Thoreau Didn't Know How Good He Had It

Walden is a wild read in these turbulent times!

A few weeks ago, I watched the three-part PBS documentary about Henry David Thoreau. The fact that Jeff Goldblum voiced Thoreau made it mildly hilarious to anyone who finds Jeff Goldblum slightly madcap no matter what he’s doing. And George Clooney narrates the entire thing, and Meryl Streep’s voice puts in an appearance, and this is all because Don Henley is a lifelong lover of Thoreau and a major backer of all things Walden-related, including this documentary, and he convinced his celebrity friends to get involved.

This, of course, led to me deciding to read Walden; or, Life in the Woods, which he published in 1854, and which I probably read decades ago but have forgotten.

There’s a great deal about this book that is amazing and I definitely highlighted many pages and followed my husband around, reading passages aloud, but I’m going to limit myself to this today:

Thoreau did not know how good he had it.

We all know the basic story, right? “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” He was going to shed the trappings of modern 1850s civilization and commune with nature. Sounds reasonable.

But what, exactly, were his complaints about modern civilization?

I’m sure that before I picked up Walden this time around (the last time being when I was in high school or college and nowhere near old or wise enough to properly appreciate it), I had the general impression that what he didn’t like about his modern society was the same general sort of thing that we didn’t like about our modern society. That’s what makes it a timeless classic.

But reading it now, I was rather astonished at how accurately he nailed 2026.

Raise your hand if this describes your workday:

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toe, and lump the rest…In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

And ask yourself if this describes the average screen-addicted worrier in 2026:

Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes up he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind has stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe”—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls.

And if this describes how you feel about scrolling the news right now:

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough….Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure—news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy.

And, for that matter, see if Thoreau’s mailbox sounds like your in-box:

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage.

And what about the imposition of technology that nobody asked for and only makes our lives worse?

Men think it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get our sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

Here we are wanting to go back to the days of leisurely train trips and newspapers and letters in mailboxes, but Thoreau? Detested them. Built a one-room cabin in the woods to get away from them.

Sorry, Henry David, we did not heed your warnings. But we bought an awful lot of copies of your book. You were on to something, we know that.

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