Home Recreation: A Way of Life Modern society tends to fragmentize life Sports Films History Baseball: The Components of Profit Estrogen and Antagonists Diet and Nutrition The Vitamins Vitamin B Vitamin C Vitamin D Vitamin E Let the stars size up your shopping style Astrology: Magic or Science? Jamaica For Cyclists Maine: Earliest Inhabitants The passion for football Changes in Body Weight The Metabolism and Energy Transformations of Healthy Man Normal Activity Restricted by the Conditions of Experiments Metabolism During Specific Activities and Movements Public Colleges M to N N to Z What Is It We Want? Directed Thinking On Being Oneself Economics Is a Branch of Biology Life Is Also Frustration How Goods are Bought and Sold Leisure and work The Pecuniary Standard of Living The Uses of Time Teaching People to Want Things Art as leisure The Loss of Privacy The Great Emptiness	Life Is Also Frustration Man is the foreseeing animal, and his foresight always holds a shadow. Some are acutely conscious of it; to others it looms up disquietingly when the changing seasons or the evidences of change in themselves remind them of the passing of time. No matter what consolations they seek, no matter what spiritual resources they invoke, no matter to what distractions they resort, the shadow is never wholly exorcised. It is the shadow of the inevitable passing of youth to age and so to extinction. When that thought holds the mind, it seems as though the road moved downhill all the way, down from the morning sun into the deepening valley. In Wordsworth's phrase, we travel "daily farther from the east." And for great multitudes the valley still contains, besides its proper fears, the specter of poverty and dependence, though this particular terror of the valley is one that social man now has the means to overcome. But there wait also weakness and loneliness and disease and obsolescence and impotence and beyond these the crouching finality. A certain irony of it all has obsessed the minds of various poets, philosophers, and common men-the thought that the end of life levels all the differences in which mortal men take pride. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Or again we have Hamlet holding the skull of the jester Yorick and saying to Horatio: "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come." The dreams of youth rarely come true; and if sometimes they are achieved, the achievement may be empty of all the elation for the sake of which it was pursued. Success brings new anxieties and greater fears. A short flowering of brave hopes and brighter prospects, and then the increasing weight of cares and the downward path. The words of the Preacher convey the message: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Life has indeed its quota of frustration, but the picture we have presented is somewhat out of focus. A goodly part of the vanity of it all is not to be attributed to life's conditions but to our lack of wisdom. When men vex themselves over trifles, when they get enraged over fancied slights, when they spend themselves to outdo their neighbors, when they patronize their "inferiors," when they scramble for wealth they know not how to enjoy and for power they know not how to use, anxiously amassing means to no ends, forever hustling to get nowhere faster--they add a new dimension to the pathos of living. So little time, so little fulfilment. So much vain endeavor, so much crippling of one another's chances, so much waste of war, so much abnegation of heart and of mind. Thus frustration looms everywhere ahead. Men move brashly forward, not to victory, but to false means of victory, and as they move, the thought of the goal slowly seeps out of them, so that to win is only to lose. So much pride and so little mastery. So much seeking and so little reward. So much contriving, but all for what? For all this climbing, youth still at length must take the downward road. The bright fires burn lower. The gay song dies in the deepening valley. Man, by his exploitations and his misdirected conflicts, by his cunning in devising ever more wonderful techniques of power, by the consequent expansion of his ambitions, pursues more feverishly greater ambitions and prepares for himself yet greater frustrations. So much of it all is due to false expectations and therewith to mistaken calculations. We think things, possessions, position, power, will bring us the satisfactions we crave, and when and if we acquire them we create only the appetite for more. We are embittered and jealous because others do better than we, or gain recognition we think should be ours, or have capacities we lack. The less is always the itch for more, and the more is always the relative less. But the fault is not our competitiveness, certainly not our urge to excel. It is the lack of goals toward which to direct our restive energies. We must cultivate our own garden and find the joy of doing it in our own hearts. Frustrations will still beset us, but the satisfactions we find will be intrinsic, for we shall be finding ourselves, and the sense of the worthwhileness of the quest will sustain us. Our false expectations are applied to others as well as to ourselves. We require them to follow in our footsteps, and if we have any power over them we harry them to believe like us, to act like us, to have the same interests as ours. This product of our conceit and our failure to understand adds grossly to the frustration of others, and of ourselves in the process. I remember being impressed by the wisdom of a father whose son was considerably less intellectual than his parent, though he had other aptitudes of his own. The son, failing to meet expectations, became morose and indrawn. The father, coming to realize what was happening, went quietly and patiently to work, taking discreet opportunities to show that the business of living is to make the best of what we are, that the worth of endeavor lies not in what is given to us but in the fortitude to use well whatever we may have. He showed the vanity of pride in any superiority of gifts, that it is merely a matter of scale, and that an athlete wins high honor for doing the mile in four minutes though any mongrel dog would look with contempt on such a record. Without ever seeming to preach at his son he made the point that the struggle is not for the sake of the applause or the prize but for the sake of one's own integrity. I give only the tenor of this counsel, not the wise manner of it. It is in blessed contrast to the way of those who prod their sons to follow alien paths in the quest for achievements the latter are unqualified to seek and disinclined to pursue. So we multiply the ills to which flesh is heir. There is a curious contrast here within our modern civilization. On the one hand it brings many liberations from dangers and privations and necessities that have plagued mankind through all past time. A multitude of diseases have been conquered and others subdued. A multitude of new opportunities of the most diverse kinds have been opened up. In the more advanced countries provision is made for the decent support of old age. The span of life has been greatly extended. The standard of living has risen for vast numbers. There is every reason to expect further gains, far greater gains, along the same road. In this sense progress is triumphant. Look on that picture and on this. Is the sense of frustration removed or greatly alleviated by these great advances? It would be hazardous to answer "Yes." It is not merely because, like spoiled children, we want more the more we get. It is in large measure because we so constantly frustrate one another. And it is also because we have so geared up the conditions of our civilization that we are subject to new entanglements, new worries, and new strains that wear the emotions and the nerves. In this latter respect our whole civilization may be compared to the condition of automobile transportation in some of our large cities. We have excellent roads and speedy cars, but much of the time we must move slowly, and if one vehicle breaks down it may reduce to halts and tedious crawls a long procession of following vehicles. Then when we reach our destination we find no place to park. So we fret and fume and miss our engagements. We are meshed in a world of elaborate organization that generates all kinds of stresses. So many things can get out of joint and thwart our purposes. Life is also frustration, but much of it must be attributed not to nature nor to fate but to our own misguidance. We create a great network of organization and get tangled in its meshes. We discover the secrets of power, we learn to control natural energies of incredible magnitude, and become their slaves or their victims. We are so advanced in our contrivance and so backward in the wisdom to use it. Mostly we frustrate ourselves when we frustrate others. We make so much of our differences and so little of the more important things we have--and are--in common. Beneath our striving and our hustling, beneath our envies and our jealousies, we all need the same things. We all need affection and the regard of others. We all need the warmth of an abiding place. We all need the free use of our constructive capacities. We all need sustainment and a hope for the future. We all need to be in some sense understood. These needs are compatible as between the members of a community, the near community or the great community. So much and so often, in our treatment of others, we know not what we do. We do not try to understand. We ignore their feelings and their needs, which may or may not be ours. And what we do and what we don't do recoil on ourselves. So the circle of misunderstanding widens. We pay a heavy price for trifling returns. Therein lies the pity of it. Moreover, the sense of frustration is aggravated by our own unreal fears. There is melancholy in the knowledge that youth must so quickly pass. There is pathos in the thought that the clock ticks out the little lives of us all, forever moving inexorably toward the darkness that is the end of our day. But the inference that the road is downward all the time, from sunlit youth to the deepening shadows of the valley, is demonstrably false. The notion nevertheless holds many in its spell as they behold in themselves the signs of departing youth or of advancing age. I remember sitting at a dinner party next to a lady unknown to me. She joined at first gaily in the idle conversation. Later, as I turned toward her, she seemed to be revolving some depressing thought. On being challenged, she said abruptly, "Today is my birthday. I'll never be thirty-six again. It makes me feel so old.""Then you make yourself feel so old," I replied. The response may not be adequate, but it is still relevant. For we inherit a pattern of youth and age that dates us by the calendar and not by our own feelings. And this calendar is in any event obsolete. It is a tradition inherited from a society where women were "old" at thirty and men were often "too old" at forty, a society in which the average span of life was only half of what it is in the western world today. Under these conditions the metaphor of the darkening valley and the downward road was convincing enough. Unconquered diseases lay everywhere in wait to cripple or to kill. Epidemics swept mercilessly through unprotected populations. Inadequate nutrition and the bleakest poverty drained the vitality of the masses. The strength of youth was quickly sapped. The old tradition lingers on. But now it is appropriate only to a few of the more muscular forms of achievement. The boxer is on the decline after thirty. The football player can hold his own perhaps a few years longer. But this kind of muscular prowess plays a lessening part in the range of human activities, and no part at all in the great array of the abiding concerns of life. Over these major areas of man's interest and endeavor, where judgment and knowledge and experience rule, where the spiritual, intellectual, and social aspects of life are foremost, the metaphor of the downward path no longer holds. Through a lengthening period of maturity the path may well lead upward to greater achievement. And the sense of the worthwhileness of living may not be diminished, but rather enhanced. Life is still also frustration, but the sum of it is magnified by needless misconceptions and needless misunderstandings. If we could remove what is removable, if we cared for the art of living as we care for the technique of doing, the great adventure would take on a new zest and a new bravery. Its full worth would appear, but also the true nature of the tragedy the story still contains, cleared of all the meaner, needless tragedies that now confuse the record. There is still disappointment and loss and regret. We still "look before and after and sigh for what is not." There is still the irremediable end, and for those who really live it always comes too soon.