consumerism
I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own…It started a couple of years ago. It was in response to going to these Golden Globe type events and they just give you stuff. You don’t want it. You don’t use it. And then Mad Men started to become a success on a popular level and people started sending me stuff, just boxes of shit. Gifts for every holiday, clothes. One day, I looked around and thought “I don’t want this stuff, I didn’t ask for it.” So I started giving it to friends or charity stores, or if it is still in its box I might sell it for a hundred bucks. I liked it so I didn’t stop.
“The Observer,” by Tim Adams, in The Guardian, Sunday, April 25, 2010.
Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly. I want to break the loop with this bike. I’m going to ride it for thirty years or more and I want to savor the process of acquiring it. I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it.
It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 11.
I don’t want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately—that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don’t believe in Nature anymore. It’s too isolated from you. You’ve abstracted it. It’s so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life’s highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.
Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (New York: Vintage, 2002), 3.
Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven’t moved may begin to need a fire.
Composing a Further Life (New York: Knopf, 2010), 38.
I am doing it right over again. I am sick of clothes and gewgaws and bags and advertisements and newspaper clippings and society pages and the new Vogue and fittings and the main floors of department stores and the radio—jazz and magazines and hairdressers. I am sick sick to death of them. But I clutch at them madly, like smoking or drinking—anything to keep from thinking.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 15.