From Quiet Desperation to Quiet Quitting: On John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s “Henry at Work”

LONG BEFORE “quiet quitting” entered the lexicon, Henry David Thoreau concluded from the shore of Walden Pond that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” His contemporaries’ desperation was but another word for their resignation: not resignation from a life of unhappy, meaningless work “in shops, and offices, and fields,” but resignation to it. In going to Walden Pond, Thoreau himself did the opposite, opting out of the rat race rather than “practi[cing] resignation” and “liv[ing] what was not life.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic partitioned us all into “essential” and “nonessential” workers, a similar intuition has taken hold that work just isn’t working—and with it, the same divergent understanding of what “resignation” really means. If 2021 was the year of the Great Resignation, 2022 was the year of quiet quitting: the former defined by record rates of outright job-quitting (most pronounced in the service industries), the latter by a disengagement more akin in name and substance to Thoreau’s “quiet desperation.” Who better than Thoreau, then, to help us rethink work and leisure as the receding pandemic and the looming prospect of automation continue to reshape our understanding of both? In their new book Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, the philosophers John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle offer a Thoreau for our own fraught moment, rooted in what they convincingly describe as the central place of work in Thoreau’s philosophy and life.

The meanings of “work” and “economy” were as much up for grabs during Thoreau’s two-year stint at Walden as they have been from 2021 onward. He graduated from Harvard during the economic depression known as the Panic of 1837, and as Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) depicts, he watched the railroad transform his native Concord from a pastoral backwater into a bustling Boston suburb. His early essay “Paradise (to be) Regained” (1843) satirizes the kind of techno-utopianism familiar in Silicon Valley circles today, and the first and longest chapter of Walden bears the simple title “Economy”—a word that, as Kaag and van Belle remind us, originates in the Greek word for home. At least in that sense, Thoreau was a true economist, concerned not with capital markets and interest rates but with what it means to make a home in the world. (Walden, Marilynne Robinson has quipped, might alternatively have been titled Housekeeping.)

In what is perhaps their book’s strongest chapter, Kaag and van Belle highlight Thoreau’s preternatural skill for calling out “meaningless work.” Thoreau’s late essay “Life Without Principle” (1863) suggests that many jobs amount to nothing more than “throwing stones over a wall, and then […] throwing them back.” In Walden, even the family farm, that Jeffersonian-republican ideal, is reduced to an “Augean stables”—the original and literal “bullshit job,” to borrow the late David Graeber’s phrase. But from the outset, Kaag and van Belle are also rightly careful to avoid placing Thoreau in the genealogy of American slackers that runs from “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) to The Big Lebowski (1998). Empty leisure was no more appealing to Thoreau than empty work, and so his biography is also a résumé of gig work that resonates in our own economy. “I have as many trades as fingers,” he remarked, and Kaag and van Belle catalog each of them: building his cabin at Walden; growing some seven miles of bean rows there; moving and laying the foundations of his parents’ house; assisting in the family pencil-making business; serving Emerson variously as handyman, gardener, and babysitter; teaching in a school and tutoring Emerson’s nephew; surveying the woods and fields of Concord; and, of course, writing in both literary and scientific capacities.

Many of Thoreau’s gigs involved the sort of manual labor that has remained largely exempt from the post-COVID rethinking of work—presumably because carpentry, gardening, and surveying are exactly the sort of “essential” work that can’t be moved to a home-office Zoom screen. The embodiedness of this work also made it essential in a different sense for Thoreau, as Kaag and van Belle capture in a fine chapter on “manual work.” Working by hand, they suggest with an illuminating reference to Virgil’s agricultural Georgics (which Thoreau loved), united Thoreau’s environmental and economic projects. It connected his body to the nonhuman world around it and “broke down the seeming divide between self and Other.” Consider how he experiences a kind of workaday transcendence while weeding his Walden bean field, lulled by the “music” of his hoe striking against the stones: “It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans.”

Not coincidentally, manual work was a source of solace to which many of the privileged “nonessential” also turned in the lonely early months of the pandemic: gardening, baking, and home-improvement projects. We might, of course, object that, without remuneration, these activities are better classified as hobbies than as work. When done out of pure necessity, they risk becoming the same boring and often exploitative drudgery that Thoreau inveighed against. But whether done for leisure or for pay, they involve the same outward extension of the self that Kaag and van Belle ascribe to work. As the environmental historian Richard White has observed, the same often holds true even for purely recreational activities. The sailor navigating winds and tides, the hiker gasping his way up a mountain, the fisher or birder tracking seasonal migrations—each one must take on an awareness, however transitory, of the environments and bodies that office life collectively shuts out.

Thoreau himself happily blurred the line between work and leisure, particularly during his years at Walden. What he called his “morning work” was neither the recreation of a weekend warrior nor the hard labor of the working poor, like the Irish-immigrant railroad workers he often encountered in the Walden woods. The central precept of Thoreau’s economy was instead that “[y]ou must get your living by loving.” Both halves of that equation were indispensable, as Robert Frost would later articulate in his most Thoreauvian poem, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Might the pandemic have revitalized that same dream for each of us? Kaag and van Belle overstate the case in suggesting that “[w]e got our first taste of freedom during the pandemic”—no matter how much any of us hated our jobs, I doubt “freedom” is the word that springs to mind when we look back on the COVID-era lockdown—but they’re right to link the Great Resignation to the lived experience of the pandemic itself. Perhaps it’s less a matter of “freedom” than a reflection of how the brief work-from-home era gave us a hint of Thoreau’s union of work and play, albeit faint and tempered by the exigencies of the pandemic itself. To return to the office—air-conditioned, fluorescently lit, hermetically sealed from the outdoors—is to yield, once more, to their separation.

The easy inference from Thoreau’s example is a moral that’s hardly unique to him: do what you love. Kaag and van Belle’s book is least original and interesting when it harnesses Thoreau in service of this message—not because it’s untrue or un-Thoreauvian, but because it too easily lapses into self-help clichés like “Sometimes we resign our position and lose a paycheck, but gain the peace of mind to sleep at night.” At times, Thoreau himself fades too much into the background: the longest block quote in the book is not from Walden but from a burnt-out Google employee’s LinkedIn post announcing his resignation. Likewise, the authors sprinkle the book with personal and social anecdotes that, while sometimes vivid, are mostly too undeveloped to connect with Thoreau. (By contrast, Kaag’s earlier books, 2016’s American Philosophy: A Love Story and 2018’s Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, masterfully weave personal memoir with philosophical biography.)

There is a deeper question, too, that Kaag and van Belle might have addressed more directly. Might the ideal of “fulfilling work,” the subject of their final chapter, itself lie at the root of our current discontent? A recent article by Erik Baker in Harper’s Magazine argues not only that the ideal sets an impossible standard but also that it’s all too easily co-opted in service of an ever-more-engulfing workaholism, with contemporary workplaces making perfunctory gestures toward entertainment and wellness only to better subjugate their employees. Kaag and van Belle would, I imagine, be the first to agree that, whatever Thoreau had in mind about the union of work and play, it was something more than just yoga classes and a bowling alley at the Googleplex. Nor, however, would Thoreau endorse what Baker envisions as the alternative view, “a more cold-blooded understanding of work as a simple exchange of drudgery for money.” That was, after all, exactly the “resignation” he did not wish to practice.

If anything, Thoreau rescues the ideal by reversing the co-optation that Baker grimly describes. For him, work doesn’t cannibalize meaning but is subordinate to it. And as Kaag and van Belle remind us, “meaning” is inherently subjective; the problem Baker identifies arises not from its pursuit but from submission to its external definition, whether by an employer, a self-help book, the force of our own habits, or, yes, Thoreau himself. This point lies at the heart of what I found to be at once the most humorous and the most important anecdote of the book, a Concord farmer’s reminiscence of Thoreau spending a whole day motionlessly observing frogs in a pond: “And there that darned fool had been standin’—the livelong day—a studyin’—the habits—of the bull-frog!” The farmer’s own workday had been more commonplace (not to mention remunerative), but it would have appeared just as absurd to Thoreau as his frog-watching did to the farmer.

If that anecdote is a quintessential portrait of Thoreau, it’s also oddly familiar, because the mere question “What do you do for a living?” often opens the same mutual gulf of incomprehension. Explaining to new acquaintances what you do can be hard enough; explaining why you choose to do it is often downright impossible. That difficulty reflects what William James, the subject of Kaag and van Belle’s previous book, diagnosed as “a certain blindness in human beings.” We cannot, James writes, experience another person’s inmost feelings or be moved by their ideals; we can only “ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.”

Perhaps, then, Thoreau’s most important critique is not of work but of the work ethic, our shared compulsion to police the bounds of labor and leisure, drudgery and fulfillment. Thoreau could be guilty of it himself, but he could also echo James’s live-and-let-live conclusion. “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account,” he writes in Walden, for “I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible” and “would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way.” For Thoreau, that way pointed to Walden Pond and, one day, to the frog pond where he encountered the skeptical farmer. Thoreau probably thought the farmer was leading a life of quiet desperation; the farmer thought Thoreau was a darned fool. We will never know if Thoreau was wrong about the farmer, but as Kaag and van Belle have reminded us, we at least know the farmer was wrong about him.

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Geoffrey Kirsch is a cultural historian studying the intersections of literature and law in the 19th-century United States.  He recently earned a PhD in English from Harvard University and will begin a Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in October 2023.