The Real Reason Modern Man is So Anxious

Josef Pieper on the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Life

It’s no secret that the modern western man is anxious, restless, and discontent. Compared to earlier generations, he finds himself far lonelier, more heavily medicated, and spiritually malnourished.

Even the most well-adjusted of individuals suffer from a sense of malaise and silent desperation — an unspoken feeling as if life is not what it should be, or something is missing, or that one is unwell in a manner that defies understanding.

Indeed, whether one is impoverished, or a high level executive, or a run of the mill family man: a lingering sense of unease seems to follow him, making him “modern.”

But why is this so?

Why is modern man, by far the most materially prosperous of any generation, so fundamentally unwell?

Josef Pieper understood the source of modern man’s dread. He wrote a famous essay, Leisure the Basis of Culture, explaining why man is so spiritually unhappy, what’s missing from his life, and how he can recapture his lost sense of humanity.

Today’s article will be the first in a four part series on Pieper’s theme of leisure: what it is, why we’ve lost it, and how we can recapture it. To understand the fullness of leisure, is to understand the fullness of human nature, what’s missing from our souls today as moderns, and how we can recapture it to live well.

But to properly understand leisure, we must first understand where we are as a civilization today, and how everything went wrong…

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The New Modern Man

Well how did everything go wrong?

For this, we must look to German philosopher Ernst Junger. He was one of the earliest minds to diagnose the revolutionary changes of “modern society,” that created, “modern man.”

Junger came to this realization as a veteran of World War I.

He, like many others, noted the absurdity of the war — not just from a political view, but on the frontlines itself. There was no human dignity to be found, no “honor,” to be won, nor opportunity for valor. Instead, war felt like a factory: soldiers as cogs in a machine sent to slaughter.

More interesting, however, was his return home.

In a strange sense, he felt this “factory,” sensation back in Germany during peacetime. Industrialization paved ways for massive factories and, and workers were more literally cogs in a machine.

In other words, modern society distinguished itself via “total mobilization.” Both war and peace were sapped of human dignity, in favor of an all-encompassing embrace of work, functionality, and productivity.

Junger makes this clear in his work Der Arbeiter, where he describes the Arbeiter (the Worker) as a new Gestalt, a totalizing form that’s remaking man, technology, and the state into a single integrated whole. In other words, the modern world is reshaping the soul of human nature by reducing him into a worker. No longer is he an ensouled being with dignity, but a mere piece of State-machinery.

Strangely, Junger almost seems to celebrate this change, but Pieper differs. He thought Junger’s diagnosis was brilliant, yet claimed nothing could be worse than man’s nature reducing itself to merely work and productivity.

If man is but a worker, then he becomes expendable. It’s only by reducing him to a “worker,” that the trenches of WWI, or the dehumanizing conditions of factory life, or the agonies of life in the mines, could ever be justified.

Pieper’s answer to Junger is far simpler: rediscover leisure.

The Total World of Total Work

Pieper introduces his essay with a simple claim, “leisure is one of the foundations of western culture.”

This draws back to Plato and Aristotle, who said the final aim of our labors is leisure. It’s also mandated in Scripture — work six days, so that you may rest on the seventh.

Yet Pieper says modern culture today has explicitly inverted this, quoting Max Weber:

“One does not work to live; one lives to work.”

It’s eerie how natural this sounds to modern ears. The common man could say the same thing at a local bar, and all listeners would nod their heads in lamentation.

Now Pieper’s critique of modern culture isn’t simply over the 40 hour work week, nor an economic argument about fair wages for the common man. Strikingly, he says all classes suffer from a lack of leisure and embrace of total work:

“Like the wage-earner, the manual worker, and the proletarian, the educated man, the scholar, too, is a worker… he too is harnessed to the social system and takes his place in the division of labor.”

But how is the scholar a worker? Shouldn’t the “ivory-tower,” professor be the peak of leisure?

Pieper says no. Leisure does not just mean reading books, nor even abstaining from work. Leisure is about rediscovering what a true education looks like.

A Servile Education

At the risk of redundancy — the loss of leisure in modernity has been replaced by the cult of productivity and embracement of total work.

All human behavior must be oriented to utilitarian ends, the “common need,” or some economic purpose. You must be useful.

Pieper laments that this belief system has engrained itself in modern education systems too:

“The worker’s world, as Ernst Junger puts it, is ‘the denial of free scholarship and inquiry.’ In a consistently planned “worker,” State there is no room for philosophy because philosophy cannot serve other ends than its own or it ceases to be philosophy…

The ancients, however, maintained that there was a legitimate place for non-utilitarian modes of human activity, in other words, the liberal arts”

We can understand this easily. Growing up, it was far more likely you were told education was for “getting a real job,” than it was, “learning virtue to liberate your soul,” which was the traditional view of education.

To put it simply then, the problem of modern man’s spiritual malaise is due to the cult of work and productivity, which has engrained itself into every fiber of the public domain.

We’re technologically prosperous, and spiritually impoverished. We have smart phones, cars, and climate controlled homes, and spend nights binging tv shows and hedonistic pursuits to numb the pain of being strangers in our own bodies.

Of course then, the problem is not just education — we have no issue teaching mathematics, science, or music as such.

The problem is a philosophic and theological issue:

“[we must] dig down to the roots of the problem and so base our conclusions on a philosophical and theological conception of man.”

And so the problem of leisure is the problem of human nature:

What kind of beings are we? What part of our humanity has been lost, and how do we rediscover who we actually are?

The Usefulness of “Uselessness”

Thus far, we’ve been stressing the “problem,” of modernity. We’ve been painting a coherent picture as to why modern man is anxious, unhappy, overworked, and struggling with the existential despair of an existence that feels meaningless.

We must understand and properly diagnose the problem before we can fix it.

Pieper now introduces a solution by invoking a contrast between observation and contemplation:

“Observation is a tense activity; which is what Ernst Junger meant when he called seeing an ‘act of aggression.’

To contemplate, on the other hand, to “look,” in this sense, means to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s vision, and the things seen enter into us, so to speak, without calling for effort or strain on our part to possess them.”

Pieper says modern man is stuck in the strenuous activity of observation, and has forgotten how to contemplate reality.

He then invokes the middle ages, who distincted between ratio and intellectus:

• Ratio is the discursive mind at work (searching, comparison, abstracting, etc.) It’s effortful by nature.

• Intellectus, by contrast, is the mind’s capacity for simple, receptive beholding. It’s what Aquinas called simplex intuitus, a simple gaze that takes in truth the way the eye takes in light, without labor.

Pieper’s argument is that human knowing has always involved both — but modernity has effectively forgotten intellectus exists at all, collapsing all knowing into ratio, into work. To know something, in the modern view, is to have earned it through effort. The idea that truth might simply give itself to a receptive mind sounds, to modern ears, like mysticism at best or laziness at worst.

So the first path to leisure then (and escaping the modern trap of total labor) is to rediscover the lost art of contemplation (intellectus). Such is the practice that places man back into harmony with his own being, and restores his relationship to reality at large.

Next week, we’ll continue this diagnosis by observing the deadly vice of acedia (the key driver of the “modern worker mentality,”) and how we can conquer this vice to make contemplation a norm in our daily lives.

I am 100% reader-supported. This newsletter is free, but if you’re able to support, please consider a paid membership — it helps my mission of sharing Truth, Beauty and Goodness with maximal reach

As a paid member, you’ll get:

• Two full essays a week

• Access to recordings of all my Great Books lectures on this channel

• Eternal gratitude from me