Sublime

Maintaining the fiction of the autonomous self, a laborious fiction that is ultimately unsustainable, has become hard work.

Why have people embraced self-help groups—what do they get there that they don’t get in political organizations?

For the women who were managing households, raising children, and holding down jobs, the appeal of having it all had led most unexpectedly to the reality of having less and less.

The treatment of labour as a calling became as characteristic of the modern worker as the corresponding attitude toward acquisition of the business man.

What finer characteristics could a system like capitalism seek in a worker?

In these labors that are purported to be labors of self-creation, the exercises provided are actually most effective not for the creation of newly invented selves but rather for the maintenance of existing notions of the self and its relation to the social and political worlds.

In Orman’s calculus, all prior economistic metaphors are collapsed: life is not just a business. Rather, money is alive—a life force in itself.

David’s band was one of the few from the early 2000s emo-punk scene with any moral compass pertaining to underage girls, something I would only realize in hindsight. Being in high school did not deter other musicians in the scene from inviting us backstage, or inviting us on their tour buses, or inviting us into their hotel rooms. One time, a bass