I have often wondered why a man, when given the choice, so often chooses to be a beast of burden. It is not that he delights in labor, nor that he finds in it any special dignity, but rather that he has been taught to mistake the yoke for the ox itself. He wears his toil like a second skin, forgetting that he was not born with it, and if you ask him what he would do were it shed, he looks upon you as if you had inquired how he might live without breath.
The question (what would you do if you did not need to earn a living?) ought to send men leaping from their desks and their counters, scattering ledger books to the wind. It ought to set them to wandering, to climbing trees, to putting their hands to the honest work of delight. Instead, it seems to terrify them.
They clutch at their paper currency as though it were bread in a famine, and when you press them for an answer, they say, “Why, I should do just as I am doing now, of course!”; though not one in a hundred says it with conviction.
If a man’s occupation is the truest use of his time, why must he be paid to do it? The robin requires no wage to sing at dawn, nor does the fox demand compensation for keeping the rabbit population in check. There is, I suspect, a deception at work. A man is set to toil at some dreary enterprise; not because the work must be done, but because it has been agreed upon, by men in taller hats, that he must do it. In this way, he may keep himself clothed and housed just well enough to be of further use. A curious arrangement, to be sure, and one that no other creature has seen fit to adopt.
But if a man should wake one morning and find that no master, no bank, no obligation stood between him and his own inclinations, what then? Would he at last take up the violin he abandoned in youth? Would he write the book he has carried in his breast these many years? Would he, at long last, sit beneath a maple and watch the world unhurried? Or would he, as I suspect, pace the floor like a dog unchained, whining at the door to be let back into his prison?
The sad truth is that most men, though they long for freedom, have spent so long in servitude that they know not what to do with liberty when it is offered them. They are kept not by chains but by habit. They have confused necessity with virtue, suffering with dignity, employment with purpose.
If a man has considered this question honestly and found his answer, he need not wait upon any external deliverance. The door is not locked. If his heart tells him to build a boat, let him begin at once. If he would live by the pen, let him take up the quill today. If he would be a wanderer, let him set forth before the hour grows late. He will find, in the end, that the world is no less accommodating to his true nature than it was to his false one. But if he cannot muster the courage, let him at least be honest with himself: it is not the world that keeps him bound, but his own unwillingness to step into the unknown.
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