American Bulk: Essays on Excess

we were not the kind of group who could comfortably sustain such blatant, undisguised togetherness. We needed a pretext. Costco was our play.

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.

By escorting Olive Garden into the realm of acceptability, I’d revealed my belief that such a realm existed, and that I was one of its gatekeepers. True iconoclasm would’ve been my unqualified pleasure, but I couldn’t unqualify my pleasure.

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.

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

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.

Looking at the American Eagle and the Auntie Anne’s, the fluorescent lights and the industrial planters, the puffy-coated families ambling too slowly through the rabble, I understood now that Times Square wasn’t the turbo city. It was the turbo suburbs.

Where my cousin saw waste as a form of excess—it was having something you didn’t need—my grandma saw waste as the act of a careless and unimaginative person.

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