The women imagined themselves in service to the poor, but the poor served them.

“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.”

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

my evidence suggests that the stories we tell ourselves about money are full of white lies—not harmless, but white.

“No aristocrat ever contemplated the loss of feudal privileges with more sorrow than a member of this class would regard his descent into ordinary labor where the reward was only the pay.”

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.

Investment isn’t any more of a sin, I think, than gambling. But when shareholders profit at the expense of the workers who produce those profits, it’s a means of extraction. An economy of extraction is what we’re retiring on, those of us who get to retire.

could also have said that it’s a critique, an embodied critique of the middle-class cult of personal safety. It’s a rejection of the belief that every vulnerability should be protected, and that the central project of our lives is to undo our own precarity. It’s a refusal of a way of life devoted to insurance.

For both Baraka and O’Hara, the tone and texture of intimate conversation was an aesthetic of resistance.