Thoreau on Making a Living
Episode Stats
Summary
We don't often think of work when we think of Henry David Thoreau, but he was a man of much practical skill who lived a life of both thought and action. He did all kinds of work from carpentry to surveying to helping raise Ralph Walden Emerson's kids, and thought a lot about the nature of work both the paid variety and the kind that's necessary for simply sustaining day-to-day life. Today, on the show, Professor of Philosophy and the co-author of the new book, "Hearnry at Work: Henry David thoreau and Making a Living," share some of thoreaus insights on work with us.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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we don't often think of work when we think of henry david thoreau we think of thoreau
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living with his family or loafing around at a cabinet walden and mostly spending his days
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walking and enjoying nature we know he did some writing sure but often think of him as being
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largely the abstract thinker type but thoreau was a man of much practical skill who lived a life of
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both thought and action he did all kinds of work from carpentry to surveying to helping raise ralph
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waldo emerson's kids and thought a lot about the nature of work both the paid variety and the kind
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that's necessary for simply sustaining day-to-day life today on the show john kag professor of
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philosophy and the co-author of henry at work thoreau and making a living share some of thoreau's
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insights on work with us we discuss what thoreau can teach us about the value of resignation
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the importance of continuing to work with your hands to maintain what thoreau called your vital
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heat what makes for meaningful work and the trap of working in bad faith we end our conversation
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with a call to consider what you're really being paid for in your job and the true cost of the
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things you buy after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is henry at work
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all right john kag welcome back to the show oh thanks so much for having me i really appreciate
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it so we had you on before to talk about your hike with nietzsche then we also talked about
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your experience with the pragmatist by this library you found in the middle of the new england woods
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you got a new book out it's called henry at work thoreau on making a living it's about what we can
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learn from henry david thoreau about our work lives and what's interesting is we typically think of
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henry david thoreau as the original dropout right the guy that built a shack by a pond so he could write
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and look at nature but you and your co-author you make the case that thoreau has a lot to teach us
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about work so let's start off with thoreau's work life what was his work life like what did he do
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to make a living yeah i mean we think about thoreau going off to walden we think oh this is just a
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nice vacation but really what thoreau is doing when he goes to walden is he's attempting to live
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deliberately he says this at the beginning of one he says i went to the woods to live deliberately
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so that i didn't get to the end of my life and discover that i haven't lived but also what we
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sometimes forget is that thoreau worked his butt off at walden over the last 15 years some authors
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have criticized thoreau for the help that he received while he was at walden pond for two years
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two months and two days but when we really look at thoreau's day in and day out life at the pond
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what he's trying to do is he's trying to sustain himself through his work he's trying to build his
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own house he's trying to grow his own crops grow his own food mend his own clothes and also write
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two of the greatest pieces of american letters walden and this famous essay called civil disobedience
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so if you think about thoreau as a loafer or a lotus eater you're sort of off base here i mean thoreau
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worked his entire life you don't write a two million word journal just by sort of sitting on your hands and
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doing nothing sometimes we don't think about writing as real work but it was for thoreau but
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he was also a sort of manual laborer in a way that many of us have come to re-appreciate or appreciate
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once again during the pandemic and the pandemic is basically a time when we've had to re-evaluate
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our work life and work-life balance and thoreau is a really good one to start us on that path
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and you also highlight his work life before walden like the guy had lots of jobs he tried his hand at
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teaching school him and his brother opened up their own sort of alternative country school
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he was a surveyor and then he was also he was emerson's basically like a babysitter for emerson and did
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some sort of general handiwork for emerson when he was out you know touring the world giving lectures
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that's right i mean if we think about thoreau's early life it really was a childhood of a working
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class or middle class family where he wasn't the famous author that wrote walden he was just a boy
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who falls off a cow and was a farmhand and who cut his toe off cutting wood and really lived a very
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straightforward manual existence for much of his early life which i think explains in some part why
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thoreau disdained the high society and the high intellectual life at harvard he believed that the
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real life real world lessons of experience were oftentimes far more important than the the book
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learning that we would get from philosophy or from academia but you're right to say if we think
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about thoreau's life as a worker he was first and foremost as we know him today a writer that's true
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but he was also a teacher he was also a nanny as you say to emerson's children when emerson went away
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in fact emerson's son was so close to thoreau that when emerson was away he asked he said to thoreau
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mr thoreau can you be my father i mean he's that close to the emerson kids and he in a way that
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i think comes back to our own present day we've really had to think about what it is to
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make our homes and the importance of frugality and home economics thoreau is very much aware of that and
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his journey out to walden and his press for simplicity and frugality was really a function
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of economic necessity he lived through the panic of 1837 where lots and lots of people lost their jobs
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and thoreau for one worked on 75 cents a day for months upon months and even back then 75 cents a day
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was not much money this idea of economics i think to understand thoreau's philosophy towards work
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you have to understand his philosophy towards economics in general and we when we think of
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economics today we think of sort of macroeconomics the market business and that was part of thoreau's
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idea of economics as well but his was more home-based he was trying to go back to the original
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meaning of the word economics from greek and he talked about this in a chapter in walden called
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economy so what understanding of economics do we get from thoreau from this chapter on economy
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so when you open up walden sometimes you're a little surprised to find this chapter called economy
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because thoreau is such a stringent or such a harsh critic of modern consumerism and you think
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what is this chapter economy doing here but you're right brett i mean he's thinking about oikos the
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greek word oikos which basically derives from the word to dwell or dwelling and he's reminding us
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thoreau's reminding us that all of the jobs that we have and all the work that we do should really
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be geared to figuring out how to make the world more livable and how to make a home in the world
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and when emerson encourages us to be self-reliant his friend emerson says trust thyself every heart
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vibrates to that iron string the road takes that really practically and really seriously and he says
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to himself what exactly do i need to sustain myself in my everyday life and that answer i think if we
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really are careful about it is a surprising one we don't need that much and what you find in that
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first chapter of economy is thoreau's almost painstaking diary of all of his accounts and all
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of his accounting of how much it costs to sustain himself what did he eat what kind of shelter did he
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require what sort of clothing did he have to wear what actually supported him through life and i think
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that if we reorient ourselves to that question we discover that economy can be a much more humble
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modest but also a much more meaningful word so the audience that thoreau was addressing was one in which
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they were already beginning to think about the surpluses and the excesses of modern consumerism
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and thoreau says oftentimes those excesses of our economic life are hindrances to the actual
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meaningful business of living so that home-based idea of economics that shapes what thoreau thought
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about work and that work is it's something you have to do but make sure you do work that is enriching
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that's life affirming you start off the book with a chapter on quitting it's called resignation
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why start with quitting jobs and a book about henry david thoreau and work
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well one of them is a sort of contemporary issue and i fit i mean both i have faced and my family
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have faced and then a lot of my friends have faced a moment in our u.s or contemporary economic scene
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where many people are losing their jobs and also deciding not to go back to work in the same way
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the pandemic sort of changed things for many many people and it was a moment that i thought thoreau could
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speak to because thoreau was a very big resigner in the sense that he resigned to my account
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six pretty substantial jobs the one that sticks out to me is after he graduates from harvard he
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establishes a school with his brother but also teaches at concord academy and at the academy thoreau was
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asked to exact corporate punishment on his students and he did this for exactly one day and then got
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completely fed up and quit his job on moral grounds and i think a lot of people when faced with the
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pandemic when faced with sort of existential moments of crisis have the opportunity to ask
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if their jobs are in line with their moral lives their intellectual lives and their passions
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and thoreau was always adamant that you should never sacrifice your dreams for your dream job
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at least in the lucrative sense and he was very insightful that the next century and then the
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following century the one that we're living in would see moments in which people confused the size of
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their bank account with the true riches or wealth of living and so thoreau is on to that and he says
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quit your job if you think that it doesn't fit into the sort of logic of living deliberately ask
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yourself whether you're going to get to the end of your life and look back and regret certain things
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about your life and that includes your work life so thoreau would say or advocate for a certain type of
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self-examination and then oftentimes a certain type of resignation from jobs that don't fit our ideal
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and i think another thing i took away from thoreau and his willingness to resign himself when he didn't
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like a job or wasn't aligning with his values he also resigned himself from the world whenever he
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faced big i guess we call life disruptions or failures you talk about in the book you know his brother
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died it was devastating to him i think his brother cut himself with a razor and he died from shaving
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and then shortly after that i don't think a lot of people knows about thoreau he actually accidentally
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burned down a giant forest near concord right that's right and we oftentimes think about walden as
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this almost heroic mission of like self-reliance but really thoreau is retreating from a world that
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seems to have come undone for him i mean his brother john dies in his arms from lockjaw basically gangrene
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and then thoreau as you say burns down a chunk of the forest and is the pariah of concord for several
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months if not a year and we oftentimes think oh thoreau he's just going out to sort of commune with
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nature he's also retreating from life in a particular way but what i will say is that he's also
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turning to work or a new sort of version of work of manual work of meaningful labor in order to get
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himself through so it's not simply that he went on vacation to retreat the world he says i'm going to
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see how much i can rely upon myself in order to sort of sustain myself in life and i think that that's
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a really redemptive move for thoreau but also for our understanding of what work can mean for us
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and what was interesting about thoreau he was willing to resign himself from work or projects that
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were also successful like walden for example at the end of it when he writes like why did i leave
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walden well just it was time to end it it was time to move on to something else he didn't hang on to
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it even though it might have been a good thing i think that's another lesson you can take from
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thoreau you might be in a job that's great but maybe you need to quit it and move on to something
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else yeah i mean i think if if i think about the heroes from american philosophy the pragmatist
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william james says that we should do two things every day that are difficult just for the practice
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of it and sometimes in thoreau's case just changing your habits of life is both difficult but also
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rewarding we oftentimes get stuck in a rut and we suffer through this sort of fallacy of sunk costs we
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put so much into a job in terms of time or resources or ourselves that we can't imagine doing anything
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else and thoreau says oh gosh everyone come on there are so many possibilities to life you can do
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something else and if you fail at least that failure will be yours in changing careers or changing tax
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and i think that that's something that when we think about the desire for economic security and when we
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think about the way that employment sort of draws us in and requires us to invest ourselves
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we need to be very careful and self-reflective about knowing when it is time to go or let go
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and not allowing the draw of security to actually get in the way of some of our more personal or
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existential ambitions so emerson famously said in his eulogy to thoreau which is a great i recommend
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everyone read this thing it's fantastic we'll link to it but in the eulogy to thoreau he said that thoreau
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lacked ambition what do you make of emerson's critique that thoreau you know he kind of just
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dressed up his willingness to loaf with philosophical pretensions well emerson and thoreau were very good
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friends through much of their life but they did did have a falling out and one of the ways that they
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diverged i think is that emerson became a public intellectual in a way that thoreau never did
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emerson spent countless hours delivering public lectures developing public lectures going on tour
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and making some serious money doing it and i think that his comment about thoreau being less ambitious
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was a function that thoreau never achieved the same success on the lecture circuit or in terms of
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monetary goods in fact emerson oftentimes hired thoreau to do his household work to plant his gardens
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at least in part to nanny his children yeah i think that's one thing that separated emerson and
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thoreau in their approach to transcendentalism so emerson really embraced the life of the mind of
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transcendentalism i think like you said if he were alive today i'd imagine he'd be some you know
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superstar professor thought leader going around the world doing ted talks and writing new york times
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bestsellers but he also he appreciated he had a romantic appreciation for the sort of the down-to-earth
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self-reliance that thoreau embodied like he would often imagine himself it would be nice to have some
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land and you know do manual labor himself but he didn't follow through with that idea because he
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was busy lecturing and things so thoreau what's interesting about thoreau he continued to write
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and continue to think about philosophy but he made a point to keep doing manual labor he had real
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practical skills he could build boats he could build a house he could do carpentry he could garden did
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surveying why did thoreau think it was important that we keep working with our hands even if we are
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engaging in what we think of as abstract thinking or philosophizing that's such a good question
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i mean we should remember that thoreau is a contemporary of marx that carl marx and
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marx's criticism of labor and capitalism turns on the fact that modern industrialism and modern
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industrialization leads to the alienation of of the workforce and how that happens is that workers
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no longer have a sense of the control over the means of production in other words they lose the
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sense that their efforts are translating and generating particular products so you can think
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about the assembly line in thoreau's day in the factory or in the mills and those workers make only a
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very small part of a much bigger product which they don't particularly own or lay claim to and thoreau
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thought that one way of counteracting modern alienation in the form of economics and in the form of modern
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economics was to work with our hands to go back to sort of older artisan forms of work and you can think
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about the maker movement today or you know make your own food make your own clothes the the right to
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recycle these are attempts very thoreauvian attempts to get back to the products that underlie our lives
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and also to lay claim to them again so i think thoreau more than emerson said let's see what my hands
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can actually do and if you the front cover of the book of henry at work is thoreau up on his ladder
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fixing his cabin at walden or putting his cabin together at walden what's interesting about the
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frontispiece or the first page of walden is it's just the cabin already constructed but jonathan and i
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thought that what was most interesting is about thoreau's actual attempt his hands-on attempt to put the
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jingles on the roof and to think of that as really both an intellectual philosophical but also a very
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personal form of work emerson and the american scholar says that a true american scholar needs to
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draw on a number of resources the past history but also nature and action and the action part was
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pivotal for thoreau yeah you quote him saying that one of the things you get from working with your
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hands is yeah you said you get to see immediate feedback right unlike a lot of work today you do
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spreadsheets then it goes off to someone you don't know what happens to whatever work you did what he
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liked about manual work is you got to see right away so he talks about this in walden talking about
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his bean field he's talking about his beans all the things that went into growing these beans and he said
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it's just really satisfying to see the things i did weeks before would have an effect on these these
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little beans but he also had this great line about how manual labor working with your hands can
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give you sort of a spiritual vigor i'm going to read it here it says it is something to be able to
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paint a particular picture or to carve a statue and so to make a few objects beautiful but it's far more
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glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look so i mean i guess for him
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when you work with your hands and you're shaping your environment and then that in turn shapes you
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as well when i read that line it reminded me of matthew crawford's work that he did in shop class
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as soul craft he had that very same idea you work with your hands because there's something about it
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that's going to give you a satisfaction that you're not going to get with just abstract work
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i love that i love that book shop craft as soul craft i think in terms of crawford and thoreau there's
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also a sense that manual labor connects us to the natural world in a way that intellectual labor
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sometimes does not what i mean by that is that the like when you're working in a garden or when you're
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even washing dishes and you're really quote into it or immersed in your dishes you're connected to
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something radically other than yourself and you're connected in this very intimate way i mean i think
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oftentimes manual labor can be a form of drudgery and meaningless if it is forced but i mean if we
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choose to use our hands to as you say shape the world and let the world shape us in the process
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you also come away feeling like you weren't just alone in the bean fields or weren't just alone in the
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garden like you actually feel like you were connected and i think in our modern day we really crave
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that connection that's just beyond our fingertips that's right there for us to have if we're willing
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to put our hands into it we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors
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and now back to the show he also talks about in walden how manual work can also help us retain
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our vital heat i'm curious you're a professor of philosophy so you spend a lot of your time reading
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writing what do you do to work with your hands so you can keep your vital heat in a thorough view
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thanks for that i mean i had a cardiac arrest when i was 40 and i was out for three minutes before the
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emt shocked me back to life and that moment when i was 40 was really a moment when i thought i need to
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get this vital heat back and so we moved and we started a garden and we have two kids and i have
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spent basically the last three years i'm now 43 really trying to think about the meaning of work
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in a more sustained way but also using my hands and having two dogs and raising two dogs and being
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much more hands-on and i've gotten emails and letters over the last three years from readers
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and they said when's the next book coming out what's happening like why aren't you writing more
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and the answer is is that i was too busy living and i was too busy using my hands and in part i've
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toned back my reading and my writing so that i could have a more thorough in existence in some ways
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so work can sometimes feel meaningless for thorough what made work meaningless
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so thorough i think makes a distinction between meaningful work and drudgery meaningful work has an
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objective that is freely chosen and a path to achieve that objective that's like the very very minimum
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for meaningful work meaningless work usually has no objective freely chosen and oftentimes doesn't have
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a true means or a path to achieve any sort of objective chosen or not so it's not clear to the assembly
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line worker what the objective is or the end objective of their work no one ever sees the final product all
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they see is the same assembly line moment that oftentimes is meaningless according to thorough and
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meaningful work is utterly personal it's the type of work that you feel like when you do it that you are
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fully suited to that particular task that the universe has sort of picked it out for you that you're not
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just some sort of fungible part that somebody else could you know step in and do exactly the same job
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it's personal and it's unique well to that second point i think that's one reason why thorough is such a
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great resigner right the more he resigned from stuff he was able to figure out what was the thing that he was
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suited for i think oftentimes we just stick with the job because well it pays the bills whatever but you
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limit your opportunities to find what you're actually called to do that's right and i mean we use this
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expression that oftentimes is associated with 20th century existentialism which is bad faith but i think
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that thorough is worried about jobs that we work in bad faith what we mean by that is that think about how
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often you hear a friend or even hear yourself say the expression i can't leave my job and that expression
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oftentimes is a reflection of bad faith saying that you are not free to do something when in fact you are
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but perhaps you're simply not willing to face the consequences of the action now i understand that many
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individuals especially those individuals who are in very tight socioeconomic circumstances might feel
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that they can't leave their job and that situation might not necessarily be one where you are living or
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working in bad faith it might actually be that you can't see any other way forward that you can't see any
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other outlet to make ends meet but thorough was also concerned about those individuals who have more than
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enough who live on surplus but they still at the same time say i couldn't change my job i couldn't take
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that risk i couldn't do without that last zero on my paycheck and i think that's that's a concern that
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thorough is expressing to his readers in walden so meaningful work is one where you definitely don't
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work in bad faith or live in bad faith you say i am doing this freely i'm doing it deliberately and
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that also means that i'm free to leave it when i choose as thorough say don't put golden handcuffs on
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yourself do not do not what would thorough say to the situations where you're you there's work you have
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to do it feels like drudgery you can't escape it i'm not even it doesn't have to be it doesn't have
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to be work for money it could be you talk about this in the book i think it was either you or your
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co-author taking care of their mother as she was you know her last few years and caregiving for someone
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like that can it can take a lot out of you but you got to do it because you have this this
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responsibility and you feel like this filial duty to that person what do you do in those situations
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when you got to do something but it's just man it's it grinds you down what does thorough have
00:28:28.920
any advice there yeah yeah oh gosh it's such a such a both a really good question and very hard
00:28:36.880
hard answer so let me try the issue about doing things that you would rather not do when it comes
00:28:44.560
to work like modern adult life is full of these moments like maybe i don't want to drive my kids to
00:28:52.200
the extra soccer practice or maybe i don't want to take care of it was my mother that you're referring
00:28:57.620
to who's now in hospice like maybe i don't want to go see her once again for the umpteenth time
00:29:03.180
and like how do i get myself to think about this experience differently so thoreau would say that you
00:29:12.420
don't have to be zen about drudgery all the time like we just don't have that capacity that sort of
00:29:19.880
marie kondo sort of like capacity to see that tidying up is always this opportunity for growth
00:29:28.380
and beauty that would be great but lots of us don't have that ability what thoreau says is that
00:29:33.880
we can oftentimes try to see the world a little bit differently and what i see thoreau doing repeatedly
00:29:43.100
in his work and also in his um walks through nature and his reflections on nature is that he's pointing
00:29:51.720
out that we oftentimes work under the assumption that we are the sole kings of our little imperial
00:30:00.240
realms and that like we are going through life doing things and doing things for ourselves
00:30:07.960
ourselves and if we can shift our perspective just a little bit and realize that adult life really
00:30:16.480
has a lot to do with sacrificing to our loved ones and to strangers and you know to the world at large
00:30:25.460
and not just about yourself but about something else and trying to take that perspective for just a
00:30:31.960
little bit of time that what might seem like drudgery or might seem incredibly boring can be
00:30:38.960
incredibly interesting now how does this work well there was this american philosopher by the name of
00:30:47.480
ella lyman cabot and ella lyman cabot basically set up an informal orphanage and she wrote several
00:30:55.000
books about ethics and one passage i'll relay here is a passage where she says that a child came up to her
00:31:01.420
and held out three little cherries in her hand and said look how miraculous these cherries are
00:31:08.720
and at first ella lyman cabot said i could scarcely imagine what could be so interesting
00:31:15.600
about three little cherries in this child's hand but then what she said is if she really looked
00:31:23.340
carefully and really thought about things carefully all of a sudden those cherries or something about the
00:31:30.020
external world seem sort of wonderful or imaginative or meaningful in a way that she had not anticipated
00:31:37.700
and i think that thoreau's message at the end of walden which is to the effect that we need to be awake
00:31:45.000
to the world and the world dawns on us only if we have eyes to see it has a lot to do with transforming
00:31:52.800
meaningless drudgery or a boring task into something meaningful and i think that most listeners and
00:32:00.680
most of my students can think about times in their life where they actually transform something they
00:32:06.260
thought was going to be boring into something very meaningful and maybe even a little bit sacred
00:32:11.520
and those are the moments that i think reaching adulthood i i take a little bit of solace in or i find a
00:32:18.680
little bit of hope in because gosh life is going to be so boring sometimes especially with our work
00:32:24.060
and if we have the ability to see things a little differently i think that will make all the
00:32:29.140
difference and it seems like part of what thoreau teaches us about how to do that is that he shows
00:32:36.560
the importance of of having curiosity like there's a great quote his friend said that he was alive from
00:32:43.380
top to toe with curiosity you know and that curiosity you know is what allowed him to take
00:32:49.520
the same walks again and again um in this you know small concord town but you know he never got tired
00:32:55.860
of it and he still felt like it was like there was still interesting explorations to have there and
00:33:00.920
then like another thing too like you talk about this in the book like he could stand in a pond
00:33:04.160
in the same spot staring in the water for hours and hours just studying the bullfrog and people would be
00:33:10.420
like hey henry what are you doing it's like well i'm just looking at the bullfrog and people
00:33:13.200
like what a weirdo so that's another thing we forget about thoreau like he thoreau in his work
00:33:17.420
he was a naturalist and he made lots of observations and studies of nature but yeah i mean i think he
00:33:23.220
really embodied the art of looking or noticing that kept everyday everyday things fresh to him
00:33:29.660
you know he told his friend he said this he says the art of genius is to raise the little into the large
00:33:35.660
which that can be challenging but it's an interesting challenge to try so turning back to work more
00:33:41.880
generally we work to pay the bills and thoreau wasn't against that he wasn't against money making
00:33:46.560
completely even in walden he talked about he'd sell things and he made this much money but how did he
00:33:53.160
think about the relationship between work and money what what was his idea of compensation like besides
00:33:58.080
the dollar value that we get from our work what else was he thinking about does that make does that
00:34:03.540
make sense it does yeah i mean thoreau would point out that really what's happening when we get the
00:34:12.100
paycheck for every month is that our employer is paying us for a task that we perform but more
00:34:21.460
importantly the employer is always paying us for the time that we've spent of our lives on that task
00:34:30.800
in other words our employer is compensating us for our life for our time and that's something that
00:34:38.780
we oftentimes forget that what we're spending in our work life is our minutes hours days years and
00:34:47.120
decades and thoreau basically says the whole point of life is to improve my nick of time and we oftentimes
00:34:56.240
do that on the clock we do that at work so first of all the compensation that we take away in terms of our
00:35:03.500
monetary gain should not mask the fact that we're actually being paid to give up parts of our lives and to
00:35:12.640
make sure that the money that we make actually and the way that we then spend that money is in some ways
00:35:20.580
aligned to the way that we want to spend our lives the way that we want to value things and revere things
00:35:29.820
and pursue ideals and just ask yourself like is the extra paycheck or the bonus really worth it am i
00:35:38.280
sacrificing something that i shouldn't be where's that famous quote and walden the cost of a thing is
00:35:44.660
the amount of what i call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long
00:35:50.300
run so we think yeah like what what opportunities are you giving up by taking this job what i don't
00:35:56.000
know maybe kids activities are you going to miss because of the job and he also not only think about
00:36:01.060
this with your work but also the stuff you buy the stuff you buy has an immediate cost but some stuff
00:36:07.580
has long-term costs well if i buy this house how much money am i going to be spending on in the long run
00:36:13.540
to fix it up or pay taxes on it and he'd say you need to take that into account too when you're
00:36:17.820
thinking about what you're buying because ultimately the more stuff you buy the more work you'll have to
00:36:24.460
do in exchange for it and and then the more life you'll have to exchange to do that work and for
00:36:31.700
thorough that's what he was saying he's saying that's that's the real cost of a thing right i mean
00:36:36.400
thorough walked around his native concord and observed that many men and women were tied to their
00:36:42.980
family farms in other words these big farms that in fact made a lot of money perhaps were made a
00:36:50.160
surplus cost a lot and what they cost was the time and energy to keep them upright and to keep them
00:36:56.300
going okay so i guess uh thorough's advice about compensation don't get myopic and just think about
00:37:03.440
the number on your paycheck you also have to think about other things that you'll have to give up for
00:37:09.320
your time and you know maybe even your values i'm reminded a little bit someone recently a friend
00:37:16.080
recently asked me he goes when were you most happy with your job and i said to him well it was when i was
00:37:23.600
teaching community college when i was in grad school and i remember making you know fourteen thousand
00:37:29.960
dollars a year in grad school and thinking that that was a lot of money and that that was more than
00:37:35.120
enough granted i didn't have kids but at least those moments of frugality and those sort of moments
00:37:42.600
of forced frugality remind me that i can be happy on less and i think that that's really thorough's
00:37:50.580
takeaway on the notion of compensation and modern compensation we could probably be happy with less
00:37:57.100
or many of us could i love how you in the book you and your co-author in the book talking about what is
00:38:02.060
kind of sum up what does it mean to work in a thoroughian sense and you have this great uh
00:38:07.140
quote from him he says i say to myself do a little more of that work which you have confessed to be
00:38:13.500
good so good work i mean so what is good work in the thoroughians if you were to sum it up like what
00:38:18.480
does it mean to do good work in a thoroughian sense so we say in the book we say that this type
00:38:27.240
of goodness thoroughian goodness doesn't it doesn't necessarily turn on god's grace or the permission
00:38:33.680
of some sort of higher power but on one's willingness and ability to confess that the task was good
00:38:41.940
what do i mean by confess i mean when you think about the work that you do in the course of your life
00:38:50.920
and we spend so much of our lives at work if you take a minute and you think about the ways that
00:38:58.560
you're working and your work life and you say if this were my last day on this earth would i be happy
00:39:06.840
with the work that i've done you might say to yourself oh gosh there's so many times where i'm like
00:39:14.480
you know drudging through something or slogging through something no i wouldn't be happy well then
00:39:21.180
think to yourself first of all a yeah you might resign you might change that course of action but
00:39:27.520
you might also change your orientation to work on the whole so that you can do it deliberately which
00:39:33.520
just simply means to say this is my task this is what i shall do and i'm doing it freely and that
00:39:42.440
allows you to do lots of tasks that oftentimes aren't that great but at least those tasks will
00:39:49.480
be yours you'll say to yourself and this is what i mean by confess it's basically to say this is my
00:39:57.760
life this is my task i will get to work on it and i'm free to decide to do this or to do otherwise
00:40:05.340
that i think is what makes a thorovian moment of work a good work it's simply to say that i've
00:40:13.040
claimed that moment of work or labor in a real way where at the end i'd be satisfied that i had done so
00:40:21.360
so work in good faith goes back to that yeah yeah well john this has been a great conversation where
00:40:28.400
can people go to learn more about the book in your work uh the book comes out um june 13th i would
00:40:35.000
encourage folks to go to princeton university press's website and not necessarily to amazon but
00:40:40.720
that's up to them and i really really hope that the book helps a lot of people rethink the way that
00:40:48.920
they approach their work life and also and also vacations uh also the moments when we don't
00:40:55.320
necessarily have to work so that's my hope well john kag thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:41:00.240
oh thanks so much i really appreciate it my guest here is john kag he's the co-author of the book
00:41:06.100
henry at work thoreau on making a living it's available for pre-order at princeton university
00:41:10.980
press we'll put a link to the show notes where you can pre-order it also check out our show notes
00:41:14.680
at aom.is henry at work where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:41:19.560
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:41:30.920
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00:41:34.780
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00:42:02.620
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