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Henry David Thoreau and Luxuries
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When Henry David Thoreau talks about economy in his first chapter of Walden he wasn’t always literally talking about dollars and cents. He also means that society is a slave to his or her own want of luxuries. Society is driven by the want of having luxuries and they never feel a sense of fulfillment because they need more and more luxuries; therefore, they are never free, but bound by their own need for bigger and better unnecessary luxury items. When Thoreau was not speaking of economy in the sense of dollars and cents he was speaking about the people that are unhappy with their lives because of what they lost spiritually and intellectually do to being run by their luxuries. When society is run by luxuries they loose the time spent on improving themselves because material items become more important and they eventually become slaves to their own luxuries. In the first chapter of “Walden” Thoreau gives specific examples of how people spend more time on their want of luxuries than they do on themselves. The first example shows that people put more time on new fashionable clothes than they do on their own principles. Thoreau says: “yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience” (878).
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