Finding Your Walden: How to Strive Less, Minimize More, & Embrace What Matters Most

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. In Finding Your Walden, Jen Tota McGivney invites everyone—both serious Thoreau fans and the merely Thoreau-curious—to learn how five of Walden’s messages can make life a little easier and a little happier today: 1. Know the True Cost of Things 2. Create Space Between You and the World 3. Embrace Your Inner Misfit 4. Know What You Work For 5. Spend Life Lavishly Join Jen as she shares her new book, as well as her mission to put a little less striving and a little more Thoreau into modern life. 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 Simplify Magazine, SUCCESS 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. This program was recorded on November 9, 2025 and was co-sponsored by the Walden Woods Project.