I read Walden recently, expecting some nice nature writing and philosophy, and wasn’t disappointed; however, what I did not expect was how prescient

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2021-07-01 23:00:06

I read Walden recently, expecting some nice nature writing and philosophy, and wasn’t disappointed; however, what I did not expect was how prescient and unintentionally funny it was. Henry David Thoreau was essentially a van-lifer in the mid-nineteenth century. There are tons of parallels between the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, in the economics, philosophy, and overall zeitgeist of the times, and the way Thoreau interacts with other people is uncannily reminiscent of certain people I know. As Paul Graham has said, during the Industrial Revolution many people got rich from technology startups, making their fortunes by taking advantage of new methods of mass production to make things people wanted faster and cheaper. And there was a similar corresponding cultural outlook of individualism and optimism that went along with the tech boom. It should come as no surprise that similar people inhabited such a world.

For some quick background: Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts in 1817, to a lower-middle-class family. His father opened a grocery store, which folded, and then inherited his in-laws’ pencil factory. Henry David had a liberal primary school education and then went to Harvard, with tuition supplemented by various relatives, where he got middling grades. After college, he took over management of his old primary school along with his older brother John, while simultaneously trying to make it as a writer and poet under the mentorship of Ralph Waldo Emerson. John Thoreau died of tetanus three years later, so Henry David closed the school and went back to his folks’ pencil factory, where he invented a new technique that enabled the use of lower-quality graphite. After tiring of this and wanting to work more on his writing, he moved to Walden Pond, an uncultivated part of Emerson’s property, and built himself a little shack there, supporting himself by fishing, foraging, and growing beans.

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