“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”

In the mid 1800s, Henry David Thoreau spent a few years in the wilderness of Massachusetts archiving his thoughts on the "new" technologies emerging in his time. These works were assembled and Walden: Or Life In The Woods, was published in 1854.

Perhaps we can draw some similarities between his time, and ours.

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end."

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into this hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast, and not to talk sensibly."

"How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. "

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.”

Finally, a beautiful line:

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

So interesting the musings and observations of someone at the turn of technology. Back then, it was simply the railroad, and telegraph!

Some good food for thought.

You don’t need a digital detox.
You just need a day (a week).

We’ll be here each week to help you make it count.

Get a life,
Analog Sunday