Simple living

"Deep education, the lessons that actually stick, should prepare one for meaningful work, and lessons and labor should in turn be practical, hands-on, and best learned in the world beyond the classroom walls. It should already be clear that Thoreau harbored a not-so-private suspicion, deeply cynical, of the modern labor force. When Thoreau escaped in 1845 to Walden Pond, two miles from his native Concord, Massachusetts, it was, at least in part, in search of that sort of education, far from the world of commerce, farming, and modern economy. 

Thoreau's resignation into the woods was a quest to embody that most Emersonian of ideals: self-reliance. Emerson, Thoreau's mentor and fourteen years his senior, had also taken issue with the high intellectual culture of Harvard and Cambridge, as well as the pull of powerful economic forces, and he argued that there was often a high price of admission to modern institutions and organizations: the freedom to exercise one's autonomy. Thoreau's apparent separation from society was an attempt to "live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life," to see if he "could not learn what it had to teach." 16 The point of his two-year experiment with simple living was to see what life could be like without the corrupting forces of social conventions and traditional politics. 

All of this is consonant with cynicism's long history. But as one looks more closely at that history, and at Thoreau, it becomes clear that modern cynics truncate, or pointedly misunderstand, the full scope of cynicism as a school of thought and Thoreau's rendition of it. Just as a spoiler: there is no harm in resigning—quite the opposite, in fact. The first Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, epitomized the ideal of simplicity that Thoreau sought to revive in the nineteenth century. At Walden, Thoreau lived in a ten-by-fifteen-foot boarded cabin; Diogenes had done him one better, living in an overturned barrel, clothed only in rags. He stood against another school of philosophy, Epicureanism, which, in its distorted modern form but not in its ancient original one, espouses that the meaning of life could be grasped in the opulence of civilization. The Cynics, and Thoreau, too, wanted to know what life would be like without societal constraints, but also, and more important, without the trappings of material wealth. 

Today, many so-called cynics are also self-reliant capitalists. Their suspicion of big government and institutional control is rooted in the sense that those agents cheat people out of the riches to which they are entitled. Of course, this idea would have been anathema to Diogenes and Thoreau, who would have believed that our age has erred grievously in confusing material wealth with human prosperity writ large. 

According to legend, Diogenes would sit in his barrel and bark at wealthy pedestrians (" cynic" comes from the Greek word kynikos, meaning "doglike"). Thoreau took a slightly more subtle approach to criticizing modern capitalism, but only slightly. "Economy," remember, is Thoreau's spirited critique of modern materialism. The term "economy," Thoreau reminds his readers, was not originally about what one possessed as surplus, but rather where, or, more specifically how, one lived. It is about a house, a dwelling: that is all. 

At Walden, by divesting himself of life's excesses, Thoreau attempts to relearn what goes into making a place for oneself and appreciating the priceless things—virtue, beauty, peace—that money can't buy. "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life," he attests, "are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." 17 Today, "making a living" often has nothing to do with life itself, but rather, and disturbingly, with its deferral, a sacrificing of the present moment for the sake of future wealth. Thoreau knows that oikos has another meaning beyond dwelling or home; it can, and often does, refer to a cage. 

Thoreau's apparent escape to the outskirts of civilization might look as if it anticipates the separatist mindset of many modern cynics, but it doesn't. As Robert Richardson noted some thirty years ago in his biography of Thoreau, his "venture was in no sense a retreat or withdrawal. He himself thought of it as a step forward, a liberation, a new beginning." 18 Cynicism maintains its distance from society in order to gain a critical vantage point on social ills, but also, and just as important, to reevaluate what is, at once, most personally significant and universally true about life. This is what resigning from work can and should mean, not just in some cases, but in all."

— Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living by John Kaag, Jonathan van Belle