
Having and Being Had

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.
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
But I don’t see much evidence that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
James Guthrie writes, “that ownership of all kinds is a precarious business at best, or at worst, a form of self-delusion.”
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
Maybe from inside capitalism, Will says, every other system looks improbable and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe.
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
A person might consume food or be consumed by rage. In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
How can we hope to change anything, she asked, “if we don’t rebel in the everyday?”
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
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.
Eula Biss • Having and Being Had
“The desire to consume is a kind of lust,” Lewis Hyde writes. “But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.”