Why You Might Need an Adventure

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Almost everyone knows the first line of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Fewer people may remember what comes next—which might just be some of the best advice ever given to chase away a bit of depression:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Melville’s narrator was ostensibly a 19th-century whaler, whose cure for what he called the “hypos” was to hit the high seas and forget his troubles. Whaling was not exactly curling up with a cup of hot chocolate and a comfort dog; it was a brutal, exhausting, dangerous job (just read the rest of the novel for an ample account of that).

So Ishmael’s prescription might seem counterintuitive advice in today’s era of self-care. But Melville perhaps knew something that we have forgotten: When life is getting you down, the answer is not more comfort but less. If you’re troubled by your own case of the hypos, the remedy may be a tough challenge.

[From the June 1948 issue: W. Somerset Maugham on Moby-Dick]

In 2017, a scholar at the Murdoch University in Australia proposed a provocative hypothesis about why materially comfortable humans would nonetheless be drawn to difficult, even dangerous tasks. The researcher started from the observation that the universe is at once life-giving and deadly, and that therefore, from the outset, humans needed to embrace risk to flourish. This characteristic, arguably encoded in the genome ever since, may manifest in human beings as a tendency to adopt risky heroic behaviors and admire them in fellow humans.

That genetic inheritance gets reinforced by culture—which is why heroic adventure forms the basis of nearly all mythologies. This was Joseph Campbell’s famous conclusion in his 1949 study of archetypes, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In it, Campbell, who was a professor of literature, laid out the structure of the “monomyth,” which provides the underlying architecture of a narrative tradition that spans millennia commonly known as the “hero’s journey,” such as the Old Testament’s King David story and George Lucas’s Star Wars series.

This ur-myth opens with a call to adventure, proceeds through a series of difficult trials and dangerous obstacles, and finally ends in triumph. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who, among other things, popularized the concept of archetypes, saw that for anyone, pursuing some metaphorical form of the hero’s journey might be indispensable to finding satisfaction in life. “Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard,” he wrote.

Evidence from modern researchers does indeed suggest that framing one’s life as this type of quest, even when it is difficult or unwelcome, can lead to positive transformation. In one 2023 experiment, scholars asked participants to reframe their life as one that followed the steps in the hero’s journey. The researchers found that doing so raised their subjects’ sense of purpose; it also made a difficult task more meaningful to them and improved their resiliency to trouble.

But beyond simply rewriting your life story to be more of a hero’s journey, starting an actual one in the form of a voluntary challenge or adventure can bring immediate and big happiness benefits. Consider a 2013 study finding that experienced climbers tend to derive unusual spiritual inspiration, experience a greater sense of flow, and generally feel happier when they climb mountains. A 2023 meta-analysis of research on outdoor adventures showed that participants in these experiences profited in at least one of four ways: physical and mental balance, personal development, community, and immersion and transformation.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

A challenging adventure doesn’t have to be physical in nature to bestow benefits; it can equally be mental. Indeed, learning new things with a spirit of curiosity and exploration has been shown to induce positive moods. This raises an interesting paradox that appears in this field of happiness research: People derive a lot more happiness from high-skill activities that require learning than they do from low-skill ones that don’t, yet we typically settle for the latter. In other words, you will probably be much happier reading about philosophy or science than you will if you just scroll social media—so why are you still scrolling? The obvious answer is that it takes a lot less learning effort and mental focus—and although the happiness benefits of reading Cicero will probably be greater, they are deferred and seem abstract compared with the instant, if largely illusory, gratification of sitting on the couch watching videos on your phone.

Just as more demanding physical and mental adventures raise happiness, their absence can harm well-being. This is a common theme that has emerged from analysis of declining mental health during the coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns, when people suffered from a lack of external stimuli and new experiences. Those who did best during this period tended to be people with an “adventure-based mindset”—who purposely went in search of new, interesting, and challenging things to see and do.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why so many people are unhappy in retirement]

If you find yourself a bit “grim about the mouth” like Ishmael, you don’t necessarily need to risk your life chasing an enraged sperm whale around the world. But you don’t have to accommodate your melancholy, either. I can suggest two approaches that you can employ right away to take on your hypos.

The first strategy is to use that narrative device of the hero’s journey to reframe your difficulties. This can be especially powerful if you have recently endured an event or hardship from which you’re still struggling to recover. Say, for example, that you went through a bad breakup that you did not initiate. This experience is all too easy to frame as a humiliating defeat or evidence of failure. It is nothing of the sort if you can think of it this way instead: that your breakup jerked you out of a complacent reverie with unwelcome evidence that you were not actually in the right relationship.

That realization is in fact your call to adventure, per Campbell. Now, confronted with this truth, you can embark on the second stage of your journey: learning to overcome emotional obstacles and getting stronger through your pain. The greatest stage lies ahead, when you will emerge triumphant—more secure, more emotionally intelligent, more self-knowing—ready to love again and be happier, on your own terms.

The second strategy, if your life simply feels dull and gray, is to go find a challenge that is worthwhile, hard, maybe even scary. If you have gotten a little too comfortable marking time in work that doesn’t inspire you, perhaps you should announce (to yourself at least) your intention to quit and start a job search. If the information you carry in your head has become stale to you, maybe it is time to go back to school in a new field. For a physical challenge, sign up for a half-marathon in six months’ time or (my personal favorite) set out to walk a few hundred miles. If your terrestrial existence is getting tedious, go in search of metaphysical truths. And if it shocks people around you who always took you for someone without a spiritual bone in your body, all the better.

There is no guarantee that whatever adventure you choose will turn out the way you hope, of course. And that is the point. If it were safe, it wouldn’t be heroic; if it were predictable, it wouldn’t be an adventure. Even if your heroic exploits prove to be more uncomfortable or painful than you expected, that, too, is part of your journey. The object is not to win in a conventional way; it is to wake up and be fully alive. If it’s for the first time in a long time, it should be bracing.

[From the November 1956 issue: Ishmael and Ahab]

One last point about the adventure you might seek: A common mistake is not to be Ishmael but Captain Ahab. Ahab—the doomed skipper of the Pequod, the whaling ship whose crew Ishmael joined—was singularly consumed with finding and killing Moby Dick, the great white whale. The days leading up to Ahab’s fateful encounter with the great whale were a fever dream singularly focused on the object of his obsession. This makes Melville’s story an inverted myth: an antihero’s journey that began with a plan born of hate and vengefulness, that brought travails from which Ahab learned nothing, and that ended tragically in a way that permitted no return.

Your adventure should have a goal, it is true, but it is called a hero’s journey for a reason. Happiness comes not from the blip that is a moment of victory but from the long arc of living, learning, and loving. That is the best cure for a damp, drizzly November in your soul.