Frittered Away by Detail

Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, and that word has been doing the heaviest lifting in Walden ever since. This episode asks what it demands. Not a verdict handed down from a bench: attention turned on your own life, and a choice you have to keep making. Kaag learned what that costs the hard way, in his first marriage. Then Thoreau names the alternative: a life frittered away in detail, and a railroad that "rides upon us". Kaag ran a seven-day experiment on his own frittered hours, and he will tell you what it freed. Thoreau's enemy ran on rails. You can guess what today's runs on.