most men live lives of quiet desperation

“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.

Let’s roll.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. I hope that you will as well. If you’re ready for a new journey, one that will lead to a better marriage, better parenting, better fitness, a better career, and a better life experience, join me. I plan to take my family on a tremendous journey. We can be good men who are good at being men. We can incorporate traditional masculinity while rejecting the mistakes of the past. It’s time that we promote and reclaim these masculine virtues and apply them in our day. And the consequences are clear: more suicide, more depression, and more discontentment than ever before. As a result, most men have not developed their masculinity. It ignores the need for the masculine virtues of strength, courage, skillfulness, or honor. Our culture promotes comfort, pleasure, entertainment, and leisure. I’m convinced that when men are both good men and good at being men, women and children will also thrive. Most of us are good men, but it’s time for us to get better at being men. The life that society has tried to force us into is not working. There’s more to life than we’ve experienced. The strength, courage, and ability that sits inside of us can save the world. While many will tell you that men are the cause of the bulk of the world’s problems, I tell you that we will be its salvation. I’m here because I want to exchange the good for the great. I’m Stephen Marshall, an attorney, a husband of over 20 years, and a father of four. We feel the “quiet desperation” that Thoreau observed. Our families, our careers, our health, and our accomplishments are not what we envisioned. We’ve become too comfortable, too safe, too scared, too stable, too fat, too busy, too bored, too depressed, and too insignificant. We have good jobs, good wives, and good kids.īut when we get a moment to reflect, we realize that we’ve given up on our dreams. I don’t mean we haven’t been generally successful, because we have. For too many of us, things didn’t quite work out like that. We intended to take life by storm and dominate it. Thoreau famously wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Despite our advancements in civilization and technology since Thoreau’s day, his words still speak deeply to many men today.