There’s a quote by Henry David Thoreau that seems to echo louder with each new productivity app:
“Men have become the tools of their tools.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
It’s a short sentence. But in nine words, Thoreau predicted something that feels eerily modern: the quiet horror of spending your limited human life aligning boxes in a PowerPoint slide.
Today, we live in a world of endless dashboards, notifications, and formatting tweaks. We have tools for everything, but somehow, the tools seem to have us. Thoreau’s critique wasn’t just about industrial machines in the 1800s. It was about any tool that shapes the way we live, work, and think even digital ones.
When Thoreau wrote Walden, he was responding to the rise of industrial capitalism, which he saw as stripping people of their autonomy and humanity. Machines made work more efficient but also more mechanical. Sound familiar?
Today, we don’t swing hammers or tend steam engines. But we do sit in front of screens, refining formatting, updating fonts, and resizing logos not to express ideas, but to meet the aesthetic expectations of a pitch deck template.
These tasks are repetitive. Precise. Mechanistic. And they eat up hours of our lives. You might not sweat at a factory, but you can still be a tool of your tools just a very quiet, digital one.
PowerPoint is a perfect example. It’s a tool for presenting ideas but more often, it becomes a trap for perfectionism, tedium, and wasted potential. We've seen people spend hours nudging text boxes, adjusting bullet spacing, or changing fonts one slide at a time.
This isn't idea generation. It’s digital babysitting.
At SlideCheck, we’ve watched people burn time they could be spending on real thinking, or actual rest, just to make sure all their headers are 28pt Arial and centered properly. That’s not creative work. That’s machine work.
“The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day... He has no time to be anything but a machine.” — Thoreau
This line from Thoreau gets at something deeper than just tools — it’s about dignity. When you're constantly racing deadlines, fixing formatting, or replying to pings, you're not building a life. You're maintaining a machine.
The tragedy is that this kind of labor is now considered normal. But Thoreau would’ve called it out: tools should work for us, not drain our attention or define our worth.
We believe productivity isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing more of what matters. That’s why we built SlideCheck: a tool that catches font mismatches, alignment errors, and inconsistent formatting in seconds, so you don’t have to.
It's not just a time-saver. It's a philosophical stance. Because the small things, the alignment clicks, the font re-checks add up. Over weeks, months, years, they shape the way we spend our lives.
And we think life’s too short to be fixing fonts.
Want to reclaim your time?
Let SlideCheck handle the formatting.
Ask yourself: where in your day are you more like a human, and where are you just a well-behaved machine?
If Thoreau walked into your workspace today, would he see a person building something meaningful or a tool, finely tuned to hit “send”?
It's not about quitting your job or living in the woods. It's about reclaiming your attention. Your creativity. Your time.
Try it free: https://slidecheck.app
Want to suggest features or share feedback? Contact us at slidecheck.app/contact.