Finding Your Walden

The hero for our time is someone few people get right. Henry David Thoreau wasn't a loner in a cabin. He lived during a time much like ours, when technology changed more in a generation than the centuries before it, constant communication interrupted daily life, and a pandemic spread a mysterious lung disease. Thoreau, like us, reassessed his priorities: When is a job worth quitting? Do I need all this stuff? How can I sell out, just enough?

Finding Your Walden is self-help meets choose your own adventure inspired by the philosophy of Thoreau. It's both practical (those bills aren't going anywhere) and idealistic (can't we be more happy than busy?). Thoreau reminds us that cost and value aren't the same, that we should focus less on saving time and more on spending it well. This work distills Thoreau's philosophy into five principles, covering money, solitude, individuality, work, and hobbies.

Finding Your Walden applies a journalist's lens to a misunderstood literary icon, exploring how experts--psychologists, leaders, and scholars--support Thoreau's principles as guideposts for today's Great Reassessment and how they can be adapted today, and why they should. As people reassess priorities to create values-based lifestyles in a profit-based society, Thoreau's life offers a precedent, and his philosophy provides a path.

Like Walden, Finding Your Walden is about creating a personal business and life plan. Thoreau wrote that he went to Walden Pond "to transact some
private business" and to "acquire strict business habits." But then (plot twist!), he redefined currency. We not only spend our money, he argued. We spend our time, our energy. We spend our life. Finding Your Walden asks: If life is our true currency, how is our return on investment?

Finding Your Walden isn't about shunning money or success. It's about grappling with the purpose of the first and the meaning of the second. Thoreau sets us on a path to discover fulfillment and happiness--we just need to stop at a cabin on our way.