Certainty is not security, it’s a snapping shut and a cover-up—an attempt to escape from the insecurity of not knowing.

The security of having our needs met allows us to have real autonomy and creative agency in the world.

The hazard, in other words, comes from the possibility that millions of people might be less stressed-out and more free.

Curiosity is something we can safely be consumed by, since consuming knowledge enriches us without creating waste.

Fourth grade was my first encounter with what I call manufactured insecurity, the kind of insecurity generated to keep us competing and consuming, nudging us to act like materialists and compete for scarce resources, even if we might prefer to try to live another way.

This means that our current capitalist system is set up less to meet and fulfill our current needs than it is to generate new ones, which, of course, can only be met through additional consumption—consumption of new lifestyles, experiences, products, upgrades, and apps with features we suddenly can’t live without.

We work hard, shop hard, hustle, get credentialed, scrimp and save, invest, diet, self-medicate, meditate, exercise, exfoliate. Like the Stoics before us, we engage in self-care, hoping it might help us one day care less.

you do not have to be at rock bottom to feel insecure, because insecurity results as much from expectation as from deprivation.

When the Pew Charitable Trusts conducted a poll asking if people would prefer financial stability to upward mobility, more than nine out of ten respondents said they would eagerly abandon the pursuit of wealth for security.