Walden (book response)

In Spring 1845, famous American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau decided to build a cabin on Walden pond in Massachusetts and live there by himself for a few years as a sort of personal experiment. In Thoreau's eyes, people work too hard at unfulfilling things and rarely give themselves the opportunity to live deliberately. He sees the world as too fast-paced, full of people who chase luxuries but fail to live luxuriously. Thoreau's choice to live alone with nothing more than the bare necessities (food, clothing, shelter) is his counterargument to the rapid lifestyle of his fellow Americans; he hopes to prove that one can live a happy and fulfilled life by escaping the "ruts of tradition and conformity."

There's something about Walden that makes you oddly disgusted with your own way of life as you read through it. Thoreau is very effective in making you almost feel guilty for living with modern luxuries. Lamps, headphones, charging cables, cell phones, bronco ID's, keurig coffee makers, laptops - it all feels so unnecessary as Thoreau describes his delight in hearing the birds chirp their tunes outside his cabin. Walden makes you long for a simpler life than we were born into, and encourages you to shed unnecessary luxuries in pursuit of peaceful living.

One interesting and relevant observation that Thoreau makes in Walden is that human beings can't seem to keep up with their own technological progress. Rather than shaping technology around our lifestyles, we shape our lifestyles based off of technology. The example the Thoreau uses is the railroad system (being the biggest technological breakthrough of his time), but the principle holds true for many modern things: cell phones, cars, etc. From Thoreau's perspective, these luxuries end up making us worse off overall since we inevitably end up spending more time on these items than we do focusing on ourselves as individuals.

Although I haven't finished Walden yet, I can tell Thoreau likely be a huge climate change advocate if he were alive today. It seems that mankind's unnecessary lust for technological progress and economic achievement is essentially the cause of global warming, and now our species and our planet are unfortunately destined to suffer the consequences of our actions. Rather than worsening an individual's quality of life (as Thoreau argues in Walden), climate change is essentially the same idea except on a global scale. Are we really better off with our modern technology if the planet is suffering because of it? Would we really be better off to abandon this way of life in favor of a Walden-esque lifestyle?