I wrote this essay back in junior year of highschool for an assignment on Thoreau. Everytime new AI developments come up, this essay feels relevant again. Some of my perspective has shifted since to be a bit more agentic, but it still feels largely aligned with my thoughts.

TLDR: We can’t always live a simple life because of internal and external consumerist pressures. But with the fourth industrial revolution coming up, we have the opportunity to finally choose simplicity. I don’t think we will though.

The conflict between capitalism’s self-serving nature and Transcendental thought has existed for over a century. With the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, the American economy became increasingly competitive and profit-driven. The Revolution posed an opportunity to liberate workers from their work, but the new industrial machines merely increased the expectations for higher productivity and subjugated workers to repetitive, meaningless tasks. Transcendental ideas that societal institutions corrupt people and that being a self-reliant individual who can disregard societal pressures brings about one’s best gained prevalence largely in response to this economic industrialization and its subsequent impact on society. A key step in becoming a Transcendentally self-reliant being is simplification. Henry David Thoreau explains that to free their minds, think deliberately, and live satisfactorily, people must live in “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” (Thoreau 59). To live a simple life, one must “let [their] affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand”–simplicity requires reducing the number of responsibilities or concerns one has and freeing life of “luxury and heedless expense[s],” excess products and services that clutter life (59-60). However, living a simple life as an American today is nearly impossible because of the modern capitalist society.

Capitalist external pressures make achieving simplicity by minimizing the consumption of excess products extremely difficult. Thoreau uses clothing as an example to argue that having only what is necessary allows for a truly fulfilling life and insightfully criticizes that people, when buying clothes, “are led oftener by the love of novelty… than by a true utility” (13). However, what causes people to do so is not entirely in their control. Because a capitalist economy depends on the sales of products, the system encourages and pressures people to consume unnecessarily. One such pressure comes in the form of marketing, which exists solely to convince people to buy unnecessary things and condition an associated emotional response to products that may lack functional value (Twin “Everything”). For fashion, marketing dictates trends that are underpinned by exclusivity and prestige and compels people to keep up with the latest styles. As a result, people often have an obscene number of clothes, with closets full of pieces they do not wear more than a few times. Streetwear and luxury brands like Supreme or Gucci, for example, market themselves as more respected and impressive to create unsubstantiated hype. Many people who buy from such brands, consequently, do not necessarily purchase products for any special utility, as their goods are not much functionally different from others, but rather for the sense of superiority attached to a brand name. In the face of endless advertising, breaking away from repetitive marketing and messaging, whether explicit or subliminal, to reduce the number of products one has becomes difficult.

Additionally, mobile phones, with their planned obsolescence and aggressive marketing, exemplify the difficulty of eliminating excess goods. To increase profits and continually sell new products, companies need customers to consume consistently and repeatedly. Thus, companies like Samsung often deliberately design phones with a short lifespan; Samsung designs its phones to last a maximum of four years (Wolfe “Samsung’s”). Such planned obsolescence directly forces people to increase their expenses. Furthermore, even if certain phones stay functional, aggressive marketing emphasizes the superior functionality of the newest, most revolutionary technology, urging people to constantly buy new ones. If calling others is a phone’s true utility, then the majority of a mobile phone’s functions become unnecessary. Marketing, however, convinces people otherwise. Whether it be in the form of television advertisements, bulletin boards, or social media influencer endorsements, marketing constantly pressures people to clutter their lives with the unnecessary.

Furthermore, when subjected to enough repetitive marketing, people internalize and reproduce capitalism’s consumerist culture within daily interactions. Whether it be mobile phones or the fashion industry, marketing helps create a societal norm of staying up to date that coerces people to conform and makes self-reliant behavior far more difficult. For example, students frequently compare their phones and clothes to those of the latest trends and their peers and make consumption decisions based on superficial comparisons. Such students and other like-minded consumers embrace a mindset that is antithetical to living self-reliantly. Breaking from deeply established societal norms typically prompts judgment or even ostracism from onlookers, as there are always “those who think they know what is [someone’s] duty better than [they] know it” and comment on the life decisions of another (Emerson 23). These consequences influence people’s decisions to the extent that they begin to hold the opinions of others to a higher standard than their own. Thoreau observes that those who prioritize “fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes” over “a sound conscience” experience internal anxiety (Thoreau 13). But for many people, the ostracism from breaking norms and wearing clothes that may negatively stand out outweighs the cost of this anxiety. Thus, society demands conformity because it “is a joint-stock company in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater” (Emerson 21). To better survive and stay relevant in society, people often give up a part of their will and desire.

Capitalism also compels people to work by creating inequality through the necessitation of a “low-paid underclass,” because capitalists rely on low-paid workers as cheap human capital to build products and earn profits (Hodgson “How”). Work then becomes necessary for survival. Low-wage workers must work to escape or avoid poverty, reach a state of relative financial freedom, and solve their immediate concerns, like providing for their families, paying their debts, and buying genuine necessities. Thoreau criticizes these workers for not taking risks to simplify life and for falling “into a particular route… and make a beaten track for [them]selves” (Thoreau 209). However, many poor and middle-class workers cannot afford to live otherwise. To pursue real interests, detach themselves from the common nine-to-five workday, and simplify their lives as radically as Thoreau had isolated himself in nature is a privilege and requires a level of financial stability and independence these people are working towards. Thoreau fails to recognize that workers who are trapped within a system that requires them to work and live in such a bleak manner generally cannot simplify the number of concerns they have. Simplification can only comfortably occur once workers escape the capitalist economy, but cannot before then.

Ultimately, capitalism and its inherent focus on profitability prevent simplicity. Capitalism pressures people to buy excess goods with forces like marketing and catalyzes the creation of social norms whose consequences coerce people to conform. Capitalism’s ability to create inequality and poverty also forces people into a dull work routine, preventing them from taking the risk of simplifying life. However, despite being difficult to achieve, simplification and the idea of simplicity are relevant now more than ever. Humanitarian and existential crises like climate change force society to contemplate both the costs of capitalist lifestyles and the necessity of taking steps to simplify life even if achieving complete simplicity is nearly impossible in the status quo. Capitalist production has continuously consumed Earth’s finite resources, and consumerist culture has created tremendous amounts of waste that further damage the environment. However, as society approaches the Fourth Industrial Revolution–the wave of automation of traditional jobs–society has the unique opportunity to rethink simplification (Hadzilacos “Fourth”). Machines can soon take over many of the jobs people previously performed. When the takeover happens, society can choose either, as it did almost 200 years ago, to maintain American capitalism by simply supplementing new machines with redundant human labor, or to allow people to finally simplify their lives more than ever before.

Works Cited Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance and Other Essays. New York, Dover Publications, 1993. Hadzilacos, Rigas, et al. “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org/focus/fourth-industrial-revolution. Accessed November 11, 2020. Hodgson, Geoffrey M. “How Capitalism Actually Generates More Inequality.” Evonomics, 28 April 2018, from https://evonomics.com/how-capitalism-actually-generates-more -inequality/. Accessed November 12, 2020. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. New York, Dover Publications, 1995. Twin, Alexandra. “Everything Marketing Entails.” Investopedia, Investopedia, 16 Sept. 2020, www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing.asp. Wolfe, Bryan. “Samsung’s Weak Update Schedule Makes a Good Case for Switching to Apple.” iMore, 4 April 2020, from https://www.imore.com/samsung-Phone-ripoff-why-apple- fans-are-smiling. Accessed November 12, 2020.