[ the opp ]

I was immediately interested by Michelle's post on materialism because in Walt and Ralph we're studying Thoreau's (who Michelle quoted) Self-Reliance. He obviously had some similar ideas to these and in class most of us agreed that Self-Reliance was a better essay than the ones we had previously read. It was essentially a discussion of how people had softened from their original tough and resilient state...and considering that that was written two centuries ago, we've softened a lot more after his time. I think Thoreau mentioned in Self-Reliance something along the lines of if you strike a "primitive" person with an axe the wound would be healed in a week and the same wound to a modern person would kill him, so in a way we've "softened" literally too. Anyway, there's a time-saving gadget for just about everything and people seem to honestly believe that they need each and every one of them. We definitely rely on things like these gadgets, plus instant gratification like mindless TV, way too much.