Shadowing Practice: The Freedom of Loneliness - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I bet you've had the following fantasy.
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You've thought of leaving your whole life behind.
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You would move to a cabin in the woods somewhere and be blissfully by yourself.
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You would see very few people and talk to almost no one.
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You would get back in touch with nature, work with your hands, do a lot of reading, and make a final divorce from the civilized world with its myriad of pressures and pains.
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And Henry David Thoreau did just that.
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He packed his bags, went to a remote area of Massachusetts near Walden Pond, built a cabin there, and stayed for two whole years.
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During that time, he learned an awful lot about nature, himself, his fellow man, and how to live merrily in solitude.
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He penned all these insights into a magnificent book entitled Walden.
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And that is precisely what we will look at today.
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We will learn about the double-edged sword of society, how luxury can be a bad thing, and how all of us should learn to embrace a little bit more solitude in our lives.
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So, without further ado, let's get started.
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1. The Trappings of Modernity The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus used to draw a distinction between natural needs and groundless needs.
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Natural needs are everything we need for survival and to secure a baseline level of happiness.
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Things like food and shelter all come under this heading.
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It is basically impossible to be happy and starving unless you are a committed monastic.
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However, there are a great many things humans want and torture themselves to get that are not our natural needs.
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We strive after wealth or power or the high of romantic infatuation.
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For Thoreau, living in the wilderness for so long, made him acutely aware of just how little he needed to be happy.
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He reflects on how possessions end up owning us just as much as we own them.
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Thoreau noticed that the people around him would buy up large estates
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and then inherit the vast task of maintaining that estate for the rest of their lives.
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They would constantly buy more and add to their workload for no extra joy, simply in the pursuit of more.
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Thoreau himself had been tied up in this rat race, having previously attempted to make it in the city as a journalist.
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But safely tucked away in his cabin, Thoreau realise just how pointless this struggle was.
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For those two years, whereas the people around him became slaves to their luxuries, Thoreau decided to do the exact opposite.
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He deliberately fills his cabin with only the sparsest of furnishings.
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He eschews anything fine or fancy and instead subscribes to what he calls a Spartan lifestyle.
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In this way, he attempts to rid himself of a very human delusion.
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When we are accustomed to luxury, we can often fool ourselves into thinking that our happiness depends on this luxury.
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I had this a few years ago, when I went from having virtually no pain in my life to being in pain most of the day, on most days.
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This illness was a big shift, and for the first few months I was convinced that I would never be happy again.
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But slowly, bit by bit, I began to acclimatise.
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And now I find I can be happy, despite the pain.
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Thoreau, like Epicurus before him, wants to remind us of just how little we need.
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With shelter, some food, and some warm clothes, Thoreau manages to find more peace and contentment than he ever found amongst luxury.
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The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca used to recommend
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that we take the opportunity once in a while to live on next to nothing.
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We should sleep on the bare floor, eat only simple foods and stay away from those we hold dear.
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This is so we can return to our lives
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and our loved ones deeply grateful for everything that they add to our existence.
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And also so we can remind ourselves that no matter how much we may love these things, we do not need them to be happy and content.
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At least that was Seneca's theory.
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And just as living simply accustomed Thoreau to a life without luxury, it also allowed him to appreciate luxuries when they did come.
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And that is just what we shall move on to next.
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If you want more on philosophy and the art of learning, subscribe to my email list.
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The link is in the description.
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Two, radical gratitude.
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One of the Buddha's most extreme teachings was that of total gratitude.
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And the means of achieving this gratitude was through the intimate knowledge that things could always be so much worse.
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If people did not like you, it could be worse.
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They could be actively attacking you.
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If people are attacking you, it still could be worse.
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They could be killing you.
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Through this bit of philosophical magic, the Buddha used to transform awful situations into pleasant ones through a mere shift in perspective.
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But an essential part of how these monks could achieve this radical level of gratitude was through their ascetic lifestyle.
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They were celibate, ate only moderately, and largely lived on the generosity and arms of other people.
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Their whole lifestyle was minimalistic, and that made it very easy to be grateful for when they had a little bit more food than usual, or the weather was especially pleasant,
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and we see this emerging on a smaller scale in Thoreau's time living in his humble and isolated manner.
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Over the course of the short book, he expresses gratitude for a sunny day, the hooting of the owls, and the pleasant afternoon in the company of a woodsman.
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He devotes an entire chapter to the beauty of Walden Pond.
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He says how much he loves the night air spent in nature, how much he appreciates the few guests that he does receive in his cabin.
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He even says how grateful he is for the idle gossip in the nearby village.
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But only ever in small doses, of course.
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The bar for his happiness has become dramatically lower, and as a result far more things strike him as so wonderful that he just cannot help but be grateful for them.
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And it's no wonder that it took such extreme measures for him to reintroduce gratitude into his life.
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Both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer agree that gratitude is a very difficult emotion for humans to feel.
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This is because we're just not naturally inclined to think that everything is okay, that we can just be content with how things are.
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If that were the case, human achievement would probably not have got nearly as far as it has done.
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A man running out of fear will push himself that much harder than someone running for fun.
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Without our natural striving instinct, the species probably wouldn't have survived.
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But with all the benefits of civilization, this innate tendency to strive for more can venture beyond food,
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shelter, and companionship, and into acquiring wealth, status, and public acclaim.
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But according to a great many philosophers, including the Stoics, if we ignore gratitude in our lives, we are setting ourselves up for a miserable existence.
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If we stop treating all of the lovely things we have in life as bonuses and instead we see them as requirements, then we become attached.
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And once we're attached, we fool ourselves into thinking that we need these things.
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We fight so hard to keep them, even when they're just making us more miserable.
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Gratitude is the greatest soldier we have in this battle against our own despair.
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We are programmed to have a voice screaming in our heads at every hour of the day, asking how this situation can be better, how it can be improved, in what way are we not measuring up.
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Gratitude is the little voice that tells us just how much worse everything could be
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and reminds us to be grateful for everything we have now.
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After all, it could be snatched away at any moment.
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And one of the greatest ways to cultivate this gratitude is to deprive ourselves of the things
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that we think we cannot live without.
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This is just what Thoreau does.
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He lives in isolation and learns to appreciate people more.
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He lives without fine food and so loves it when somebody is kind enough to make him a nice meal.
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Everything in life is treated as a bonus, so it strikes him as even more pleasant than it was before.
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We can all learn a lot from this radical attitude to life.
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It will make flavours fuller, lights brighter and make every day seem that bit more like a gift, rather than an inescapable curse.
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But with all that solitude and all that humility, what does Thoreau do to find meaning in his life?
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That is precisely our next subject.
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Three, a connection with work.
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Throughout history, a number of thinkers, included but not limited to socialist ones like Karl Marx, have talked about the alienating effect of modern labour.
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This is an immensely complex subject and I can't go into detail about it now, but in part it encompasses the psychological effect of being so far separated from the results of your work.
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It may be the case that a factory assembly line is far more efficient at making a watch than an individual artisan, but that also means that no one person can sit back,
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feel proud and say, I made this watch.
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This is just one of the things that can make modern work so deeply unpleasant.
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And Thoreau found out firsthand what it was like to be free from this alienation
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when he was the sole person working on his small patch of land.
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He describes in vivid detail just how fulfilling he found the process of planting seeds, taking care of them, and waiting for them to grow.
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He used to spend hours enraptured by the plants, and the best part was that he was the sole beneficiary of his work.
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He got to, quite literally, reap the rewards of whatever he did.
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He got to eat everything he grew in his garden, and sell anything he didn't want without having to consult anyone else about it.
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He felt almost entirely self-sufficient, and this granted him a self-satisfaction difficult to attain through other means.
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And he did not even mind when it was hard to maintain his miniature bit of farmland.
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He talks of feeling almost like a parent to his vegetable patch.
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He would go out and defend his children from the weeds and the pests of the world every morning, carving them out a safe haven from the rest of reality, and knowing that he'd have to do it all again the next day.
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He felt a care and connection with these simple plants, and it was all because he was putting in meaningful, difficult effort into maintaining and looking out for them.
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Albert Camus famously said that we should imagine Sisyphus happy.
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By this, he at least partly meant that we should find value in the process of living and struggling, as opposed to placing our meaning in the hands of a higher power.
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I think Thoreau, rather unwittingly, demonstrates this principle rather well.
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By his own admission, there is no higher reason for him to be in the wilderness tending to these vegetables.
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He could buy vegetables from professional farmers instead, and could return to his life in the city at any moment.
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But the struggle itself makes the process of acquiring food meaningful.
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The point for Thoreau is in the pushing, and I think this lesson is particularly applicable to many of us today, myself very much included.
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Many of us are fortunate enough to live in countries where food is plentiful, law is maintained, and we have the potential to drift into an unfulfilling form of comfort.
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It is perfectly possible for a lot of us to get by doing the bare minimum
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and numb ourselves with drink and mindless stimulation until it is time to go to work again.
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But Thoreau reminds us that a lack of struggle in our lives can make them just as meaningless as too much struggle.
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If we feel like we cannot make a difference in our lives
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because we have no power to get out of a difficult situation, that will make us feel helpless.
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But if we fail to use even a tiny fraction of the power that we actually have, we will also feel helpless, even if we can actually change our situation.
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Sometimes the answer to meaninglessness is not to wait until things are easier, but to plunge in when things seem hardest.
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Thoreau made his life much, much harder, and yet he found his sense of meaning only improved as a result.
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It is a very counterintuitive bit of wisdom, but I think we can take a lot from it.
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But what about the particular benefits of solitude, of being isolated from other people.
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That is our next point.
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4. The value of solitude.
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Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that too much time in society would alienate us from ourselves.
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And this makes a lot of sense.
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In the company of others, we are sat at a constant negotiating table.
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We can either be totally ourselves and slightly alienate people through our unique brand of strangeness, or we can give up fundamental parts of ourselves to dwell peacefully in the company of others.
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It's certainly true that too much time spent socialising will eventually tire us out
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and we'll get too much in the habit of hiding parts of ourselves for fear that others will reject us.
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This is only natural.
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We are social animals and we want to fit in.
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But Thoreau points out that we must balance this instinctive social drive with one for solitude
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and individuality so that we don't lose ourselves in the process.
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Thoreau surprisingly found that he did not get lonely during his time at Walden.
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He enjoyed that he could walk into the local village
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and see people but also that he could spend days or weeks at a time without seeing anyone.
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This isolation was by design.
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It allowed him time to think, to introspect, to read and to write.
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Eventually, he says that the authors he was reading became his company
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and that his modest room was transformed into a meeting of great international minds.
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From Hindu philosophy to ancient Roman wisdom, the cleverest people in history came to mingle in his humble log cabin.
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And the sheer volume of subjects he covers in his book shows just how much time he could spend thinking
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and considering aspects of life.
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He writes on economic organization, nature, the effects of good company, the consolations of solitude, the fulfilling results of work and the importance of a wise philosophy.
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He has put tens of hours of his self-imposed exile considering each one of these topics, and the result is a deep understanding of how he approaches the world.
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Thoreau describes the contours of his mind like it is a great kingdom for him to explore and rule over.
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Compared to this domain, all of the empires in history feel like tin-pot dictatorships to him.
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He spends hours getting to know this internal estate in great detail, and he recommends that we spend some time doing the same.
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This is no easy task, because introspection is frankly terrifying.
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We might find out that what we thought would make us happy in fact does nothing.
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We might discover that our partner of many years is not the right person for us.
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We might find that we have to reorganise our entire life around these new internal findings.
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Nonetheless, Thoreau says we must persist in our investigations.
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After all, if we are miserable but don't know it, that won't stop it from affecting our lives, but it will stop us from doing anything about it.
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It will doom us to a life of unconscious despair, where we wander around the world deeply unsatisfied with no idea why this is.
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All of the great thinkers and geniuses in history will be useless to us
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if we don't know the inner workings of our own mind.
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We will be like an excited dog chasing philosophies hoping for a quick fix to our problems, while at the same time being ignorant of the source of the issue.
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And so we will be unable to identify which approach will actually deliver us from the pit of suffering.
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But there is one final question.
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What are the main lessons we can take from this?
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And it turns out there is a great consolation for us all.
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5. What next?
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It is very common for philosophers to teach the values of solitude and advise us to choose humble living.
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But few actually follow through.
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The Roman Stoic Seneca taught of a simple life free from luxury.
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But he himself lived in a vast house, had ample power and significant wealth as he was a close advisor to the imperial court.
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So it is gratifying for us all to read someone like Thoreau, who practiced what he preached, and spent two years in the wilderness so he can tell us what it's actually like to undertake such a challenge.
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The first lesson I see is a brilliantly uplifting one.
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Humans actually need very little to be happy.
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Thoreau is comfortable and content by himself, with a few books, some meaningful work, and a simple wall cabin to keep him safe from the cold.
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So many of our other needs are brought on by comparisons with others, or by trying to live up to some false expectation of what we need to be doing.
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Thoreau gives us a model of how we could be content
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if we let go of these luxurious desires and lived as simply and as minimalistically as possible.
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We might not always have the power to gain more, but we often have the power to want less.
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And Thoreau is an excellent example of this lesson in practice.
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Secondly, he demonstrates how our instincts for comfort can work against us.
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The convenient and comfortable life is a lot easier than one full of struggle and strife and suffering and striving.
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But that does not mean that it's more meaningful.
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It is just that we will deal with the problem of meaninglessness rather than the problem of suffering.
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We can take some comfort in this though.
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It shows how problems in life are not optional.
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It is just a matter of picking our poison.
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Thoreau's life in the wilderness was difficult and peaceful, whereas a life in the city might have been more comfortable, but much more chaotic.
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Both situations have their pros, but more importantly, they both have their cons.
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Schopenhauer would truly be proud.
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And lastly, Thoreau's book gives us a much-needed piece of consolation when we are feeling lonely or unloved.
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When we are isolated, it can quickly feel like we are in a unique form of hell, that it is pointless attempting to be content in this situation.
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But Thoreau's book is a wonderful exposition of all the benefits of being alone.
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For him, the difference between painful isolation and pleasant solitude is just a matter of perspective.
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If Thoreau can be happy with only the sparsest interactions with people, not seeking their approval and living life how he sees fit, perhaps we can do this as well.
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Thoreau's book serves as a great balm for one of our deepest and most painful fears, the fear of abandonment.
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As always, I encourage you to pick up Thoreau's book for yourself, as there's lots in it that I've been unable to discuss here. And
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if you want a detailed philosophical look at the dangers of society then check out this video on Franz Kafka's The Trial.
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And stick around for more on thinking to improve your life.
Why practice speaking with this video?
Engaging with the video "The Freedom of Loneliness" offers a unique opportunity for English learners to practice speaking in a reflective and philosophical context. The content encourages you to think deeply about solitude, happiness, and the nature of needs, which can help you develop a more nuanced understanding of the language. By utilizing the shadowing technique, you can mimic the speaker’s intonation and rhythm, enhancing your pronunciation and fluency. The conversations surrounding complex ideas in this video are perfect for learners looking to elevate their speaking skills beyond the basics. Practicing in this way not only improves your vocabulary but also allows you to express intricate thoughts more clearly.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
The speaker employs several grammatical structures that are valuable for learners. Here are a few key expressions you can focus on:
- “It is basically impossible to be happy and starving” - This structure highlights use of the phrase “it is” to express general statements, which is common in English.
- “He reflects on how possessions end up owning us” - The use of present tense for reflection shows how to discuss ongoing thoughts or insights.
- “We should learn to embrace a little bit more solitude” - The phrase “should learn to” suggests advice and is useful for expressing recommendations.
- “No matter how much we may love these things” - The conditional phrase “no matter how much” is effective in discussing varying degrees of feelings or situations.
Practicing these structures through shadow speech will help reinforce your grammar and enable flexibility in your conversation skills.
Common Pronunciation Traps
As you practice speaking with this video, pay attention to certain words and phrases that may present pronunciation challenges:
- “Possessions” - This word can often be pronounced incorrectly due to its multiple syllables; practice breaking it down into “pos-se-ssions” to avoid confusion.
- “Gratitude” - The emphasis on the second syllable can trip learners up; pronounce it as “gra-ti-tude” with a clear middle part.
- “Blissfully” - This adverb may be challenging, so focus on the soft 's' and the rhythm: “bliss-fully.”
Using a shadowing site or shadowing app can help you refine your pronunciation as you mimic the speaker, making it easier to integrate these new sounds into your everyday language use.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.