The life we (think we) want
Alex from Ithaca, NY, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Thoreau's Walden is criticized, in many cases rightly, for being out-of-touch or hypocritical—but it offers us a great lesson today in Silicon Valley: that the good life isn't necessarily what is chosen for us by others (or ourselves). And that through careful reflection, we can break free from such bounded expectations. Kinfolk mag.
It’s no simple thing to live a good life. We might be able to describe the things we want—health, love, pleasure, joy—but it is usually hard to draw a line between the work and responsibilities that fill our days and the things we believe are most valuable.
A good library will show you that this has been true for most people, in most places and times. For the Greeks, the question of how to live a good life was of paramount philosophical concern. For the 19th-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, it was all-consuming. By the time he was 27 years old, he had retreated from his neighbors in the well-to-do town of Concord, Massachusetts, and settled in a hand-built cabin on a local pond called Walden.1 Thoreau gambled that isolation would show him his true needs and desires. ...
The resulting book, Walden, is popularly known as the bible of the back-to-nature movement, a proto-hippie manifesto on rustic transcendence. But those who open it expecting to find a treatise on mindfulness will be quickly rattled. Thoreau begins with a merciless accounting of his neighbors’ lives, which he sees as foolish and wasteful—his chief complaint being that they spend their time pursuing material wealth and security, which most of them fail to attain, even after giving a lifetime to the cause.
The essential problem is much the same now as it was then: What we think we want, and what actually makes us happy are, in the end, not the same things. Thoreau’s solution is surprisingly practical and has the tone of an economics lecture rather than the pulpit. “The cost of a thing,” he writes, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
When we devote ourselves to our jobs and push ourselves to acquire the outward signs of success, we often vastly under-estimate the amount of “life-cost” we will pay to attain our goals. Once awoken to this cost, Thoreau saw it everywhere: the effort made to dress elegantly, curry favor among neighbors and business associates, the fear of insolvency. ...
A thoughtful life is a good thing, but it's also a privilege that comes easiest to those who have been given the education and freedom needed to pursue it. It's a criticism that wasn't lost on Thoreau's contemporaries, who pointed out that only a young man "from the manor born" could have the time and freedom necessary to move to a lake house for two years of thinking.
Fair enough, but the tragedy observed by Thoreau—that humans, born with the capacity for transcendent thought, sublime understanding and the joyful apprehension of just being, were spending their lives in monotonous pursuit of dubious prizes—has never been as relevant, or hard to correct, as it is today. The essential thing is this: to remember that you are the sole owner of your body, your span of life, your mind and your capacity for happiness. Once we become aware that a goal will not only cost money or time but exact a cost from our selves, we gain the capacity to break free from the trappings of success, and decide how we really want to spend our time.
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