What your life is costing you
The Economy chapter is an itemised bill for your time.
- Is my job worth what it's taking from me?
- How much do I actually need to live?
- I earn well and I feel trapped.
Personal Development
Talk to Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- 1854
- English
- Public domain
Thoreau built a cabin by a pond, lived in it for two years, two months and two days, and wrote the most quoted account of deliberate living in English.
He also walked into town regularly, took his laundry to his mother, and had a great many visitors — facts his critics enjoy and which he never hid. Walden was not a wilderness. It was a mile and a half from Concord, on land owned by Emerson. The experiment was about attention, not isolation.
Which is what makes it useful now. Its central question is arithmetical and uncomfortable: what is this costing you in hours of your life, and would you still buy it at that price?
Start here
What you can ask it
Simplicity and stripping back
Simplify, simplify — his most quoted and least followed instruction.
- My life is too full and I don't know what to cut.
- What would I lose if I owned less?
- How do I stop buying things I don't need?
Quiet desperation and conformity
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. He meant it literally.
- I'm doing everything right and I feel hollow.
- Why does everyone seem to be pretending?
- How do I stop living the way I'm expected to?
Solitude and attention
Two years of looking at one pond, closely.
- I'm never alone and I can't hear myself think.
- How do I get better at paying attention?
- Is it strange to prefer being on my own?
Talk to this book
Message the consciousness of Walden
Ask Henry David Thoreau's Walden a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
- Is my job worth what it's taking from me?
- My life is too full and I don't know what to cut.
- I'm doing everything right and I feel hollow.
What Walden actually is
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years he spent in a self-built cabin beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts, from 1845 to 1847, published in 1854.
It is part memoir, part economic argument, part natural observation. The opening chapter, Economy, is an itemised accounting of what he spent and what he earned, intended to demonstrate how little is actually required — and by implication how much of most people's labour buys things they were told to want.
Around that sits some of the finest nature writing in the language, and a strain of Transcendentalist conviction that the individual, attending closely, can reach truths that institutions cannot supply. He is frequently smug. He is also frequently right.
In its words
Passages
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.
Frequently asked
Questions readers ask
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Talk to this book
Message the consciousness of Walden
Ask Henry David Thoreau's Walden a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
Begin the conversation