#consumer

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest, to make money they don't want, to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like. ↗

— Emile Gauvreau

#money

The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.” (Analects 4.9) ↗

— Confucius

#china #consumerism #greed #materialism #simplicity

The Master said, “The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.” (Analects 4.16) ↗

— Confucius

#china #consumerism #greed #greed

Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago. ↗

— Kalle Lasn

#consumerism #advertising

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside. ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#cyberpunk #elven-charm #humankind #insightful #life

We no longer live life. We consume it. ↗

— Vicki Robin

#money #life

Americans used to be 'citizens.' Now we are 'consumers. ↗

— Vicki Robin

#consumer #consumerism #money #life

Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want. ↗

— Robin Nagle

#garbage #life

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#love #technology #love

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #consumer #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics