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.

But what are advertisements if not instructions?

Pundits talk a lot about red and blue states, about rural and urban, about the heartland and the “coastal elites,” but one ideological divide has gone largely unexplored: that of people who would be embarrassed to have dinner at the Olive Garden, and people who would not.

Ulta’s ideal employee was someone who needed Ulta more than Ulta needed her.

Wealth was not leveraged to consume rarer or fancier things than the middle class, but to consume middle-class things in excess.

I’d learned this in high school when I’d looked for summer jobs only to find that summer jobs didn’t really exist anymore, because the people who fill them don’t really exist. If you have money, your summer job is pre-collegiate grooming rituals, all your unpaid internships and philanthropy. If you don’t have money, your summer job is the job you a

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

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.