Penance

Kaag starts inside his own chest. A few years ago his heart stopped, at forty, and the cardiologists could chart everything about it except the why. Thoreau knew the why. Early in Walden he looks at his neighbors, prosperous, free citizens of Concord, and sees them doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways, punishing themselves for gods they would never admit to worshipping. This episode is about that liturgy: how work became worship, what it did to Kaag, and the gentler discipline Thoreau recommends instead. He measures his townsmen against Hercules and his twelve labors, and the comparison is not a compliment.