What Thoreau Meant by Quiet Desperation

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This is documentary first, the deep dive where I take an insight from a recent podcast conversation plumb it's depths and see what gold we can bring to the surface. I'm Christian Taylor. Let's dive with Eric and Christopher Ewers, two brothers, both filmmakers who just completed a stunning three-part documentary PBS series on Henry David Thoreau. It's called Henry David Thoreau and it's narrated by George Clooney with Jeff Goldblum Thoreau, Ted Danson Ralph Waldo Emerson and Meryl Streep as Emerson's wife. It's executive produced by Ken Burns and Don Henley of The Eagles. you haven't watched it yet, you can find it on PBS documentaries on Amazon. Now, these guys are not inexperienced filmmakers. Eric has been Ken Burns' senior editor for 33 years. He's worked on nearly every one of his films since the Civil War. Chris is a world-class cinematographer who's been shooting for Burns and Florentine Films since the Vietnam War. That's nearly a decade of major PBS documentaries, while he's also been building a commercial career shooting for Apple, Coca-Cola, Stella Artois, Peter Millar, just to name a few.

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Together, they have co-directed two previous documentaries under the Burns umbrella, The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, and Science, and Hiding in Plain Sight, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Now the Thoreau film is their third. So these brothers have gone from crew to co-directors in one of the most respected documentary operations in the world. These guys are impressive. But here's what really surprised me. Near the end of our conversation this past week, when we were talking about knowing yourself and what it means for leadership and filmmaking, Eric, the older brother, got surprisingly honest. He said he had confidence in his career and that he had had it for a long time. but he didn't really know himself. He described himself as lost and wayward on that front. And then he said something really remarkable. He said it was his own documentary, Hiding in Plain Sight, a four-hour film about youth mental illness that taught him how to search and find himself. And then Chris had a very fitting response. Take a look.

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Thoreauvian. How perfect. And he was right. Because what Eric was describing, being excellent at your work for decades while being a stranger to yourself, is exactly the condition that sent Henry David Thoreau to the woods 180 years earlier. Chris went on to explain what he meant. He said that Thoreau asks us to wake up, to stop and recognize where we've been sleepwalking through life, to notice what we've been allowing to quietly diminish us, but also to see where we have agency, where we can freely change course to something that feels more right, more true. Take a listen.

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That's what I want to unpack a little bit today. Not the Thoreau documentary, which again is extraordinary and you absolutely should watch it, but the deeper question that Eric's confession opens up. What is the difference between being good at what you do and knowing who you are? And why can you have one for an entire career without ever finding the other? There's a famous line, maybe you've heard it many times before, but it's from Thoreau. Most people don't even know who wrote it. And it goes like this. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Now, people might hear that and think Thoreau was talking about unhappiness, about misery, about people who hate their jobs or feel stuck in bad marriages or can't pay the bills. But to know what he's really talking about, you have to read the next line that he writes. He says, what is called resignation is confirmed desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed. Unconscious. That word changes everything. Thoreau wasn't describing people who are visibly suffering.

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He's describing people who don't even know they're suffering. People who are so embedded in their routines, their roles, their daily performance of competence that they never even stop long enough to ask. Is this actually my life or am I just going through the motions that someone else set in place for me? Well, that was Eric for 33 years. He wasn't miserable. He wasn't failing. He was one of the best editors in documentary film, working alongside one of the greatest documentary filmmakers who has ever lived. By every external measure, that man was thriving. And yet. Here he was on my podcast and he said he still really didn't know who he was. Not because the work was wrong, but because the work had become his whole identity. The editing room was the one place that he knew himself. Chris says as much in our interview, but outside that room, lost. Wayward, Eric's own words. Here's the thing about quiet desperation as I started thinking about it. It's quiet precisely because it's masked competence. The better you are at what you do, the easier it is to never ask who you are.

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Your skill becomes the hiding place. Your work becomes the walls. And you can live inside those walls for decades, comfortable, productive, even respected, without ever stepping outside. to see that you've been building a house you've never actually moved into. Thoreau saw this everywhere in the 1840s. People working themselves to exhaustion for things they didn't need, living lives that weren't really theirs. And his answer wasn't to quit, it wasn't to burn it all down, it was to stop. to go to the woods, to strip away everything that wasn't essential and find out what was left. He said, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when I come to die, discover that I had not lived. I shared this before, but I'm going to share it again because I think it absolutely belongs here. My mother passed away unexpectedly recently and after she died, almost everything just stopped for me. Not my skills, not my ability to work.

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Those didn't go anywhere, but my sense that any of it mattered? Gone for months. I couldn't bring myself to care about anything. Not filmmaking, not podcasting, not... Anything that had defined my professional life, none of it mattered. None of it felt important anymore. And the only thing that brought me comfort or joy was rest, the people closest in my life and nature. I had the blessing of being in Jackson Hole, Wyoming during that time with my best friend, Sarah. And I found myself sitting at the foot of the Grand Tetons. I'm going to show you some pictures if you're watching on YouTube, right at the bank of the river, listening to water move over the rocks, feeling the wind come down off the mountain. just screaming and crying, crying out to God about all of it. The loss, the confusion, the terrifying question of like, what was even real about my life now that she was gone? What mattered? Who was I? And in that moment, along with my dear friend Sarah, it was beauty. I was such a powerful solace. Not the work, not the resume, not the awards, the audience, or the numbers, just the mountains, the river, and the sky. and the honest acknowledgement that I had no idea who I was without my mother in the world.

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I didn't know it at the time, but I was doing exactly what Thoreau did. I only learned that after watching Eric and Chris's documentary. In 1842, Thoreau's brother John died suddenly from lockjaw. It was fast and devastating. Henry was so shattered by that. He developed psychosomatic symptoms of the same disease his body was trying to follow his brother into death. He couldn't write. He could barely function. Three years later, he went to Walden Pond. Scholars have always debated exactly why Thoreau went to the woods, but read the timeline and it's hard to miss. The man who wrote, not till we are lost do we begin to find ourselves, had recently been as lost as any person can be. I don't think he went to Walden Pond because he had answers. I think he went because grief had stripped everything away that wasn't real. And all that was left was, who am I underneath all this? What's real? What matters? Same questions I was asking at the foot of the mountains. Same questions Eric was forced to ask when he made the documentary about other people's mental health struggles. He discovered his own. Different centuries, different catalysts, same impulses.

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And the noise finally stops. Whether because grief silences it or because your own work forces you to look in the mirror, you find yourself standing on honest ground. for the first time. And question waiting there is always the same one Thoreau asks, have I actually been living or have I just been performing a life that looks like living? Okay, so what does any of this mean for us as filmmakers or storytellers or even as people? Okay, well, I think it means something very practical and I think it's something many of us may not be doing or at least not doing enough of. Eric didn't mention going on a retreat or taking a sabbatical or... even reading a self-help book. He made a documentary. The film he was making about other people's lives became the mirror that showed him his own. His Walden Pond wasn't a pond. It was a four-hour documentary about youth mental illness. And that told me something important. The stories we tell have the power to tell us something back. But only if we're paying attention. How many of us are heads down in production, in the schedules, the gear, the money, the deadlines, the deliverables, that we don't stop to notice what the work is doing to us on the inside?

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We're so busy building the film that we miss the fact that the film is also building us, or trying to. And for those listening that aren't filmmakers, this applies to you as well. You can be so heads down in your own stuff, in whatever you're doing, that you miss what's happening on the inside of you also. Thoreau was essentially a professional noticer. That was his whole practice. Go to the ordinary place, the pond everyone walks past, the woods nobody stops to examine and actually look at it, sit with it, let it reveal what's there. Chris talked about this in our interview. He and Eric walked around Walden Pond and thought, how are we going to make this come alive? It's just a pond. But when they started looking at it through Thoreau's eyes, sun rays through the holes in the leaf, the Jacob's Ladders light coming through the canopy, they saw what everyone else walks right past. I want to challenge you with something, and honestly, I'm going to challenge myself too. Take periods of rest inside the intense periods of work, not just for your health, although, yes, we need that too. But because rest is where the seeing happens. When you step back from the edit, when you sit down with the footage before you start cutting, when you let the story breathe before you decide what it means, well, that's when you notice things.

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That's when the film starts talking back to you. Pay attention to what you're feeling when you're telling someone else's story. What's stirring in you? What's uncomfortable? What keeps coming back? Because that's the film doing for you. That's what hiding in plain sight did for Eric. The story you're telling is also telling you something. And if you're too busy to listen, you'll miss it. Our creativity flows more readily when we're self-aware, when we know what we're bringing into the room, we make better choices about what we put on screen. The best documentaries aren't just well-crafted. They're made by people who were changed in the making of them, I think. And That only happens when we're awake. Thoreau went to the woods because he was afraid of reaching the end of his life and discovering he had never actually lived. Eric Ewers sat in the editing room for 33 years and nearly made the same discovery until his own film woke him up. I sat at the foot of a mountain after losing my mother and realized everything I thought mattered was rearranged in an instant.

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You don't need grief to wake up. You don't need a crisis. But you do need to stop. You need to look. You need to let the story you're telling tell you something back. Because your craft can take you everywhere. Except inward. For that, you just have to be still. Be sure to watch the You're Brothers documentary Henry David Thoreau. It's available now on PBS documentaries on Amazon. And stay tuned for part two of my conversation with Eric and Chris. It drops next week and we get into the business side of PBS filmmaking, AI, the state of the industry, and some truly incredible stories about working with George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum and Meryl Streep. If you enjoyed this episode, please text the link to a friend. Just pull it up on your phone and send it to someone you think needs to hear it. And if you haven't yet, follow and subscribe wherever you listen. I'm Christian Taylor and this is Documentary First: The Deep Dive. See you next time.