When it comes right down to it, Walden is about simplicity. I know, profound insight, right? But what I've realized about Thoreau's simplicity is that it must be sought as much in the material world as in ourselves. It seems to me that finding that intersection could be the difference between happiness and misery for many modern readers.
As much as I try to fight it, I'm neck deep in our American consumer culture. And it is a fight, it truly is, to keep my head above the waters of rampant materialism. I'm a meticulous recycler, I have a passionate dislike of plastic bags, and I buy my coffee fair trade as often as possible. Nevertheless, when I walk into that Apple store or wander onto Amazon.com, I feel the monstrous magpie inside crying and wanting to be fed. It wants the shiny, the new, the cool, and sometimes it wins. In the future, though, I'll have another voice to keep it quiet: the patient words of Thoreau:
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names .... It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is."
Where are the voices like that these days? Where in our culture does anyone call for contentment? If those voices are out there, I don't think they are being heard. There is everywhere pressure for faster, bigger, thinner, younger. Enough is never enough any more. If you try to keep up with even just one societal demand, it's a sure path to frustration. When you buy that tiny new phone, it's inevitable that a smaller, cooler one will be out in six months. The big companies are big because they know how to tempt the magpie. They not only make sure we feel like we need that SUV, they make sure we want a better one than the Joneses next door. We try to meet the demands by going after more money, but that's like using a gas-tanker to put out a forest fire. "It looks poorest when you are richest," Thoreau says, and I think he's right. More money means more stuff to buy, and if you have more stuff, you need a bigger car to move it and a bigger house to store it all. Faster than you can say Visa, your house becomes, as George Carlin said, "a pile of stuff with a cover on it."
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