Henry David Thoreau on Social Media Trivialities Detracting from the Present Moment

After hundreds of years Thoreau’s writings largely pertain to today’s social media behaviors

By Samuel Hixon / Contributor / The USD Vista

I’ve spent the last year reading Henry David Thoreau as part of the Keck Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Program. What relevance, you may wonder, do the ideas of a man who lived 175 years ago have in the 21st century? Although he lived hundreds of years before Snapchat and the Apple Store, Thoreau’s writings from his time at Walden Pond have a lot to say about social media and modern lifestyles.

 Thoreau notices that in society, “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while (on the other hand) reality is fabulous.” Our Snapchat stories and Instagram feeds don’t accurately depict reality but rather are “shams and delusions” vigorously consumed by young people today. They remove us from the present moment of our lives and allow us to mentally teleport and tune into a digital facsimile of another’s reality. One billion Instagram users scroll insatiably through cherry-picked life snippets conveniently snapped, filtered, and tagged for the world to exalt with its attention.  

This consumption isn’t a small aspect of our lives. According to the Nielsen Company, a New York based data and market measurement firm, the average American ages 18-34 spent four hours and 45 minutes out of each day on their phone in 2019. Another study shows people interact with their phone screen by swiping or clicking an average of 2,617 times daily. Such voracious consumption of social media and its associated news and hooplah is undeniable and dwarfs the print newspapers and telegraph of the 19th century. Thoreau criticizes people’s infatuation with news, saying, “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.” How often is it that the first thing you do in the morning is reach for your phone and order up a breakfast of Instagram-scrolling with a side of vicarious living to satiate this very appetite?

I get it. There’s a desire to feel connected which undergirds social media and accompanies the desire to know what’s going on.  I’ve consistently failed to delete my own Instagram profile for this very reason. But is knowing what’s happening in others’ lives actually improving our own? Is seeing the photogenic dinner Aunt Susan is eating or the beautiful beach Chad sits on while sipping his cocktail enriching the viewer’s life and worth two hours of one’s day? Thoreau suggests the news transmitted by technological advancement is often unimportant.  “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he states, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” He continues on, describing the eagerness in his time to “tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear, will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Billions of Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, and social media users around the world today receive constant updates on the activities of friends and acquaintances which are transmitted instantaneously via digital apps, WiFi networks, and internet servers. In this way these incredible feats of technology are often used to transmit frivolous trivialities. 

Not only is the information transmitted often insignificant, but viewing it comes at an exorbitant cost: one is removed from the miraculous nature of the present moment they inhabit. Thoreau states: “Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man…(but) God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.” He notes that, “We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.” The sanctity of the present moment is adulterated by mentally inhabiting another place and time through a phone screen. This clutters the limited shelf-space of our minds, which are left little time for free thinking and clear discernment. Constant occupation with news and media leaves no time to be “unhurried and wise” and “perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence.” Rather, Thoreau states, this subsumes one into “the petty fears and petty pleasures (which) are but a shadow of reality.”

The views expressed in the editorial and op-ed sections are not necessarily those of The USD Vista staff, the University of San Diego, or its student body.