American Bulk: Essays on Excess

The TV show wanted me to see people obsessed and compelled, but far more than that, I saw people who, somewhere along the normal cycle of consumption, had been paralyzed into a deep ambivalence. Our living naturally creates piles of disorder, and it requires tremendous effort to work against that entropy.

I felt, when I consumed, that while my individual participation in the system would unavoidably augment its power, revoking my participation did nothing to diminish it.

The American Dream, as we know it, is abundance. It’s a dream to amass houses, children, cars. It’s a dream to collect things of value. But it is an equally American dream to be able to abandon, drop everything, to jettison, without guilt, anything that weighs you down.

His so-called attachment to objects seemed, more than anything, to be a problem of ontology. He couldn’t find the line between value and valuelessness, between want and need, between satiety and hunger, between thing and thing. To lift one object from the pile was to hoist the whole mess, every decision tugging a thousand more behind it.

At first, it was fun, dictating how often a fake human could pee. But it quickly became tedious when I realized how much of living is dedicated to these mundane tasks, and how, if you are not programmed to do them almost without thinking, they consume you, and you again become a child.

The practical difficulties of extracting yourself from responsibility—a home, a job, a marriage—are so daunting that many people never do it at all.

Was the sadness I’d believed to be a deep-rooted sensitivity to the forces of capitalism simply a quibble over aesthetics?

When you ask for ease, comfort, and stability and receive it in enormous quantities, you are then left to wonder whether you even wanted it in the first place. Then you must find new things to want.

I’d been healthy and parentally insured my whole life, and in that comfortable state, I’d forgotten that health care, too, was a transaction, that medical procedures carried a price tag like anything else. When I talked to the kind doctor, I was buying something.