycle of working jobs they don’t like in order to afford a lifestyle they don’t need so they can look good in the eyes of people they don’t really know.

This is still true.

Today I see the cloud of desperation spilling out like a dark cloud. Deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol related deaths) are at an all time high. In life, despair has different symptoms than you might assume. I would argue that despair best shows itself in the constant pursuit of dopamine.

The message on the phone validates our existence, our importance. That we have not completely dissolved into the large mass of unknown individuals, but someone somewhere wants to talk to me.

Posting a picture of my family so others can affirm to me what I already know, as if their opinion of my family matters more than my own.

Binge-watching shows on the weekend to numb the pain of social anxiety rather than confronting why no one made plans with me to go out this weekend.

Rather than risk pursuing a job we love, we numb our discontent at work by scrolling social media when we get the chance. Little dopamine pick-me-ups to get us through the day.

Dopamine has become so abundant, so incorporated into our daily existence, many of us no longer know ourselves well enough to know that we are atrophying into despair. Many of us have not sat alone, without distraction, long enough to remember what our inner voice sounds like.

We will not solve this addiction to dopamine with more drugs prescribed by a therapist. Despair will not by eradicated by the pills from a pharmacy.

We need to build healthy habits with the things that give us dopamine. And once we return to a place where we are no longer slaves to feeling good, we can begin taking risk and pursuing lives of purpose and meaning.

If we are to solve the epidemic of quiet despair, it will happen through a pursuit of meaning.

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