Alexey Golubev

Prosperity of a Mind in Need
The question of the underlining meaning of life comes to everybody at different times, but its seemingly absolute answer is never fully agreed upon by all parties of human civilization. Everybody lives a different life with different values and expectations to get out of it, so how could a person ever give one reason as to entangle every possible meaning of such a question. But intuitively people all follow the same framework, no matter if they recognize it as such or not. It’s the details that human lives consist of, that distinctively cause them to see a large range of disparities between a set life and the next one. Henry David Thoreau was a man that lived in a society, which was bounded only by the never-stopping development of cultural and technological identities. But even then, he believed that the conservative ideas and restrictions keep people in the basement of the underlying and factual meaning of life. His ideas, leading the ideology of an unorthodox philosophy of Transcendentalists at the time, challenged what people assumed as being the ultimate reality and state of affairs to being. He believed that through eradication of hereditary commodities like religions, beliefs, unnecessary time commitments and occupations, and through embracing of life lessons taught by the perpetual nature, people will come to the inevitable vision of absolute reality, that will abolish people’s perception of failure to live meaningful lives. Thoreau’s ideas, expressed in “Why I Went to the Woods,” still appeal greatly to today’s audience and society, because in this day many loose their track in finding a true purpose, and just survive through mindless living in an artificial world.
People today, live in a world full of possibilities others created for them, which keep them away from seeing a path to follow in their own survival through a complicated world. Thoreau saw the brick wall on a path to self-purification caused by acceleration in lifestyle influenced by the Industrial Revolution, and tried to educate the rest of his contemporaries as to break the truth out from behind steel bars. The same still applies to the great and present today, in which issues raised by Thoreau have become further bloated and discrete to ever discern in people’s busy, ever accelerating lives to the future. People have a huge variety of occupations to choose from today, as to make sure everyone has a self-proclaimed purpose, and the precedence of the routine and stable life is kept unchanged. However, this entertaining routine, which ensures people are kept busy, has taken out an integral part of human nature, and that is contemplation. Ever increasing distractions, misdirect people from meditating on the observation of things that happen to and around them. The result is people being blind to beautiful paths laid out by nature, from which they can find a true purpose for their existence. As Thorough puts it, “Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men…”(173). Modern times have proved that people only continue to degrade their innocent lives away from the simplicity of natural order, with the increase in complexity inscribed by the twenty-first century advancements.
Over the past centuries, humanity strived like never before to better people’s lives through creation of artificial occupations, and simplifying through complicating many parts of their daily routines as a result of profound technological advancements. In Thoreau’s time, he saw no purpose in many usual human endeavors. “For my part, I could easily do without the post-office… To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letter in my life… that were worth the postage”(Thoreau 175). Mail, newspaper, the trains and the railroads, all fell victim to Thoreau’s scrutinizing view of simplicity in life. But what is mail, but the Internet and telephone of today. Plane rides and cars