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I believe that Thoreau decided that he needed to live alone in the woods in order to conduct his experiment because in order to live life as deliberately and simply as possible you have to separate yourself from the things that complicate life. To Thoreau, modern technology, social structures and government only tarnish life and detract from it and so in order to see what exactly life is, he had to distance himself from all human influences.
So many things become possible when you remove yourself from society and live your life with only your interests in mind. Time becomes virtually obsolete because there are no schedules to adhere to. When you are hungry, you will eat. When you are tired, you will sleep. The only thing you have to worry about is your needs and so you are free to meet them as you please. This is accomplished only when you strip away all the outside influences in life and get down to the core and the basic meaning of it. It’s strange that the way to understand what life is more fully is to remove yourself from it. Society comes to define being so much that the individual is lost and in order to regain it you have to remove yourself from time to time. Even today it is common people go on weekends out into the country; Minnesota is the land of cabins after all. Why do we do it? I would say to enjoy the natural beauty of the world, to take a break from the hectic pace of life and live it a little more deliberately and to find themselves. Thoreau only takes this concept to an extreme, but it still is something that almost everyone can at least relate to slightly.
Thoreau wanted to see what life is like when everything is slowed down to the pace that it was intended to be. In the villages and in the large cities, everyone is in a rush to make gains for themselves so that they can live a better life. In the wilderness, nothing is rushed and no animals have any boss to please or strict schedule to keep and so everything is much more relaxed and deliberate and simple. When you are in the towns, you don’t have time to stop and enjoy everything and experience life fully and even if you do, there are always people around you that are on the go and so it is impossible to experience simplicity in the towns like you can in the wild.