Missing Hunger

When Voltaire’s silk slippers of history are invoked, it is usually in the context of the softening effect of luxury and the toughening effect of hardship.  Peoples (and individuals, for that matter) to whom an abundance is easily accessible lose the endurance, perspective, and strength that come from experiencing hardship and struggle.  They lose something else, too, something less often mentioned: hunger.

I don’t mean hunger in the physical sense of consuming insufficient calories in a day.  Rather, I’m referring to the abstract hunger, the hunger that people reference when they say that an Olympian hungers after a gold medal.  This is the hunger that drives people, that prompts an inventor to sleep in her lab for years to make that breakthrough, that gets a marathoner up and running in the morning regardless of the wind, the snow, the subzero temperatures, the darkness, and the sore muscles.  It is also what motivates a whole nation, a people, to oppose a greater power, to persevere through losses and setbacks that, proportionally, would humble a more established country.  And it is a hunger that is missing in those who are accustomed to comfort.

The idea that experiencing challenges and hardships improves us in some way is deeply woven into our modern culture, and not just in the form of the oversaturated superhero genre.  Some psychological research challenges the legitimacy of the notion at the individual level (for what that’s worth, given the field’s replicability crisis), yet the studies can’t even agree on what constitutes an improvement in an objective sense.  Since becoming a better person is such a nebulous concept on which no two people are likely to completely agree, I suspect these studies are measuring the wrong thing.  Experiencing challenges and hardships doesn’t necessarily make us better people, but it does affect us – how could it not?  We are, after all, the product of our experiences.

If nothing else, difficult circumstances give us perspective.  The person who grew up without enough food to eat will value food more dearly than someone to whom an abundance was always available.  The person who loses a loved one will more deeply appreciate and notice the relationships that endure.  Those fleeing oppressive regimes for the freedom and opportunity of the United States have the perspective to see just how remarkable that freedom and opportunity is, through its imperfections, which those who take it for granted lack.  What we do with that perspective varies from person to person, but it is perspective that changes with hardship, and it is perspective that powers some people to become “better,” whatever that means for them, through that experience.

Yes, I’m painting with a broad brush.  There are exceptions, certainly, and this presupposes that you survive the hardship in the first place, and in a condition in which to take advantage of your new perspective.  Yet, do we not see that many of the most driven people are those who did not come from a place of comfort?  Yes, when we look at the success stories we don’t see the many others who did not succeed, but drive does not always correlate to success.  That drive is there, that hunger, whether success comes from it or not, and that is the subject of this reflection.

Sometimes, I think that I am insufficiently hungry.  I get up most mornings to run, but not every morning.  I take on extra projects at work, but are they that significant?  I write, but I could write more if I was willing to get up earlier, stay up later, trim out extraneous activities like that twenty-minute break when I get home from work before I start on my next task.  If I were hungrier, more motivated, could I accomplish more?  In making a comfortable life for myself, have I hamstrung my own productivity and drive?  And, if so, should that even be something about which I’m concerned?

We can witness the same concepts at the societal level.  Take, for example, the current international competition to return to the moon.  The United States has a plan to do it, involving massive budgets that may or may not be adequately funded, great attention to imagery, pageantry, and appearance, and an intricate, over-wrought mission design with a timeline that is continually delayed.  Compare that to India’s plan for moon missions.  India landed Chandrayan-3 on the Moon with far less experience than most of its competitors, on a shoestring budget that had NASA experts asking them how they managed it, and they have a streamlined, aggressive, and practical mission design to put people on the Moon.  The US had that kind of a plan, that kind of drive, too…back during the Apollo program (minus the shoestring budget part).  Where is it now?

From Egypt, to Rome, to imperial China, we see young nations that build themselves from humble origins into world powers, only to succumb to a decadence, a comfort, that leaves them unprepared when a hungry upstart in wooden shoes appears, an upstart that might look a lot like their civilization did closer to its inception.  There is reason to think that the collective West has achieved such a level of comfort that we are now reclining in our silk slippers, and we can hear the wooden shoes coming up the stairs, but we can’t quite find the energy to get up from the couch and prepare to encounter this new arrival.  We lack perspective, and it is reflected in our news, in our media, in our politics, and in the matters with which we concern ourselves.  To remain ready for the world’s challenges, societies, like people, need to know hunger.