Solitude and Contentment

Date

October 30, 2021

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Hermits have always lived apart from the societies of their times. But do they have the secret key to happiness? What can hermits teach us about achieving happiness in our own lives?If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, . . .

Hermits have always lived apart from the societies of their times. But do they have the secret key to happiness? What can hermits teach us about achieving happiness in our own lives?

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In the past two months, we visited modern hermits and ancient Chinese classics, read about Going Slow and about Homelessness and Heimat and the Rhetoric of Refuge. There are still so many topics we haven’t touched, so I might keep putting up articles on hermits onto these pages. If you are interested, subscribe so you don’t miss any post!

Now the time has come to wrap all this up. What was it good for? Is there anything hermits can teach us normal people of today about how to have happier and more fulfilled lives?

Hermits, alienation and empowerment

Interestingly, only a fraction of hermits in history and present are religious hermits. There certainly is a number of Christian hermits (and this was a big movement in the times of the Desert Fathers), and today we still have Daoist hermits in the Zhongnan Mountains in China and elsewhere (more on those in a future article). But many hermits today are secular hermits. People who leave our hectic, capitalist world in order to seek a quieter, more meaningful life, without the pressures, expectations and prescriptions of organised society.

Interestingly, only a fraction of hermits in history and present are religious hermits.

It is undeniable that every human society needs the individual to conform to some common understanding of what the limits of their freedom are. We trade freedom for safety, if we are lucky. By submitting to society, by giving up a part of our freedoms, we gain the support and the help of society in terms of financial security, healthcare, childcare, infrastructure, ease of life, and many other things.

This trade-off is a continuum: The hermit is at the one end, free like a wild animal but relying entirely on him- or herself for survival; the corporate employee on a lifelong post is at the other, having traded freedom for safety and a retirement scheme.

Much less obvious are other ways how we trade away our freedom. Many philosophers, from Epicurus and Bertrand Russell to Erich Fromm and Richard Taylor (whom we have all discussed previously in these pages) emphasise how we lose our freedom by accepting society’s values and ideals. By blindly embracing the desires that society prescribes, we let others take control of our lives. Epicurus speaks of “vain desires,” Erich Fromm of the failed promise of 20th century capitalism, and Richard Taylor even says that a person who only follows the lead of others loses a crucial part of their humanity and becomes a non-person.