weekly Objet library

An object up for resale is its owner trapped between a life lived and a life to be lived.

If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?

The world still turns to Japan for things; it also turns to Japan to rid itself of them. There’s only one problem: Japan isn’t anywhere near as tidy as outside observers give it credit for.

Subtractive is contemplative; additive is stimulating. But, above all, the Japanese are master ‘editors’, he says, picking and choosing between polar opposites to suit the occasion. This is why Japanese people continue to remove their shoes indoors, even as they choose to live in Western-style houses. It’s why they continue to distinguish between Japanese-style and Western-style foods, hotels, even toilets. To Matsuoka, the subtractive and additive approaches aren’t inherently in opposition; the distinction is simply a matter of context.

‘Today, the idea that you’ll hold on to a lot of things for your whole life is fading,’ said Tsuzuki. ‘Take clothing. It used to be the case that good clothes cost a lot. You’d buy them and take care of them and wear for years. So you’d naturally build up a collection. But now we’re surrounded by low-cost retailers that are just good enough. You wear it for a season and that’s it.’

The most satisfying and nourishing communities, after all, are those where people aren’t in competition, trying to sell each other things, or united around nothing beyond a common consumer desire.

but we can also restore the value relationship between customer and object

the majority population don’t really like destructive consumerism, but have been bullied and seduced by capitalism into imagining that they like it, and therefore can perhaps be persuaded out of it again, provided that this persuasion is accompanied by sufficiently far-reaching institutional changes.

the majority population don’t really like destructive consumerism, but can’t desist from it because they have become addicted to it.

Consumer society…overwhelms us with a potentially limitless range of options…limitless possibility can be debilitating and a constant source of frustration. Simplifying choice by setting our own limits and by choosing ‘not to’…can then be liberating.

The idea that the only goal in life is to produce and consume more – an absurd, humiliating idea – must be abandoned. The capitalist imaginary of pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery, and of unlimited expansion, must be abandoned. Only men and women can do that.