just just take these. ta-take em. all of em.

This comment should be enshrined forever.

Have you tried Proteus?

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

The world is a sandbox. Quit your job.

Thoreau didn't have a family to think about. My mom just had another surgery. They fused two more of her neck vertebrae and took out the pad between to relieve pressure on her spine. She's regained some use & feeling in her left arm, but her legs are still not that good at getting her around. My older nephew is 13 now, he can take care of himself and helps out around the house, but I don't want to make him do too much. He's got enough shit in his life, I want him to have ample opportunity to just be a kid. Same goes for his little brother who's 7 now and has way more serious problems. My sister is currently incarcerated, but doing better. She's been getting psychological counselling and now that she's off drugs she looks and sounds worlds better. She got her GED and will hopefully be placed into a halfway house sometime around October. Meanwhile, I still have to put in forty hours a week and my dad puts in fifty, mostly to keep the health insurance that helps take care of my mom.

Anyway, as Billy the Poet points out below, Thoreau was only able live at Walden Pond the way he did because he had a wealthy mentor (Ralph Waldo Emerson) who let him stay on his land for free. And Thoreau didn't live as simply as most people think. He often had dinner and spent nights in Emerson's nice big comfy house and took his clothes to his mother for laundering.

Yeah, ok. I was only half serious but now I feel like a dick.

Try Dwarf Fortress?

Sorry, didn't mean to snap. I know you were just being snarky for laughs.

But never tell a guy like me to just quit the job and run off on an adventure. It's like taunting a starving dog with raw meat that turns out to be a steak-shaped squeaky toy.

"Dwarf Fortress" is a fun game, but makes too many demands for the kind of experience I enjoy most. If I don't harvest and trade my crops in "Minecraft" nothing terrible will happen. My little toy world in a bottle will still be okay.

If you take your eye off the ball in "Dwarf Fortress" to enjoy the scenery too long, you'll find most of your dwarfs have been eaten by a carp and one dwarf, driven mad by boredom and grief, is gleefully murdering the remaining dwarfs.

A few cats and he'll be fine.