being part of western gen-z cohort, the societal expectation is to life a digital life—to share every experience on instagram, to get news from youtube, to entertain ourselves on tiktok, to purchase everything from amazon, to sink hours into the latest video game, you get the point. it’s how most of us live, yet rarely do we reflect upon the consequences of such a lifestyle. further, given that our friends and family (and everyone around us) are digitally united, we are expected to do the same.
often times we act without thinking of consequences. we are slaves to our emotional desires. we forgo long-term thinking, and instead choose to listen to our emotive taskmasters, constantly chasing the next dopamine hit, the next new product, the newest release of x, finding ourself yet longing for y, not knowing we needed z. this masochistic cycle is what drives the lifestyles of nearly gen-z person. while it’s part of human nature to desire, it’s a problem when these feelings get conflated for value. the question then becomes—what brings value? currently, within our shallow existences, it’s a rare discussion that seems to have been lost between generations.
gen-z, the distracted generation, the vain generation, the connected generation, the indulgent generation, this is the generation that will soon run society. being part of this generation, I can give an internal look, discuss the reasons why my generation is novel, and discuss the extrapolations of the consequences of our individual actions.
why do we live like this? why are we expected to live like this? how did we end up like this?—being a part of the anxious generation, just thinking of these questions often spurs anxiety within myself. these are important questions. they’re difficult to answer, yet we have to try. if we can’t understand the reasoning behind our behavior, it becomes impossible to adjust ourselves for a better life. in my opinion, there’s a few reasons we’ve ended up like this.
chasing value is something humans have done for a long time. meaning is something gen-z is lacking. we are comfortable, pampered, and don’t understand suffering. our lives have been so easy, we are uncomfortable with any sort of pain. what’s unique about this generation, is our unprecedented access to distraction.
nihilism is the philosophical basis driving our lifestyles. as religion becomes increasingly unpopular, the typical goals that drove our predecessors has been lost (as well as our moral drives). because of this, it’s difficult to find a guiding light in the current world. what should we chase after?—given there is no intrinsic meaning to life anyway (according to nihilism). it is this struggle that i believe
is it possible to live in the connected world—whilst choosing a focused lifestyle? these two seemingly dimorphic lifestyles seem to clash, each valuing different ideals differently. should we live like luddites, regressing 200 years, choosing atechnology to any technology? conversely, we could choose to live as we do, constantly connected, constantly stimulated, constantly shallow.
near the end of march in 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an axe and walked into the woods near walden pond. he felled young white pine trees, which he hewed into studs and rafters and floorboards. using more borrowed tools, he notched mortise and tenon joints and assembled these pieces into the frame of a modest cabin. thoreau was not hurried in these efforts. each day he brought with him a lunch of bread and butter wrapped in newspaper, and after eating his meal he would read the wrapping. he found time during this leisurely construction process to take detailed notes on the nature that surrounded him. he observed the properties of the late season ice on the pond and the fragrance of the pine pitch. one morning while soaking a hickory wedge in the cold pond water, he saw a striped snake slide into the pond and lay still on the bottom. he watched it for over a quarter of an hour.
in july, thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. in the book walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: “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.”
the natural follow-up question is: how can you find enough of this solitude in the hyper-connected twenty-first century? to answer it, we can draw insight from thoreau’s cabin at walden pond. thoreaus’s retreat to the woods beyond concord, massachusetts, with the intention to live more deliberately, is cited as a classic example of solitude. thoreau helped spread this conception. his book about the experience is rich with long passages describing thoreau alone and observing the slow rhythms of nature.
in the decades since walden’s release, however, critics have been busy attacking the mythology of walden as an isolated outpost. historian w. barksdale maynard, to cite one example among many, listed in a 2005 essay the many ways in which thoreau was anything but isolated during his time at the pond. thoreau’s cabin, it turns out, was not in the woods, but in a clearing near the woods that was in sight of a well-traveled public road. thoreau was only a thirty-minute walk from his hometown of concord, where he returned regularly for meals and social calls. friends and family, for their part, visited him constantly at his cabin, and walden pond, far from an untrammeled oasis, was then, as it remains today, a popular destination for tourists seeking a nice walk or swim.
but as maynard explains, this complicated mixture of solitude and companionship is not a secret thoreau was trying to hide. it was, in some sense, the whole point. “(Thoreau’s) intention was not to inhabit a wilderness,” he writes, “but to find wilderness in a suburban setting”
thoreau had no interese in complete disconnection, as the intellectual milieu of mid-nineteenth-century concord was surprisingly well developed and thoreau didn’t want to completely disengage from this energy. what thoreau sought in his experiment at walden was the ability to move back and forth between a state of solitude and a state of connection. he valued time alone with his thoughts - staring at ice - but he also valued companionship and intellectual stimulation. he would have rejected a life of true hermit-style isolation with the same vigor with which he protested the thoughtless consumerism of the early industrial age. the pianist glenn gould once proposed a mathematic formula for this cycle, telling a journalist: “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don’t really know … but it’s a substatial ratio.”
it’s exactly this alternation between regular time alone with your thoughts and regular connection that I propose as the key to achieving a balanced digital lifestyle.
the first and longest chapter of walden is titled “Economy”. it contains many of thoreau’s signature poetic flourishes about nature and the human condition. it also, however, contains a surprising number of bland expense tables, recording costs down to a fraction of a cent. thoreau’s purpose in those tables is to capture precisely (not poetically or philosophically) how much it cost to support his life at walden pond - a lifestyle that, as he argues at length in this first chapter, satisfies all the basic human needs: food, shelter, warmth, and so on. thoreau then contrasts these costs with the hourly wages he could earn with his labor to arrive at the final value he cared most about: how much of his time must be sacrificed to support his minimalist lifestyle? after plugging in the numbers gathered during his experiment, he determined that hiring out his labor only one day per week would be sufficient.
this trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher frédéric gros calls thoreau’s “new economics,” a theory that builds on the following axiom: “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.”
this new economics offers a rethinking of the consumerist culture that began to emerge in thoreau’s time. standard economic theory focuses on monetary outcomes. if working one acre of land as a farmer earns you $1 a year in profit, and working sixty acres earns you $60, then you should, if it’s at all possible, work the sixty acres - it produces strictly more money.
thoreau’s new economics considers such math incomplete, as it leaves out the cost in life required to achieve that extra $59 in monetary profit. as he notes in walden, working a large farm, as many of his concord neighbours did, required large, stressful mortgages, the need to maintain numerous pieces of equipment, and endless demanding labor. he describes these farmer neighbours as “crushed and smothered under (their) load” and famously lumps them into the “mass of men lead(ing) lives of quiet desperation.”
theoreau then asks what benefits these worn-down farmers recieve from the extra profit they squeeze out. as he proved in his walden experiment, this extra work is not enabling the farmers to escape savage conditions: thoreau was able to satisfy all of his basic needs quite comfortably with the equivalent of one day of work per week. what these farmers are actually gaining from all the life they sacrifice is slightly nicer stuff: venetian blinds, a better quality copper pot, perhaps a fancy wagon for travelling back and forth to town more efficiently.
when analysed through thoreau’s new economics, this exchange can come across as ill concieved. who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life? similarly, why would you add hours of extra labor in the fields to obtain a wagon? it’s true that it takes more time to walk to town than to ride in a wagon, thoreau notes, but these walks still likely require less time than the extra work hours needed to afford the wagon. it’s exactly these types of calculations that lead thoreau to observe: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, house, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.”
thoreau’s obsession with calculation helps us move past the vague subjective sense that there are trade-offs inherent in digital clutter, and forces us instead to confront it more precisely. he asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance - arguably the most valuable substance we possess - and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time. when we confront habits through this perspective, we will reach the same conclusion now that thoreau did in his era: more often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.
-d. guihot. written 22/3/25. last updated 11/4/25