This weekend I finished Walker Percy's
The Second Coming, which deals in large part with the negative psychological (and spiritual) side effects of living a life of seemingly peaceful abundance (Percy calls this, I think, a "living death"). I'm still processing the book and trying to figure out what Percy is trying to say (when I read Percy the challenge is to figure out what he is putting forward as true, or probably true, and what ideas he is putting out as false--you kind of have to go back through the book and jot down ALL the definitive "truth" statements he has characters make, and then deal with each one on their own merits to see, what if anything, is true about the statement). But, when I saw the Heinlein quote above from Jacob, this definitive truth statement from
The Second Coming came to mind:
The name of this century [20th] is the Century of the Love of Death. Death in this century is not the death people die but the death people live. Men love death because real death is better than the living death. That's why men like war, of course. Bad as wars are and maybe because they are so bad, thinking of peace during war is better than peace. War is what makes peace desirable. But peace without war is intolerable. Why do men settle so easily for lives which are living deaths? Men either kill each other in war, or in peace walk as docilely into living death as sheep into a slaughterhouse.
I think this gets at what Percy is talking about with his concept of "everydayness"; and the numbness of that everydayness.
Funny, given that this is the "early retirement extreme" forum, the concept of "early retirement" is another theme of this book, which Percy is linking to the concept of "living death" and of how to find meaning when living in a world of seeming peace and abundance. Another quote from the book:
Early retirement is one of the major causes of depression.
Again, with Percy's fiction the challenge is to figure out whether he means this to be a statement of truth or a statement of truth that is actually false, and/or what sort of nuance needs to be read into this. But, notably, the book's protagonist (an
extremely wealthy early retiree, whose immense wealth was due both to marrying rich but also to making it to the absolute pinnacle of his profession) seems to ultimately find resolution in part by going back to work, simply for work's sake. Seriously, Percy published this book in 1980 and the words "early retirement" appear throughout the book.
ETA: On the "early retirement" angle, there's a part in the book when our early retiree (who is 43 years old, I think--same as me, and a lawyer; perhaps why the book had such an impact on me) ends up in an actual old folks' home, sort of; though it takes him awhile to realize that's what happened--and then he does:
Jesus Christ, he thought. I'm in the old folks' home.
And . . .
Strange. He had not spent a week at St. Mark's [the old folks' home] and already he was looking forward to the Morning Movie.
ETAx2: I think the parallel I'm seeing between the Heinlein quote and what I suspect is the main theme of the Percy book is that there's kind of a spectrum of sustenance and comfort--at the one end you've got the hunter-gatherer type who doesn't really know where his next meal is coming from, and who will starve to death if he doesn't figure that out, and who constantly has to be aware of the fact that the people in the neighboring tribe want to kill him and his tribe members. And at the other end you've got a guy sitting in an old folks' home with every physical sustenance and comfort need met by someone else, such that the only thing he needs to worry about is getting up and ready in time so as to not miss the "Morning Movie." And, clearly, something spiritually, or psychologically, or whatever is lost along the way as you move toward the Morning Movie end of the spectrum.