Book Review: Finding Reality

Finding Reality: THOREAU‘S LESSONS FOR LIVING IN THE DIGITAL AGE, by Nate Klemp is a book about living life. 

   Our grandparents shifted from one reality to the next at a snail‘s pace.  They woke up, walked outside to get the paper, drove to work, and waited all day for the afternoon mail.   Whereas, we shift realities in an instant. 

 We now live in so many worlds.  We dance throughout the day between the virtual and the actual. Say, a state of digital disorientation. Also we wonder,  Who am I?  What is real? 

This book offers one possible answer, an answer drawn from America‘s great 19th century philosopher, Henry David Thoreau.  What matters for Thoreau is whether you live each moment fully and deliberately.  What matters is whether you find reality in each moment. 

The book then explores the the treatment of reality by Descartes, where one's  thoughts played the primary part. 

If I doubt my own existence, then there must be an I – a doubting agent who exists. The book then talks about the threat, the present days bring, of splitting life between managing work and managing things, with no time left to live.  

This is where the book discuss the suggestions of Thoreau. Of downsizing life, shifting the focus, inwards, ans experiencing the present. 

I liked this book. Through quite pleasant and easy explanations, it made clear, the challenges of the fast life of the day. And it also offers amazing resources for living a fuller, happier, more conscious life, to face those challenges.