When there are individuals that are not working for the greater good of the government it tends to rub people the wrong way. Before embarking on his two year experiment Thoreau was convinced that the less labor a man did, the better it was for him and the community. (Walden).
Thoreau was criticized and not respected for his writings like he is today which what I have seen with many artists. He had revolutionary and controversial ideas that seemed to run against the grain of society and the government. Many of Henry David Thoreau's colleagues and critics felt that his writings were not original and were too similar to Emerson's ideas of Transcendentalism. Thoreau wrote many poems and essays for a Transcendentalist magazine called "The Dial ", that didn't really make a name for himself until he created the book, "Walden; or, Life in the Woods " in 1854. "Walden was revolutionary for its time that described a life of simpler times. Instead of being a vessel of society, do away with the complexities of modern day and simplify ones' life. .
Thoreau writes, "Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. 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! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.