I recommend every man read it - from 1848, Thoreau wrote the big middle finger f*ck off to nearly all mediums of traditional society, culture and life.
He wrote that you should walk away - distance yourself from the trappings of the then 'modern' city. He stepped out of the Boston / Concord world, to live in a recluse retreat in independent life on the banks of Walden Pond.
He opted out of established higher education, work a day life, keeping up with Sir Make a Stir (the Joneses), banal technology, big publishing houses, large corporation, oppressive government, social peer pressure, mortgage debt, slavery, military conquest, taxation and fiat currency. He promoted and lived a life of self reliance, self determination. Never married, never had children - they were never on his life plan. He is the OG MGTOW

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

"I Would Rather Sit On A Pumpkin And Have It All To Myself Than Be Crowded On A Velvet Cushion."

“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.”

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough"

"How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot."

And finally,
"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! 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."