The use of the word porn to refer to things that aren’t porn – food porn, stationery porn, etc – is a bad and irritating thing. But in the case of the recent book Cabin Porn, based on a blog of the same name, it seems apt: for most of us, these luscious photos of hideaways are every bit as removed from real life as the nudes that Playboy recently announced it would stop publishing. It’s destined for coffee tables in Stoke Newington and Williamsburg, owned by people with little intention of moving to a cabin. I don’t mean to mock: I, too, have a fantasy about a wilderness cottage in which I’ll surely never live. In other words, I spend time crafting an imaginary, supposedly superior alternative existence, while doing precisely nothing to bring it about. And when you think about it‚ well, isn’t that a bit weird?

The question has been troubling me since reading a superb New Yorker essay by Kathryn Schulz on America’s original cabin pornographer, Henry David Thoreau, who in 1845 abandoned civilisation for a hut in the woods, in order to “live deliberately”, focused only on essentials. He’s been championed as a pioneer of environmentalism and radical simplicity, but in Schulz’s view, he was a sanctimonious jerk. For one thing, Walden Pond in Massachusetts, the site of his retreat, wasn’t the middle of nowhere: Thoreau strolled back to town twice weekly, where his mother did his laundry and gave him snacks. More fundamentally, Schulz sees in his exile an attempt to escape “the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people”. Thoreau apparently couldn’t accept that relationships might be among life’s essentials. He wasn’t seeking a more authentic reality, so much as fleeing the bits of reality he couldn’t handle.

This is a startling way to think about our cabin fantasies, and perhaps also about meditation retreats, the trend for digital detox holidays and other fashionable manifestations of spare, minimalist, decluttered living: what if they’re at least partly motivated by avoidance? Meditating on a mountaintop might be a way to encounter reality at its most pure, but it’s also free of the ambiguities of sex, friendship or parenting. Even if Walden Pond were the middle of nowhere, the breeze rippling the water wouldn’t be “more real” than, say, a Thoreau family argument – just easier to cope with. Or think of Timothy Treadwell, in Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, driven to the company of bears because human relationships never seemed to work.

And should you turn your wilderness fantasy into reality, it may not prove as uncomplicated as you’d hoped. Zach Klein, creator of Cabin Porn, lives the cabin life for real – but also suffers from Lyme disease, contracted in the countryside. Thoreau, Schulz suspects, wasn’t truly happy, but rather, “for reasons of his own psychology, a castaway from the rest of humanity”. And Timothy Treadwell was eaten by a bear. Grizzlies may be far less difficult than people, in a lot of ways, but their table manners are much worse.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com

Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking