Criticize songs, movies, art or writing when you’ve never written a song, made a movie, painted a picture or written a thing.ģ3. Never let the shrubs in your yard stray a single branch beyond that perfect sno-cone shape.ģ2. Let rejection, a bad review, or a rude comment stop you from following your heart.ģ1. Feel deeply betrayed and pissed off when your connecting flight gets cancelled.Ģ9. Feel deeply betrayed and pissed off when The Weather Channel’s forecast isn’t accurate.Ģ6. Give a crap what Paris Hilton is doing this week.Ģ5. Watch TV while you eat dinner with your wife or family.Ģ4. Marry someone “because she’s hot,” or “because he has a great ass.”Ģ1. Trash your spouse or partner to your friends.ġ8. Don’t listen to the voice in your head that says, “I can’t do this anymore. Don’t go out to see plays or live music.ġ4. Post Murphy’s Law signs in your workplace.ġ1. If possible, try to add the universal three-note “I don’t know” grunt as an accompaniment.Ĩ. When someone asks you a question, like, “So, why did you major in that?” or “What do you want to do?” shrug and stare at the floor. Gossip about your co-workers, your brother’s wife, or your best friend.ħ. Believe that pharmaceutical companies know what you need.Ĥ. ![]() Complain about how jobs, marriages, friendships, life, and events have all happened to you and that you’ve never had a choice.ģ. Let jobs, marriages, friendships, life, and events happen to you. Here, after several days on the road, performing, teaching a workshop, and watching America out the windows of my rented mini-van, is my full and comprehensive step-by-step guide for how to live your very own life of quiet desperation.ġ. “But if your vocational vision has not yet come, then remain serenely confident that it will come, and perhaps around age 30.Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” ![]() “This convo talk is intended to be a license for exploration, not for play,” he said. One could waste life in the other direction, too, Holmes warned his audience. ![]() “The novel embodies a critical truth for college students, and that truth is that we must follow our hearts and do what we really want to do in life, or else we may live lives of quiet desperation,” Holmes said. The book describes the life of George Babbit, a man lacking the courage to truly follow his heart, who enters a loveless marriage and lives vicariously through his son before finally admitting his own emptiness. The influence of these figures is well known, but Holmes lingered on the fictional portrait in Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel Babbit, an indictment of American culture and conformity. Holmes pointed out that Jesus is said to have begun his ministry at about the age of 30, in keeping with rabbinical requirements and traditions of the period. Even Buddha, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther and John Wesley fit that model. Lewis and John Donne to name a few- didn't find their calling until mid-life. “If Henry David Thoreau’s aphorism that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” is true-as I think it is-then premature choices may represent the principal cause of that desperation.” Holmes noted that many influential historical figures-Albert Schweitzer, Ronald Reagan, Dianne Fossey, Margaret Sanger, Malcom X, C.S. “The evidence indicates that most of us fail to know who we are, and hence what we want to do with our lives, until we are at least 25,” Holmes said. Getting clear of that tumultuous time allows the real person to emerge, he said. At Samford, Holmes warned students against rushing into relationships and careers soon after the challenging and vibrant college years. His books include The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents: From Truman to Obama (2012), A Brief History of the Episcopal Church (1993) and The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (2006). Mason Professor of Religious Studies, emeritus, at the College of William and Mary. Samford’s Religion Department hosted Holmes, a noted author and Walter G. 4, he suggested that a personal sense of purpose and direction often arrives only after reaching that once-suspect age. Activist Jack Weinberg famously warned 1960s youth not to trust anyone over 30.
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