We’ve Gotten Walden All Wrong: What We Miss When We Miss the Point of Thoreau’s Call to “Simplify, Simplify”

It’s become one of the most misunderstood American literary classics: Walden, or Life in the Woods. The 1854 book has gained a reputation as a story about a man who turned his back on the world to live as a recluse in the wilderness. Not so.

Henry David Thoreau simply sought to live well during a time much like ours, when technology advanced faster in one generation than in previous centuries, when partisan politics divided the country, when automation removed the human element from work, and when a pandemic spread a mysterious lung disease. Amid all this, Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond to contemplate two questions: What really matters? And what doesn’t?

I can’t think of a better book for this moment.

When people distill Walden down to a tattoo or bumper sticker, it’s usually its most famous line: “Simplify, simplify.” But it’s easy to miss what Thoreau simplified for. He didn’t simplify to have and to do less; he simplified to have and to do more of what mattered. To trade up, he pared down.