“The idea that we know what we want is palpably false. We’ve been suckled since birth on an endless elaboration of consumer fantasies, so that it is nearly hopeless for us to figure out what is our and what is the enchanter’s suggestion…. Because when someone is whispering something in your ear, there is no way to think your own thoughts or feel your own responses. The signals that your heart sends you are constant, perhaps, but they’re also low and rumbling and easily jammed by the noise and the static of the civilisation we’ve built lately.”

“Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature and not be thrown off track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance…. till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say This is, and no mistake.’ Only when we have some of that granite to stand on, that firm identity rooted in the reality of the world, only then can we distinguish between the things we are supposed to want and the things we actually do want – only then can we begin the process of satisfying “non-material needs in non-material ways”…. Only then can we say “How much is enough?” and have some hope of really knowing.”

Excerpts from “An Introduction” by Bill McKibben, Walden, Henry David Thoreau, Beacon Press Concord Library New Edition, 2004