Greener Pastures Magazine

Greener Pastures is a comedy and satire site run by a bunch of writers obsessed with out-writing, out-joking and out-funnying each other.

Henry David Thoreau Reviews “Animal Crossing: New Horizons”

Tiffany Babb
Greener Pastures Magazine
3 min readJan 4, 2021

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Photo by Khari Hayden from Pexels

I went to “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” because I wished to live deliberately, to front only an island’s talking animal inhabitants, and see if I could not learn what Isabelle had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not gotten a five-star rating for my island.

I did not wish to live my actual life; nor did I want to clean my actual house, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live in a tent, but then in a house with one room, and then in a house with two rooms, and in then a house with five rooms and a basement — Spartan-like as to put out all of the world that was actually happening, to drive reality away from my thoughts and reduce it to mere memory. And if that memory proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish the fading memories of true life’s meanness to the world through a twelve-part twitter thread; or if it were sublime and truly dissipated, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next monthly newsletter.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest person has hardly need to count more than what can be counted on her fingers, or in extreme cases with Siri or Alexa’s help, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be about turnips and money trees, and not electric bills and rent; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts to what you can carry in your inventory.

Hardly a person takes a half hour’s nap after a sad homemade brunch, but when she wakes she picks up her phone and asks, “What’s happened now? God, I hate 2020,” as if the rest of the world had stood her sentinels and continued to doomscroll through all of social media as she has slept. Some people set alarms to be waked every fifteen minutes, doubtless for no other purpose than to check twitter to see what’s happening; and then, to pay for it, they tweet what they have dreamed. “Pray tell me anything terrible that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,” — and she reads, over her overnight oats and homemade ginger beer, that a guy she went to high school with is now a conspiracy theorist and a middle school math teacher; never dreaming the while that as she lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of her hastily put together home office, she has also accidentally retweeted an article with a misleading headline.

Let us spend our days as deliberately as Tom Nook, and not be thrown off the track by every new viral tweet or TikTok that comes across our notifications. Let us rise early to find the daily DIY bottle on the beach and fast, or break fast (so that we can unroot trees easily), gently and without perturbation; let islanders come to live on our islands and let them go when they ask whether or not it is time to leave, let the mosquitoes sting and Pascal take our scallops — determined to make a good day of it.

Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called “real life,” situated in the meridian shallows of reality. Memes and pictures of people shopping in stores while wearing masks shared on Facebook are esteemed for soundest content, while virtual reality is fabulous.

If people would steadily observe island virtual realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a Disney Animated Movie Reboot. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, K.K. Slider’s music would resound along the town square. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only what we do inside our gaming consoles have any permanent and absolute existence, — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the beautiful world of the island that we have designed. This is always exhilarating and sublime.

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Greener Pastures Magazine
Greener Pastures Magazine

Published in Greener Pastures Magazine

Greener Pastures is a comedy and satire site run by a bunch of writers obsessed with out-writing, out-joking and out-funnying each other.

Tiffany Babb
Tiffany Babb

Written by Tiffany Babb

Tiffany Babb is an essayist, poet, and comics. Her collection of poetry A LIST OF THING OF THINGS I’VE LOST is available for pre-order linktr.ee/tiffanybabb