A few with Authur Brooks.
Theodore Roosevelt is a near-mythical figure in American history. He is famous for his courage in the Spanish-American War, and his fortitude as president of the United States. (After an assassination attempt during his 1912 re-election effort, he went on to give a campaign speech with a bullet lodged in his chest.) He is admired, too, for the style—rarely seen in today’s brash, performative politics—that he derived from his favorite aphorism: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Teddy Roosevelt was a man with a clear philosophy of life, which he found as a young man in Medora, North Dakota.
The scion of a wealthy family, Roosevelt was an East Coast aristocrat who attended fancy schools and hobnobbed with the cream of Manhattan society. But a soft life of luxury wasn’t for him. He dreamed of outdoor adventure, facing the blessings and curses of nature in equal measure. In his mid-twenties, he scratched this itch by taking a trip out West to North Dakota’s wild and untamed Badlands, where he found “a desolate, grim beauty.”¹
TR saw these guys roaming free by the tens of thousands in North Dakota. I saw this hanging outside the airport men’s room, which is basically the same thing.
Soon after that excursion and his return to New York, Roosevelt’s life took a tragic turn. Within hours, on February 14, 1884, both his mother and his wife died (the former from typhoid, the latter in childbirth). That day’s entry in the journal that he kept religiously read simply: “The light has gone out of my life.” In despair, Roosevelt returned to Medora, seeking this time not adventure but an understanding of suffering.
Alone with his thoughts, Roosevelt found a reason to go on living in Medora. “It was here that the romance of my life began,” he would later write.² Was this because his existence was so peaceful or because he found a great therapist in the Dakota Territory? Neither. He found new meaning in the severe landscapes, isolation, hard work, danger, and punishing conditions. “I am as brown and as tough as a pine knot and feel equal to anything,” he wrote to his sister, after chasing and capturing three thieves who had stolen his boat.³
The North Dakota Badlands in Medora, North Dakota
Roosevelt returned from Medora after four years, and resumed his larger-than-life public career with vigor and enthusiasm. He became a hero of the Spanish-American War, secretary of the U.S. Navy, governor of New York, vice president of the United States, and finally a two-term president. Throughout it all, he was a public philosopher, keen to share his strategy for the good life, which he had found in the wilds of North Dakota as a young man.
A pillar of Roosevelt’s philosophy was the importance of action over words. One of his most famous speeches, “Man in the Arena,” which he delivered in France in 1910, after leaving the White House, made this clear. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”⁴ Rather, “the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
In other words, you can live a comfortable life, commentating from the sidelines and sniping at others—or you can shut up and just go do stuff.
The second path is the harder of the two. And that’s exactly the point. Again and again, he recommended the challenges he found in Medora over the comforts he left in New York. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife,” he declared in an 1899 speech in Chicago.⁵ The highest form of success “comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil.”
From Roosevelt’s Medora-born school of hard knocks, here are three life lessons that are useful for all of us.
To find yourself, get lost outside. Many people resist being outdoors. Indeed, the percentage of time spent outside in nature has steadily declined since the late 1980s.⁶ But researchers have demonstrated time and again that when people are induced to get out into nature, their happiness rises dramatically.⁷ This is especially true for actual wilderness, compared with urban green spaces.⁸ (Roosevelt didn’t find his soul by strolling around New York’s Central Park in his lunch hour.)
Roosevelt believed that time in the wild puts life’s problems into perspective, and scholars have shown that this is absolutely correct. In one experiment from 2008, people in an urban environment were 39 percent more likely to agree that “I am concerned about the way I present myself” than people who spent the same amount of time in nature.⁹ You may not want to risk your life hunting down desperadoes as Roosevelt did, but to know yourself more deeply than as the person others think you are, you need to get into the wilderness, preferably alone—in blissful solitude.
Do more, complain less. Perhaps the most exhausting aspect of modern technology is how it has enabled billions of people to express themselves negatively. Online, everyone can complain about everything, all the time, regardless of whether they have anything interesting, accurate, or informed to say. Want to gripe about politics? Tweet away, citizen. Something bugging you about your partner? Share your grievance with the world in an incoherent rant reel filmed inside your car.
According to conventional thinking, all of this expression should raise our happiness by providing a form of release. Clearly, it is not working. The reverse: Joining others in going on and on about problems and complaints—what psychologists call co-rumination—is associated¹⁰ with increased depression and anxiety.¹⁰
Can talking about negative thoughts or experiences ever be helpful? Of course, it can. But as Teddy knew, not talk but action is what truly creates satisfaction in life, a principle that psychologists called behavioral activation.¹¹ If you have a problem, taking positive action to solve it will create a sense of efficacy. So quit complaining, gossiping, and (especially) troll-posting. Go do something productive about what’s bothering you.
Do harder things. Of course, actually doing things requires more effort than whingeing to a friend or tapping out an angry post. It’s harder—for a reason. Satisfaction in life can be defined as accomplishing something through effort, when the effort is as important as the accomplishment. Easy things don’t reward us; difficult things do. My students are clever and could easily cheat on my exams, but they’d get no satisfaction in the resulting good grade. We measure the sweetness of an achievement by how much we sacrificed for it.
Most people know that regular, strenuous exercise is commonly found in studies to be as effective at managing depression as medication.¹² This finding is usually interpreted in purely physiological terms—such as the way exercise affects blood serotonin levels. But I have little doubt that the mental-health value of exercise also has a lot to do with discovering oneself to be strong and capable while undergoing a difficult, uncomfortable experience. That was most certainly what Teddy Roosevelt learned from the hard life of the Badlands.
As a social scientist, I believe this three-part algorithm has the power to improve lives today. Yet I strongly suspect that, on this 250th anniversary of our nation, Roosevelt himself would have had a grander ambition than individual self-improvement. If he were to somehow come back today, I have to think that he would notice some big changes in the way Americans live now, compared with his own time. For instance, people’s weird preference for staring into a little screen rather than going outside; the talk-talk-talk approach to life in a therapeutic culture; the rising emphasis on comfort and self-care to treat our not-coincidentally skyrocketing mental distress.
Teddy would, I think, envision a national renewal based on his simple life philosophy: one that is excited, rather than scared, by the uncertainty of the future, that ignores, rather than venerates, the inane trivialities that fill our days and minds. He would encourage us to set off in search of new challenges to create what is honest and good, at home and abroad. He would demand leaders with the heart and grit to live these values personally, people “tough as a pine knot,” who are strong and honest enough to tell us what we need to hear, not just what we want to hear. He would want us to follow those who would guide us into a better, freer, more prosperous future—even if the path there is difficult and painful.
How would contemporary Americans react to such an appeal? Many, no doubt, would take to social media to denounce and cancel the old Rough Rider. If they did, I suspect that he’d simply shrug and turn his horse back to Medora, his eye on the rising sun.
Happy 250th to you, from my family to yours,
Arthur
P.S. Do you crave a beautiful Medora-like experience? Well, no wonder: your brain needs beauty to work well, and modern life starves us of it. That’s the subject of my next virtual Meaning Membership session on July 28 at 5pm ET, where I’ll explore why beauty—via nature, art, and morality—is so important, and how we can get more of it.
References
[1] National Park Service. (2015). Theodore Roosevelt Quotes. U.S. Department of the Interior.
[2] National Park Service. (2015). Theodore Roosevelt Quotes. U.S. Department of the Interior.
[3] Theodore Roosevelt Center. (n.d.). I am as brown and as tough as a pine knot, and feel equal to anything.
[4] Roosevelt, T. (1910, April 23). Citizenship In A Republic [Speech]. Sorbonne, Paris, France.
[5] Voices of Democracy. (2024). VOD Journal: Volume 19.
[6] Pergams, O. R. W., & Zaradic, P. A. (2008). Evidence for a fundamental and pervasive shift away from nature-based recreation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(7), 2295–2300.
[7] Mutz, M., & Müller, J. (2016). Mental health benefits of outdoor adventures: Results from two pilot studies. Journal of Adolescence, 49, 105–114.
[8] Wyles, K.J., White, M.P., Hattam, C., Pahl, S., King, H., & Austen, M. (2019). Are Some Natural Environments More Psychologically Beneficial Than Others? The Importance of Type and Quality on Connectedness to Nature and Psychological Restoration. Environment and Behavior, 51(2), 111-143.
[9] Mayer, F. S., Frantz, C. M., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., & Dolliver, K. (2009). Why Is Nature Beneficial?: The Role of Connectedness to Nature: The Role of Connectedness to Nature. Environment and Behavior, 41(5), 607-643.
[10] American Psychological Association. (2007, July 15). Someone to complain with isn't necessarily a good thing, especially for teenage girls [Press release].
[11] Mazzucchelli, T. G., Kane, R. T., & Rees, C. S. (2010). Behavioral activation interventions for well-being: A meta-analysis. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(2), 105–121.
[12] Heissel, A., Heinen, D., Brokmeier, L. L., Skarabis, N., Kangas, M., Vancampfort, D., Stubbs, B., Firth, J., Ward, P. B., Rosenbaum, S., Hallgren, M., & Schuch, F. (2023). Exercise as medicine for depressive symptoms? A systematic review and meta-analysis with meta-regression. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(16), 1049–1057.
