American Bulk: Essays on Excess

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.

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.

The customer is not an individual, but part of a unified front, and so it’s imperative that a company cede to their demands.

Dwight Macdonald coined the term midcult, defining middle culture by its aspirations to universality. Midcult lay between avant-garde and schlock, broadly likable, smart enough to feel elevated, bland enough to not challenge your palate.

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.

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

Costco offers far more than a good deal. It offers the lulling comfort of permanent volume, the same bulwark against scarcity that draws us to the all-you-can-eat, the BOGO, the unlimited refill, the family size.

I needed to become an expert in any desire I had, even ones I couldn’t yet fulfill, so that when the time came, I’d be armed with knowledge.

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.