Thoreau did not have contempt for money—it intrigued him, as his endless careful accounts suggest. But he realized instinctively the lesson that few of us ever learn, which is that there are two ways to get by in the world. The first is to increase income; the second is to reduce expenses. He went further than most of us will ever be willing to go, especially in his nonchalance about future security (“what danger is there if you don’t think of any?”), but there are now millions of Americans pursuing some kind of “voluntary simplicity”; they retain much of his radicalism, only in a more palatable form. And they play to an interested audience. Just as Thoreau reports constant visits from “doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out,” so the pollsters report that even today many of us remain attracted to some simpler alternative. When the Merck Family Fund sponsored a survey of attitudes on consumerism in 1995 (the last year it conducted the survey), 82 percent of Americans agreed that most of us buy and consume far more than we need, and 86 percent said our children were “too focused on buying and consuming things.” Since shortly after World War II, the Gallup pollsters have inquired each year about whether or not Americans are satisfied with their lives. In 1955 the number who were very satisfied hit 35 percent. Despite the vast gains in material status in the subsequent four decades (only a tiny percentage of Americans owned a dishwasher in 1955; the microwave hadn’t been invented), the number of people who identified themselves as “very satisfied” slipped to 30 percent by 2000. It’s as if the twentieth century served as a large-scale experiment to confirm Thoreau’s hypothesis.

But if that is so—if the mass of us are at least dimly aware of our lives of quiet desperation—then why do we do so little to change? Some of the reasons are structural. The Economy exerts powerful gravity; for many people, it’s hard to escape its demands, be they medical insurance, rent, food on the table. A low-wage job and a child constrain your choices, as do student loans.

This remains an affluent nation, however, by any historical or geographical standard, a place where most people possess real options. So why do we not, by and large, take more advantage of them? I think because of the second question that Thoreau raises, this one equally well timed for the end of this century. If “How much is enough?” is the subversive question for the consumer society, “How can I hear my own heart?” is the key assault on the Information Age. How do I know what I want? What is my true desire?

To understand Thoreau’s genius, remember that he raised this question in a time and place that would seem to us almost unbelievably silent. The communications revolution had barely begun. Advertising had not yet been invented, but the few shop signs in Concord, which we would preserve as quaint markers of a vanished age, appeared already to Thoreau as billboards “hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller’s; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor.” No Internet, no television, no radio, no telephone, no phonograph; and yet somehow he sensed all that this would mean to us. He did not need to see someone babbling into a cell phone as he walked down the street to sense that we’d gone too far; he was such a hypersensitive, such an alert antenna, that he was worried before Alexander Graham Bell was born. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he writes. “But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say.” Emerson rushed back from a summer in the Adirondack woods when he heard the great news that the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable had at last been laid; Thoreau wrote “perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”