\by Don Hall

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
—Henry David Thoreau

In 1845 Thoreau built a small hut on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, where he lived in solitude for two years. It was his experiment in simple, grounded living which, he hoped, would enable him to gain some insight into the primary realities of life. I suspect it was also his way of turning off the noise of the society which surrounded him. He still walked to Concord daily, saw people, gave lectures. He still wrote for others to read.

It was his own illusion of solitude, of separating himself from the hustle and bustle of daily life amongst the other humans. That existence, in Concord, MA, included the recent discovery of the telegraph as just a year before Samuel B. Morse sends the message, "What hath God wrought" over the first telegraph line from Washington, DC, to Baltimore, MD. The population of the country had grown to an alarming 17 million, Texas had just become annexed as a part of the United States, a war with Mexico was being waged, and the term 'manifest destiny' was coined to explain the idea that the United States was destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent.

Thoreau needed to get away from it all and devised an experiment that allowed him that very exit.

In 1973, anthropologist Santiago Genovés embarked on his own experiment to get away from it all but with a twist on Walden. Instead of solitude, he handpicked eleven people (including himself and a cameraman who didn't realize he was part of the experiment until it was too late top split) who were chosen for their physical beauty and diametrically opposed religious beliefs, races, nationalities, and stances on the hotbed political issues of the day, and put them all on a raft to sail across the ocean in self-contained isolation from the rest of the world.

His crew of lab rats all were looking to disconnect from society for a bit. One woman, twenty-five, was in an abusive marriage and had just escaped it. She was working as a waitress and felt the crushing sensation that it was a dead end so she answered the advertisement looking for people to join the experiment as a way to get away from a life which had overwhelmed her. Another, only twenty-three, was a black woman involved in much of the civil rights discourse of the day and wanted to see if the experiment could help her find a better path.

All told, the crew of the Acali were on the raft for 101 days, encountered a brush with a hurricane, near starvation, and, as the tabloids printed at the time, a lot of sex. It was the early 70’s after all when sex was neither scary nor heavily monitored for power dynamics.

At the end of the journey, Genovés felt it was a failure. His stated goal was observe humanity in these isolated conditions to see why they are violent and where that violence comes from but after the first fifty-one days, the crew got along famously.

“Things do not change; we change.”
—Henry David Thoreau

Fifty years later, Warner Brothers decided to revisit the experiment in the form—hold onto your pants, gang—a reality television show.

Survive the Raft follows a diverse group of nine strangers from different races, religions, political affiliations, and belief systems who live and work aboard the Acali II raft for twenty-one days. The contestants must put aside their differences in order to complete challenges and earn money together as a team. The money won in each challenge goes into a team bank which is split equally among the contestants who make it to the end of the competition. Along the way, contestants are tempted with chances to steal money away from the team for themselves. The contestants are also given several opportunities throughout the competition to vote off one of their current team members in exchange for a new player.

It is the introduction of competing for both power and money that introduces the conflict Genovés was looking for. When humans of all stripes are forced to cooperate for survival of fun, it seems the find ways to overcome their individual differences and find ways to peacefully co-exist. Add the simple challenge of competing with one another and those differences become the very bedrock of the inability to unite.

Solitude—the act of getting away from society for a time—is either a glimpse into looking at life as a series of things you don't have but really want or a moment to reflect on what it is you need rather than what you desire. Too many people in the post-COVID hysteria, adopted the first. "They have things I want or believe I deserve so I'll stew in that for a while until the deficiencies in my ability to effectively compete for them become overwhelming and I demand my fair share."

This path is one of comparison with others and foments a sense of entitlement and rage that can only result in conflict. Both the offense of the extreme left and the disgust of the extreme right grows from this lonely version of Walden Pond, cultivating an argument that one must take what they want or make others suffer due to a lack perceived as 'fair.'

The second version of solitude is healthier both for the practitioner and society as a whole. A reflection on what one can do rather what one can possess is an authentic arrow toward the peace Thoreau sought and Genovés studied.

This is not to state that competition is the source of our current divides but how we perceive competition and specifically for what you compete is the problem we face.

If, in your self-induced solitude, you decide that sex is the thing, you will begin to see everything as a means to that end. The path will reveal itself as either wage war against those who seem to easily get sex, examine your own standards of what kind of sex and with whom you desire it, or focus on bettering yourself—fitness, money, great hair, improved social skills—in order to get that thing. The doing of things is of higher benefit than the wanting something.

If it's cash you desire and that resource is the benchmark of a well-lived life, then everything will boil down to making it. No amount of money will ever be enough and, once again, you can brew the kind of rage at those who have as you have not, you can reframe your desire for how much is enough, or you can turn your thoughts on what you can do to get enough.

If it's status you desire, the same routine plays out.

Thoreau, from the accounts available, lived a content and joy-filled life, his love of his family, friends, and Concord recorded. Genovés died in disappointment, bitter that his one big experiment resulted in himself being revealed as the very kind of human with which he was interested in exposing.

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
—Henry David Thoreau