WORK: Henry David Thoreau on Making a Meaningful Living

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Education, Science

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Henry David Thoreau was a philosopher, poet, and pencil-maker. He was a great resigner and, above all, a superb writer whose masterpiece, "Walden," is considered by many to be America's first environmentalist manifesto. But John Kaag has a different view. "Thoreau's attempt to 'get back to nature,'" he and co-author Jonathan Van Belle write in their new book, "Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living," was an "attempt to get away from the capitalist rat race." By resigning from that race, Thoreau was, in a sense, reclaiming life—he was making a conscious choice about what to respect and where to tap meaning. "The abiding message of 'Walden,'" according to John and Jonathan, is that "the frenetic busyness of modern life should never be confused with the essential business of living." Today on the show, John Kaag and our producer Caleb Bissinger explore Thoreau's life and career, and they come away with surprising lessons about why we work and how we can make it more meaningful—how we can, in Thoreau's words, "live deliberately." If you have questions, comments, or ideas for future guests, email us at podcast@nextbigideaclub.com Guest: John Kaag Book: "Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living" Host: Caleb Bissinger The Next Big Idea is produced in partnership with LinkedIn Presents

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:06.4	I'm Rufus Griskym, and this is the next big idea.
0:10.7	Today, are you living deliberately?
0:13.5	Henry David Thoreau can show you how.
0:30.0	The massive men wrote Henry David Thoreau, more than 150 years ago, lead lives of quiet desperation.
0:45.7	I have been haunted by that line ever since I first read it, some 25 years ago.
0:51.1	Quiet desperation. What an extraordinary, indelible combination of words.
0:58.0	We humans are all too often deeply discontent, this is what I took from Thoreau's line, stuck in a
1:03.5	repetitive and unsatisfying daily grind, and unable to even articulate our desperation, much less
1:10.7	find a way out. To me, Thoreau's words were also a kind of personal challenge that guided my path
1:16.9	to some degree. How can I live not quietly, not desperately, but deliberately, delighting in every day,
1:24.8	even if in the process I embarrass my children now and then? And so I was delighted with my producer,
1:30.7	Caleb mentioned a new book by John Cagg and Jonathan Bunbell, called Henry at Work, Thoreau on
1:37.6	Making a Living, which looks to Thoreau, the great 19th century philosopher, poet, pencil maker,
1:43.2	and pontificator, to better understand how we live and work today, and how we can build meaningful
1:49.6	lives instead of blindly submitting to the frenetic busyness of modern life. That's coming up right
1:56.9	after the break.
2:06.1	At Atlassian, we believe impossible things are only impossible alone. Just ask the 75% of
2:12.0	Fortune 500 companies that use Atlassian products like Giro, Confluence, and Trello to tackle
2:17.0	their biggest challenges at Atlassian for projects impossible alone.
2:29.2	The fall of 2021 was kind of a weird time. After more than a year of mask mandates and social
2:36.8	distancing, zoom classrooms and working from the couch, we were starting to go back to school,
	...

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