Living Deliberately Without the Woods: How to Build a Meaningful Life in a Noisy World

Excuse my language. There’s a meme I once saw while helping one of my clients with his decluttering project. “Working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

Doesn’t it sum up the way we are living our lives?

This continues to bring me back to Henry David Thoreau’s essay on what he saw as the quiet tragedy of ordinary life. In the opening chapter, “Economy,” from his book Walden or Life in the Woods, he laments about people working endlessly to afford things they don’t need. And propagating a culture that confuses busyness with living.

A new year always brings new hope and new action items in the form of resolutions. A few years ago, I started using these reset times of the year to do less and even lesser of things that didn’t serve me.

For example, I consciously decided to stop doing a few things. I stopped overthinking someone else’s actions when they hurt me. I stopped endlessly replaying my own past choices that no longer served me. And I stopped giving my time and energy to things once I realized they were quietly serving someone else’s agenda, not my own.

Thoreau had gone to the woods to really test is out for himself on how little we need to thrive. His experiment was sort of an existential protest towards a world consumed by materialism. At the end, he was trying to show us how to live life stripped to brass tacks.

Here’s a detail I find endlessly fascinating, for his experiment, Thoreau spent two years by the Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, in a small cabin he built with his own hands on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

And years later he had written Walden once he had stepped back into society. In the chapter called “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” he writes this.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

 

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

He believed people were working relentlessly just to survive, organizing their lives around property, debt, reputation, and monotonous routines. We were investing far more time in maintaining appearances than in reflection and contemplation. As he famously wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Walden by Thoreau

Through his thoughts and actions, what he was really asking was this. Is it possible to live intentionally — freely, meaningfully, awake?

We were spiritually poor, trapped in a rat race of unexamined conformity. We were sleepwalking through life, accumulating and chasing whatever society decided mattered.

And that was his 1840’s America. Sometimes I wonder if Thoreau will simply faint if he sees us living our crazy busy lives – both online and offline, consuming mindlessly and scrolling incessantly in the name of self-care.

See, Thoreau was simply asking us not to inherit beliefs but to understand ourselves enough to know what we want from life. He was asking us to not let society decide the terms of our existence.

His biggest worry for humanity was that people would arrive at their death fulfilling years of obligations, accumulated all the wealth that was deemed as successful and played their prescribed roles well, but never once stopped to ask themselves, “Is this the life I chose for myself?”

Don’t get me wrong. A spartan life in the modern sense is not about deprivation. It’s about discernment. It’s about using our biggest assets as human beings, our own discretionary power to decide what truly matters to us.

It’s about reducing life to its lowest denomination, moment by moment, saving the most important and letting go of everything else that feels frivolous. And if we still have to accumulate, only gather all the things money can’t buy. Can you think of some more than the list I can manage to gather?

Love.
Kindness.
Friendship.
Belonging.
Peace.
A Sense of Purpose.

So, what are you waiting for? Start by asking yourself if you’re living out of habit, fear or performance. What one thing are you deciding to “do less” of this year?

No woods required. 🌿

Minimalism Meme

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