By Thomas Dichter
Monday, July 13, 2026
Even before Henry David Thoreau built his cabin in the
Concord woods and holed up there for the better part of two years, the quest
for a simpler, less material, more meaningful life periodically appealed to
many Americans. As Thoreau said in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): “Our
life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more
than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the
rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
In 1825, Scotsman Robert Owen established what he
hoped would be a new kind of community in New Harmony, Indiana. “I have come to
this country, to introduce an entire new state of society; to change it from an
ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system, which shall gradually
unite all interests into one and remove all causes for contests between
individuals,” he wrote. In 1841, a group of intellectuals (including Nathaniel
Hawthorne) took over Brook Farm near Boston. The group proposed “to impart a
greater freedom, simplicity, truthfulness, refinement, and moral dignity to our
mode of life.” And in Oneida, New York, in 1848, John Humphrey Noyes established the Oneida Perfectionist Community, whose
members believed that Jesus had already returned to the world, “making it
possible for them to bring about Jesus’s millennial kingdom themselves, and be
free of sin and perfect in this world, not just Heaven.”
More famous, perhaps, are the Shakers. Shaker communities in the U.S. (from the
mid-18th century on) were also utopian and deeply religious. The
core tenets of the Shakers were celibacy, gender equality, community, and
withdrawal from the outside world. Simple living and self-sufficiency were
reflected in their craftsmanship—most notably the making of plain and
functional furniture.
These movements (and there were scores and scores of them
throughout our history) can broadly be called “countercultural.” Their stories
vary. Some put their emphasis on the spiritual, others emphasized an
egalitarian ideology. But all were utopian and somewhat purist in calling for
smallness, communal cooperation, simplicity, self-sufficiency, and a more
meaningful life as antidotes to prevailing currents in American society, such
as industrialization, corporatism, and materialism. But the other thing these
efforts had in common is that they usually did not last. Thoreau did not stay
in his cabin. New Harmony lasted three years. Brook Farm burned down in 1846
and a few months later, the experiment ended. The Oneida Perfectionists kept
going longer, until about 1880, but that community eventually faded away. And
of course, the Shakers, now numbering three persons, were done in by their own commitment to
celibacy. They are largely remembered
today through artifacts in museums.
Still, calls for a more meaningful and less materialistic
life have persisted. In the 1930s, social philosopher Richard Gregg coined the
term “voluntary simplicity,” calling for an intentional giving up of much of
material life. This is reflected in the current interest in living “deliberately.”
Some present-day Catholic intellectuals are renewing
interest in distributism, a set of ideas with roots going back to Pope Leo XIII
(1878-1903), who envisioned a worker-centric society that put people before
riches. Furthered by thinkers like Hilaire Belloc, whose 1912 work The Servile State critiqued
both capitalism and socialism, and others such as G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy
Day, the distributism discussion among many Catholics today emphasizes
cooperative forms of economic organization, family-owned businesses, smallness,
and local ownership.
There is also evidence of a resurgence of “back to the
land” agrarian communities. A 2022 report notes the growing interest in “natural living in the
countryside” on the part of millennials. Another recent report on homesteading noted that some 6,000 people
attended a 2025 Oklahoma event put together by Homesteaders of America, a
fourfold increase over the number who attended a similar event eight years
earlier. This interest, the report noted, is in part motivated by a desire to
“escape from the disquiet of modern America.” And according to the century-old National
Catholic Register, there is also interest today in reviving the early 20th century Catholic Land
Movement “as many young Catholics discover that it articulates their desires to
live more simply and self-sufficiently, closer to nature, and within a
community of Catholic families.”
Still, given the failures of utopian impulses in our
past, one has to wonder whether they’ve always been, and will always be, doomed
to remain on the fringes of American society. Ultimately, they all seem to come
up against constraints that have to do both with practicality and human nature.
Can the tendency for a movement to become a cult be avoided? Can raising goats
by hand be economically viable? Can a family-owned business successfully handle
the matter of succession? Can a small-scale enterprise balance costs and
benefits as well as a large enterprise? Can a cooperative avoid internal
conflicts, the problem of “free riders,” or derailment by too-ambitious
leaders? Can decision-making by consensus ever be efficient? Just as Thoreau
could hear the whistle and rattle of the Fitchburg railroad, built within
earshot of his Concord cabin, keeping the realities of the larger world at bay
turns out not to be so easy.
My own experience attests to these kinds of dilemmas. In
the 1970s, disillusioned by academia’s publish-or-perish imperative and endless
meetings, I dropped out of that career path and decided to engage in “honest”
work, using my hands instead of my head to make a living. I joined a loosely
structured cooperative group of about 30 woodworkers in a 12,000-square-foot
old factory building in the fading industrial district of Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Each of us ran his or her own independent “business,” paying
rent based on the square footage we occupied, “cooperating” to the extent of
ordering wood and other supplies in bulk, and sharing the cost of maintaining
the machinery.
Most of us started out with the idea that working with
one’s hands was more meaningful than the “grind” of corporate work, or the
tediousness of academia. We hadn’t all read William H. White’s The
Organization Man, but his talk of the “treadmill,” the “rat race,” and the
“inability to control one’s direction” that characterized corporate life was
something we implicitly were trying to get away from. Most of us bought into
the zeitgeist of the late ’60s and early ’70s, from E.F. Schumacher’s Small
is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, to Buckminster
Fuller’s geodesic domes, to historian Daniel Boorstin’s analysis in
his 1974 book Democracy and its Discontents: “When the getting of more
and more comes to mean less and less, when more and more Americans begin to
worry about the comparative merits of their increasingly elaborate automatic
appliances performing ever-more-trivial functions, is it a wonder that more and
more Americans become skeptical of the salvation that lies in wealth?”
We were all in our 20s and 30s. About a third were former
graduate students in literature or the social sciences; one was a young dentist
(who joked that he wanted to do woodwork because he was tired of drilling tiny
holes); another third were people who had gone to art and design schools, and a
few were people just trying things out, unsure of what they wanted in their
lives. Only one member of our group had had a real apprenticeship in
woodworking.
In the beginning we were excited about becoming
craftsmen, which we thought of as a noble calling, not to mention the
satisfaction of making something and finishing it. We had one hard and fast
rule, and that was that all machines were to be turned off at lunchtime, when
we’d gather on stools and half-finished pieces to eat and talk. Out of those
lunchtime talks came the idea of making furniture “for the people”—that is,
handmade, functional pieces that the “people” could afford.
But as we soon learned, if we were to make furniture that
the “people” could afford, we ourselves could not afford to do it. Crafting
things by hand was simply too expensive. Beginning to catch on to the
challenges of making a living, a couple of us experimented with mini versions
of mass production. I made a dozen coat racks in oak and brass and tried to
sell them to local stores; I invested in an air-powered nail gun to make toy
boxes on wheels. These efforts failed. Many of us ended up turning to
larger-scale work, seeking out and taking on contracts for store fixtures
(counters and shelves), linking up with architects to do kitchen renovations
for wealthy people or fancy cabinetry for lawyers’ offices. Some of us got into
house construction. In short, we became business people, engaging in “sales,”
hiring and managing employees, learning how to sequence the ordering of
materials, and managing inventory. We learned the hard way that if you bought
20 sheets of walnut veneer plywood and did not think through how to cut the
pieces with the least waste, your profit would go out the window.
Inevitably we moved away from handwork. We invested in
jigs and templates that enabled the standardization of some processes. Purism
and perfectionism gave way to the realities of living in a modern marketplace.
And, to our surprise, we ended up using our heads just as much as, if not more
than, our hands.
Edward Lucie-Smith, a British practitioner of arts and
crafts as well as a trenchant observer of craftsmen, has said: “To become a
professional craftsman is a radical decision, often undertaken as a form of
protest against a dehumanizing environment and way of life. Our attitudes
towards the people who make this kind of choice are a curious mixture of
jealousy, envy and honest admiration.” Whereas we may have started out
heroically, soon enough this was no longer us, and within a few years most of
the members of the group had gone back to their previous careers or chosen a
new path (bankruptcy law, for example). In my case, though I still make things
at home for my own use, I made my living as a practicing anthropologist working
in developing countries.
Will the countercultural impulses of today be doomed like
those of the past? For those who adhere to a purist canon of what is good and
what is bad, probably. But in our fast-paced and fluid social media age, where
everything is subject to questioning, where there are fewer widely shared
societal and cultural anchors, where parts of daily life that used to be
separate are now blurred (two days a week working at home, three at the office;
doing business on your phone while you hike in the woods), purism seems wont to
revert to the mean. Utopian ideals and life’s practical imperatives meet in the
middle, creating a hybrid watered-down version where we keep our day jobs but
ruminate about “work-life balance.” With so many people today saving commuting
time by working from home, it’s simply no longer necessary to “drop out,” to
run off to join a commune; instead, we can use that extra time to find meaning
“after hours” in cooking, knitting, enameling, bead work, wood work, carving,
painting, etc. These are hobbies, not vocations, and they are growing especially among young people.
Indeed, the do-it-yourself (DIY) market, around for decades now, is
alive and well, slated to grow at a rate of close to 7 percent in the next few
years. Such data strongly suggest that more and more people are trying to fix
and make things at home themselves, driven of course by economic necessity as
always, but also by the need for a respite from the “rat race,” to exert
“control over one’s direction.” Huge numbers of people turn to YouTube to see
instructions on everything from how to change the windshield wiper to how and
when to prune a rose bush. Not just to save money, but because it is satisfying
to master and complete a physical task.
In our new hybrid age, where so many lines are blurred,
people who feel the need to “escape from the disquiet of modern America,” or to
redress any kind of spiritual or ideological imbalance in their lives, might
find ways to have their cake and eat it too—to inject meaning (a human
necessity almost as vital as food and shelter) into their lives just when they
need it. Tinkering in one’s garage workshop on the weekend isn’t as radical as
the purism of the Shakers or the Distributists. But it may well provide satisfactions
that last longer.
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