WWTD? (What Would Thoreau Do?)

Irony is a funny thing. Walden Pond, chosen for its suclusion by Henry David Thoreau, is now a tourist attraction."There were nearly 74,000 visitors in the month of June" says The New York Times. People are coming from all over to see the iconic symbol of American thought that is Henry David Thoreau. This makes me wonder, would Thoreau like this pilgrimage? When I read Walden, I got the impression that HDT wanted us to live our own lives, not his. People that go to Walden Pond are searching for something. They want what HDT found. However, Thoreau says himself: "Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it" (6).
We must take a step back, and realize that HDT is now our senior. We now must break away from Thoreau's experience. We each need to become Thoreaus and Emersons and find our own Walden Pond. After all, Thoreau even said: "The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors" (6). We need to find our own path.

"Attention Holiday Shoppers!"

It's only December 7th, and I can already hear it...
"Attention holiday shoppers! There is a 45% off sale on something you don't need! Aisle 5!"

Yes, it is that time of the year again. The time of the year when kids get what they asked for, and parents feel the budget crunch even more. However, even the kids don't stay happy. They play with their holiday presents for maybe a month or two, then it gets shoved in the back of the closet, packed up right next to last Christmas' tennis shoes you swore you would wear, but never got around to wearing. I am a teenager on the North Shore. This scene is all too familiar.
I noticed this occurrence before, yet I haven't been able to put it into words until after reading Thoreau's Walden. He talked about the difference between the "need" and the "want" for something. He talked about using only the essentials to survive. The movie that we watched in AS put it as "Un-cluttering his life". I could not agree with Thoreau more. We are bred into the thought that bigger, greater, and more is better. We complicate things, and therefore, we are unhappy a month after Christmas, when the material object we used to fill the void in our lives has lost its lustre. We have a need for more "stuff" because we want to be happy. The obvious question is then: why are we so sad?
I think it is because we have lost ourselves in our routine. Have you ever noticed how nice a half day (like the one last Friday) is? We get to breathe, and see a new side to the 3 and a half hours that we usually spend in school. We tried something else. Another example is the typical "north shore soccer mom". You usually don't see these people happy on a regular basis because they are genuinely bored with life. They spend each day waiting for something exciting to happen, go to bed unhappy, and start the day over again. So then they say to themselves: "I bet that brand new tennis racket would change up my routine!" So they go and purchase it, and it soon takes a back seat to the next tennis racket they buy five months later. The amount of money we spend to make ourselves happy is ridiculous. Is there an answer to this vicious cycle of discontent? Perhaps we will find out in Walden...


Does money buy happiness? The guy in the picture sure seems like he digs it...