Overwhelmed
Thoreau on too many things: the actual passage from Walden
For when there are too many things and no single one to start with.
Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand…
The version you’ve probably seen
“Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
A blend of two separate lines in the same chapter: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” (above) and, a few sentences later, a plain “Simplify, simplify.”
In plain words
Thoreau spent two years in a cabin by a pond and came away convinced that ordinary life had turned into a pile of small obligations. His fix sounds absurdly strict, two or three things and not a hundred, and he knew it; the exaggeration is the point. It’s less an instruction than a way of seeing how much of the pile is really yours.
Sit with this line → A few quiet exchanges about what it stirs in you.
Worth knowing
Published in 1854, about two years of living deliberately simply. He is exaggerating on purpose.
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