Be a Loser - The Philosophy of Henry David Thoreau

We want to experience so much in life, we can often ignore and neglect the quality of what

we actually experience. We are so often drawn to lifestyles full of busy schedules, active social

lives, frequent travels, and elaborate goals and achievements, we end up in lives focused on all

of these things but very little on ourselves. The busy life is promoted to us by culture, in movies,

in shows, the news, bestselling books, on social media, and so on. For much of the modern world,

the ideal of this life is transfused into the blood. But is this way of life even good for you?

Since oftentimes people who live very simple, modest, quiet lives are viewed as unexceptional,

unsuccessful, losers, and so on, it can perhaps be hard to see a quiet, simple life of relative

obscurity as something appealing, noteworthy, intentional, and difficult. But in truth, for

at least some portion of us, this sort of life is in fact a redeeming endeavor indicative of immense

discipline and wisdom. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because

he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away,”

wrote 19th century American transcendentalist writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau was a figure who focused much of his life and philosophy on the value of simplicity,

self-reliance, authenticity, and separating from the influences and conventions of modern life.

He not only wrote about these concepts, but he lived them. After avoiding expected, standard

career paths and befriending the founding father of the transcendentalist philosophy movement,

Ralph Waldo Emerson, for years, Thoreau lived by himself in a cabin in the woods

on a plot of Emerson’s land. Here, he led a simple, quiet, secluded life, focusing only

on what he believed he truly needed and valued. He worked only one day a week, reduced his material

possessions to a minimum, separated from the social and cultural world, immersed into nature,

and focus on his passion of writing. During this time, he wrote his masterwork, Walden.

In one passage of this book, he reflects on his time and reasons for living alone in the woods,

writing, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential

facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,

discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

We all want to live a good life and be successful, but how often do we stop and evaluate what a good,

successful life might be for us? How often do we consider, not how it would look from the outside,

but how it would feel from the inside — the only place it is actually experienced?

Plainly, being successful merely means having adequately accomplished a pre-determined goal

or task. And so, arguably, being successful in life depends solely on having mindfully

determined an overarching goal for how you want to live and then living adequately that way.

Thus, those who live a quiet, modest, simple life are just as successful as someone who

lives a busy and culturally significant one. So long as in both cases, both ways of life

are intentionally pursued, both are equally successful when obtained. Only in the case

in which someone is living unintentionally and without deliberation is one unsuccessful. Thus,

even on the highest of thrones, the remotest of destinations, and the most private of rooms,

we might just as likely find examples of failure, as we might in a small cabin in the woods.

Of course, some of us might find ourselves in conditions and circumstances we did not choose