Text on 2nd Chapter: How would Thoreau react to today's more complex, phantasmagorical technological advancements and social media? Are these further-encroaching “shadows and delusions” that we esteem for soundest of truths?

„Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?“ (Thoreau 58) asks Thoreau in the second chapter of Walden “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” talking about the acceleration of life through media like news papers or the post. In his point of view the goal in life is “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, […] to live deep and [to] suck out all the marrow of life, […] to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms [...]” (57); thus superfluous “affairs”, “meals”, or “news” are unnecessary and would deviate one from true life.

Thoreau criticizes the unnecessary affluence—which he considers to not even be real—overflowing our daily life. Considering the decade he was troubling his mind on this aspect of sociability, a reader of the 21^st century can only laugh. Television and telephone were still in the very initial phase of creation, not even mentioning the computer or even the internet. Nonetheless his fears were the same than the fears of many people of the 21^st century: the media takes away our time! One might be tended to ask “What time? Time for what?”.

The interview of Paul Miller on CNN from 2012, an editor of “The Verge” who decided to live without the internet for one year¹, is just one example among many showing the great trouble of being depended on the internet and social media. Paul Miller lived without the internet, because it took away his time; thus without he claimed to be more productive. He actually felt relieved living without it. So what scares us? And why is it so hard to get away from it?

Thoreau responses to this fear: being committed to something brings you into a relationship from which it is hard to escape. It creates a dependency to which you relate to, which becomes your truth. However, the danger is to base your life on something which is not true. “As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the country jail” (53). The philosopher in the woods actually refers to “simplicity” (55-7) enabling the finding of the truth, where on the contrary news, media, and todays internet actually lead away from it.

However, Thoreau was as much feared by the media of his time than a person of the 21^st century is. Both are overtaxed with the mass of information and are scared to feel lost in the eternity of overwhelming absent-mindedness created by it. Only a few people are able to withdraw themselves from this strudel of meaningless information. Thoreau would have escaped today's media the same way he escaped 1845's media—maybe in another forrest, on a different lake.

1 CNN. “Going Offline”. Web. 23 Nov. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oASA1RBGjp8.

2 Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. USA: Reada.Classic, 2010. Print.