It’s no simple thing to live a good life. We might be able to describe the things we want—health, love, pleasure, joy—but it is usually hard to draw a line between the work and responsibilities that fill our days and the things we believe are most valuable.

A good library will show you that this has been true for most people, in most places and times. For the Greeks, the question of how to live a good life was of paramount philosophical concern. For the 19th-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, it was all-consuming. By the time he was 27 years old, he had retreated from his neighbors in the well-to-do town of Concord, Massachusetts, and settled in a hand-built cabin on a local pond called Walden.¹ Thoreau gambled that isolation would show him his true needs and desires. He was, so to say, off the apps and finding himself.

The resulting book, Walden, is popularly known as the bible of the back-to-nature movement, a proto-hippie manifesto on rustic transcendence. But those who open it expecting to find a treatise on mindfulness will be quickly rattled. Thoreau begins with a merciless accounting of his neighbors’ lives, which he sees as foolish and wasteful—his chief complaint being that they spend their time pursuing material wealth and security, which most of them fail to attain, even after giving a lifetime to the cause.

The essential problem is much the same now as it was then: What we think we want, and what actually makes us happy are, in the end, not the same things. Thoreau’s solution is surprisingly practical and has the tone of an economics lecture rather than the pulpit. “The cost of a thing,” he writes, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” 

When we devote ourselves to our jobs and push ourselves to acquire the outward signs of success, we often vastly under-estimate the amount of “life-cost” we will pay to attain our goals. Once awoken to this cost, Thoreau saw it everywhere: the effort made to dress elegantly, curry favor among neighbors and business associates, the fear of insolvency. At one point he notes that most of his neighbors would rather appear in public with a broken leg than with patched trousers (“distressed” garments had yet to come into fashion).