Reference no: EM133576812

Discussion Post

Write a 200 words response to the following discussion activity.

Use specific references and direct quotes from our readings this week to illustrate and support your view/s.

In Walden, Thoreau's practical advice for living provides a diagnosis of what is wrong with American life: materialism. The body of the book then presents a cure for the disease of materialism: striving for purity and simplicity as exemplified by Thoreau's own experience and by the symbolic purity of Walden Pond. The final chapter presents Thoreau's optimistic prognosis that each individual reader has the potential to vastly improve his or her life by shifting priorities.

Thoreau says, "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."

A Consumer Reports article (June 1992) entitled "Has Our Living Standard Stalled?" lists the cost of various modern items in terms of how many hours one would have to work to obtain them. Although the article is three decades old and many of the figures have changed, read the article and compute how many workdays or weeks would be necessary to purchase some of your favorite items using current figures at today's values. Discuss three of these items and consider whether you think that each item is worth the amount of time in your life that you would have to "spend" for it? Why or why not? What would Thoreau think about the purchase of each item, and based on his ideas in Walden what might he suggest instead of the purchase of your selected items?