Finding Your Walden: How to Strive Less, Simplify More, and Embrace What Matters Most

2026 Book Award Winner from the American Society of Journalists and Authors for Service/Self Help

Discover Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy of living a good life and learn how to apply it to your own.

The hero for our time is someone few people get right. Thoreau wasn’t a hermit in the woods. He lived during a time like ours, of rapid technological and economic changes, political division, and a pandemic. Thoreau, like us, reassessed his priorities: What does success really look like? What is my duty as an ethical citizen of a less-than-ethical world? How can I live a good life amid (insert hand-sweeping gesture) all of this?

His solution: Pare down to trade up.

Finding Your Walden combines classic literature with happiness studies, exploring how experts―psychologists, career coaches, and doctors―support Thoreau’s ideas as guideposts for today’s Great Reassessment. It combines insights of the 1854 classic with people who embrace the pare-down-to-trade-up philosophy today, whether through major life changes (such as tiny homes or sabbaticals) or smaller life hacks (like digital sabbaths or meditation practices). Their stories inspire us to apply creativity, simplicity, and peace to the experiment of life.

Finding Your Walden isn’t about shunning money or success. It’s about grappling with the purpose of the first and the meaning of the second. Whether you love Walden or haven’t read it, you can join Thoreau on a path to discover an intentional life during a volatile time―you just need to make a stop at a cabin on the way.

Jen Tota McGivney is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina. She’s the back-page columnist for Charlotte Magazine, and her work also appears in SUCCESS Magazine, Our State Magazine, and Southern Living, among others. She has a master’s degree in English and a soft spot for the transcendentalists. Finding Your Walden is her first book.

McGivney lives with her husband, Jimmy, and their rescue pitties, Phoebe and Maddie.