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.

But I don’t see much evidence that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.

James Guthrie writes, “that ownership of all kinds is a precarious business at best, or at worst, a form of self-delusion.”

the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

Maybe from inside capitalism, Will says, every other system looks improbable and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe.

A person might consume food or be consumed by rage. In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.

How can we hope to change anything, she asked, “if we don’t rebel in the everyday?”

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.

“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.”