6/4/2023 0 Comments Good by s walden![]() ![]() ![]() Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. That’s a lot, but still less time than the three hours and 46 minutes people spent staring at their smartphones. ![]() The average American spent three hours and 43 minutes every day watching live TV in the first quarter of 2020, according to Nielsen. ![]() Many of the pastimes on which we while away huge portions of our lives feel good in the moment but bring us anxiety and regret when we manage to tear ourselves away. Without thinking about it, we are spectacularly failing some cosmic cost-benefit test, as measured not in money but in what matters most: time. Rather, he argued that we waste too much of our lives on things we don’t value. Thoreau’s point is not that we should be all work and no play-he was one of history’s most prominent critics of that way of living. “The cost of a thing,” he wrote in Walden, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. T he other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “ How to Build a Life ” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. ![]()
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