This felt like having a conversation with a friend. Bliss researches and then asks questions, she talks to people and then muses over what they told her. The chapters are short, each sort of dovetails into the other and the content, while mostly about capitalism, art, value, and money meanders as your thoughts or a good conversation would. She doesn't give any pat answers or come to any conclusions (except maybe what she values in her personal life) but it raises enough food for thought to be interesting. The only thing I didn't like was her revelation to write this book so that she could afford to write other books, which colored the whole project for me into more of a pretense than a true examination of the subject.
its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.
What is destroyed when we think of ourselves as consumers, Graeber suggests, is the possibility that we might be doing something productive outside of work.
money is not to blame for this, Piff suggests. What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people.
They don’t boast about their wealth, but about their thrift. They talk about looking for good deals and driving old cars.
Credit is a form of optimism, Yuval Noah Harari suggests. It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present.
Credit creates the illusion of equality, in that we can all buy the same things on credit, but we can’t all pay the debt back.
The social cost of some things is their very cheapness.
Work, if we are fortunate, is rewarded with money, but the reward for labor is transformation.
Bureaucracies have a way of making work out of labor and—
Toil is the word Galbraith uses for work that is fatiguing and monotonous and a source of no particular pleasure.
Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.
Perhaps we should all keep a memento of the Titanic, just to remind ourselves of how safe disaster feels.
Art unmakes the world made by work.
“We are all communists with our closest friends,” David Graeber writes, “and feudal lords when dealing with small children.” We move between different systems of moral accounting, he writes, but all social systems, including capitalism, rest on a bedrock of everyday communism. By everyday communism he means the principle: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” An entire economy couldn’t be organized this way, Graeber argues, but many of our daily interactions already are. This is how we exchange information, for instance, in conversation.
Ketman, my brother says, is the word Miłosz used for living undercover, in secret opposition to the regime that wrote his paycheck. He borrowed the concept from Islamic theology, which allowed true believers to conceal their faith when surrounded by unbelievers. For Miłosz, ketman was something like the art of passing. “To say something is white when one thinks it black,” he wrote, “to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one).” That is the game of ketman.
“It is a way of living with contradiction,” Jacob Mikanowski writes. “It allows those adept at it to create private sanctuaries of the mind, untouched by compromise, even as compromise floods the rest of their lives.”
Precarious was Merriam-Webster’s word of the day recently. This is how I learned that “depending on the will or pleasure of another”
it comes from the Latin for prayer.
“Who enters the precariat?” By everybody, he means potentially anybody.
Some people choose their precarity—evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to
Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting, as it does, that there might be something worth more than security.
John noticed that affluence is the French word for the tributaries of a river.
The people here believe that if artists are successful then their success should produce all the money they need. And if they aren’t successful then they don’t deserve money.
Cars don’t always signal their intentions. And cars aren’t always nice to each other, though they usually show each other some respect in deference to the damage they can do to each other. They are like important men in conversation with other important men. Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.
On a bicycle, I’m alert, aware of everything. It’s exhilarating, the narrow margin, the exposure to injury, the steadying force of the spinning wheels. And then, for the sake of comfort or convenience, I get into a car. The sound of the street is dulled. I sit back and turn on the radio. I become distracted. Speed is easy, unearned, and bicycles are now an annoyance. I forget who I was just moments ago.
Pleasure is not necessarily harmful, he writes. But it “outrages that part of us which is concerned with growth.”
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
