henry david thoreau went and built a cabin along Walden pond and lived there for two years, because he had to build his own worldview. By worldview, I mean how he sees the world and how he should live in it.
To use a metaphor, Thoreau’s Walden was an act of drawing a map of the terrain and navigates that terrain. It was, therefore, an act of independnt intellectual emancipation and living that rebellion at the same time. His experiment was a combination of intellectual reasoning and experience.
He had to build his worldview because he can no longer rely on anyone to build it for him. He refuses to depend on any outside authority to dictate how he should live.
Thoreau created his own personal religion.
How different are we from him?
We are not.
We have the same questions to answer—they are inescapable: How should I live? Where do I get instructions for living? How do i understand the world?
Unless we want to live an unexamined life running on autopilot, these are questions that have to be grappled with. Thoreau had to live in a cabin in the woods for two years to answer these questions and he continued answering them after his experiment. Not that he didn’t think about them before Walden (he already was) but Walden was his most daring attempt to answer and live the questions.
Today, many of us don’t have the luxury of living for two years in a cabin in the woods. But like Thoreau, we can’t escape the questions. Its all a matter of “when” do we start getting serious about them. “When” do we face our invisible Waldens to build our invisible cabins and start thinking about the questions seriously. When do we say “Enough. I am answering the questions myself. I will build my own worldview. I will live this life according to my own will.”