Analysis Of Henry David Thoreau's Essay Where I Lived For

In his essay “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau writes “Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.” I agreed with Thoreau’s statement that children perceive and live life better than the adult. Children live their lives worthily by merely enjoying life because their perceptions of life have not yet contaminated by the outside world like adults have. Psychological studies showed us that children are less likely to tell lies and hide their feelings or even unable to do so because they had only influenced by their surroundings, the protective home. This is why we trust children more than adults. Similarly, children live their life through playing, laughing, crying, or even fighting, that is, through expressing the uncovered feeling that they have at that exact moment of their life. This is what life all about, being true to your heart, yourself. In contrast, adults, who are being affected by multiple external factors such as financial burdens, learned to cope with their emotions to fit his or her best interest. For example, …show more content…
When I was a little boy, I had such a firm dream to become a scientist and had stuck to that for my entire childhood. I was intrigued by its belief and thought I was going chase for that for the rest of my life. But as I grow up, I came to discover that something is out of your wish. A scientist’s income might not be efficient to sustain my family. The traditional Chinese way of filial piety had now come into my cultural value and thus I had a burden. And with that burden, I am not able to live my life as I was in my childhood. Now, getting a good grade doesn’t mean acquiring a good amount of knowledge, but merely as a way to achieve my economic stability in the future while denying what I truly felt in