It turns out that foresaking material possesions is as likely to turn you into a crank as a saint, writes Michael Agger in a book review for Mother Jones magazine.
I don’t mean to throw cold water on earnest self-improvement. But maybe we should set about such tasks in a way that doesn’t reek of personal branding. Thoreau, after all, left the cabin behind, which earned the respect of Robert Louis Stevenson: “When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the story of hermits; but Thoreau made no fetish of his own example.” While that doesn’t mean not writing a book, it may mean not letting the rigor of your experiment get in the way of the lessons.