My friend Gabriel just had a baby girl, and as we caught up over the phone this week, he told me how overwhelmed he is by everything in his life—not just the newfound responsibilities of being a parent, but marital strife, a pending move, overinvolved parents and in-laws, and two jobs (one of which will hopefully wrap up soon). Now Gabe is a resourceful person, probably the most resourceful I know. Yet his voice had an unmistakable strain to it, which, he said, was the result of trying to keep everything together. This is what I love about our friendship: it was natural for him to share this with me, and natural for us to then dive deeper into his experience.
He shared many of his recent thoughts, among them the idea that each time humans create a technology, they make something easier and less meaningful. He was already feeling inept as a parent due to an inability to breastfeed or soothe his baby, and the pile of Amazon packages by the door was only making things worse. He wondered aloud how humans ever raised children in the past and said that given the sheer amount of stuff available, he was finding it hard to distinguish between need and want, to say nothing of the dizzying array to choose from.1 (His description of strollers, in particular, made me nauseous.)
We also spoke of rising expectations for parenthood. His wife, Gabriella, is worried that their daughter is sleeping too much on her left side. That’s a far cry from when the goal was simply for the child to survive. There’s something wonderful about that goal, despite the hardship it implies, and I imagine that even when a child died, some of the pain was softened by the fact that such things happened. If that were to happen now, it would be all the more devastating because of its rarity. Because it’s not supposed to happen.
What struck me most in our conversation, though, was the concept of quiet desperation, a term I offered after Gabe described how he was feeling. I explained that Thoreau had coined the phrase in Walden, published over 150 years ago, and Gabriel immediately recognized it as a pithy label for his own emotional state. We both marveled for a moment at how poignant the phrase remains, written so long ago and under such different circumstances. Here we were, two friends in the modern world, entirely unfamiliar with much of what Thoreau and his contemporaries suffered—including the tuberculosis that took Thoreau’s life—saddled with the same mental anguish.
As we continued talking, Gabriel put it perfectly. For many problems in life, he said, there is the escape (or fantasy) route, the ideal route, and the current route. Let’s take the example of relationship problems. The escape route would be divorce, and when things are especially tough, Gabe spends a lot of time fantasizing about its positive aspects. But when he really considers it, more than just a fantasy, the negatives appear: he’s overcome with sadness at the idea of leaving the person he loves, doesn’t know what would happen with his daughter, has no clue where he would live, and balks at the idea of dating again—especially on apps.
BERNARD: But sometimes, Willy, it’s better for a man just to walk away.
WILLY: Walk away?
BERNARD: That’s right.
WILLY: But if you can’t walk away?
BERNARD [after a slight pause]: I guess that’s when it’s tough.2
So, while Gabriel spends a good deal of time casually fantasizing about escape, he admits that when push comes to shove, it’s not really an option—at least, not yet. The current route, though, is already bad and getting worse. It may not be sustainable. His attention naturally swings over to the ideal route: ideally, he and Gabriella would start communicating better. Well, what would that require? She needs to stop being so defensive. Every time we have a disagreement, she fires back like I’m attacking her personally, meaning we never get a chance to discuss the issue or come to a solution. Instead, we just fight about how defensive she’s being and then I give up. But moving into our new home will give us more space and take a lot of work off our hands, and so will ending my second job. Baby sleeping through the night will be a game-changer, too…we’re so tired and I know that doesn’t help…
It is the possibility of the ideal route coming to fruition that keeps us on the current route. “Quiet desperation” is being trapped between the fantasy of leaving and the hope of improving.3 The escape route beckons the more our desperation, or impatience, grows, but is often fraught with so many gut-wrenching consequences that only in the final hour will we entertain it, and sometimes not even then.
Meanwhile, if we can just hold on, and keep going, and maybe change this or that about our situation: “…tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And then one fine morning—”
Staying exactly where we are, despite our best efforts, is what causes desperation. The longer nothing happens, the more desperate we become. We must finally ask why it is quiet. Well, if we are not quiet—if we spit and rage, break things and say stuff we can’t take back—then we have already chosen, haven’t we? We’ve already doomed, or at least dented, the ideal route toward which all this misery and sacrifice and tolerance has been building. And so we purse our lips. We shut our mouths—for now. A decision will be made, sooner or later. For the moment, we must hold on. It is, as Gabriel mentioned quietly toward the end of our call, a miserable and lonely existence. I agreed, and at the same time couldn’t help but notice: that unmistakable strain to his voice had lessened.
Author’s note: At Living Fossils we will occasionally profile an emotional state that hasn’t received much attention in the literature, but that one of us, one of our friends, or one of our clients has experienced. Some of these may fall beneath the scope of an evolutionary explanation, but our hope is that some readers will benefit from seeing them expressed.
Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice has more to say on this.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
‘Quartering,’ or tying a person’s limbs to four horses that then ran in different directions, was a form of execution in the past and may serve as a good analogy here. We can imagine someone suffering from ‘quiet desperation’ to be tied to two horses pulling in opposite directions, one toward the ideal route and another toward the escape route, but neither horse pulling hard enough to move the person in any direction, nor both pulling hard enough to tear them apart and put them out of their misery.