James Wallman · 368 pages
Rating: (2K votes)
“the best place to find status, identity, meaning, and happiness is in experiences,”
“It really opened my eyes to how little I used all the stuff I owned,”
“Instead of trying to understand who we really are, we reach for the “Real Thing”. And when the goods we buy fail to match up to those deep desires, instead of giving up on material goods, we just keep banging our heads against the wall and buying more.”
“Suddenly I realized that nothing could be worse than that moment,” she says. “And as that thought came to me, I felt this very odd, very strange sense of peace. In that moment, I realized, if no one could help, the only person who could do something about it was me.” From”
“In that system, where more is always better, you can never have enough.”
“people sacrifice too much life to get more stuff.”
“The industrialists, with their machines and factories and clock-time, began the onslaught against anyone who was content to take it easy.”
“I almost felt,” he says, “ungrateful—’cause I had everything I’d always wanted.” At”
“happiness is more likely to come from the enjoyment of experiences rather than the accumulation of stuff.”
“They were called “minimalists,” and they thought that the best route to happiness was not by getting more, but by having”
“Life is not about having things. It’s about having good experiences.”
“They were called “minimalists,” and they thought that the best route to happiness was not by getting more, but by having less.”
“Overwhelmed, and suffocating from stuff, we are suffering from an anxiety that I call Stuffocation. Nicodemus,”
“People have been turning their backs on civilization ever since it began.”
“I hate taking pictures,’ he says. ‘I feel that if you pick up a camera you take yourself out of the moment. You’re no longer there, living it purely for the experience. You’re trying to record it for someone else.”
“research suggests every shared car takes up to thirteen others off the road”
“You are more likely to be happy, so studies have shown, if you do something for intrinsic reasons.”
“fewer chemicals and additives in your food, a greater sense of self-sufficiency, and more time to spend together as a family. But”
“We still believe that to be considered successful, by our peers and by ourselves, we need material badges of success—and that still means a lot of stuff. The”
“Everyone is an autobiographer nowadays, it’s like everyone is actively writing their own biography all the time,”
“as the psychologist Oliver James observed in Affluenza, the more a society resembles the United States, in that it becomes materialistic, the higher the rate of emotional distress.”
“Are you stuffocating too? Stuffocation is the story of one of today’s most acute, till now unnamed, afflictions. It is about how you, me, and society in general, instead of feeling enriched by the things we own, are feeling stifled by them. Instead”
“They are quite happy to have things, if they need them, but they are not hoping to find meaning, status, or happiness in material things. The”
“as per the law of unintended consequences, no matter what people’s intention when they do something, they rarely know what the ultimate outcome of their actions will be.”
“Let other people speed past you on the highway to success, if that is what they want. Just because they are hurrying about, it doesn’t mean you have to.”
“We live in a cluttered world of too much information and too much stuff.”
“In the 1980s, people wanted a fast car. Now they want a good story to tell.”
“The more innovative and connected a system is, the more quickly an innovation will spread. In”
“By having less and doing more, we will be happier, healthier, richer, in every sense: less clutter, less regret, less anxiety, more meaning, more flow, more intrinsic enjoyment, better conversations, more connections, a healthier take on status, and a stronger sense of belonging.”
“Not many people are interested in what somebody else is thinking, or what they have to say. The best you can hope for is they'll listen to you just so you'll have to listen to them.”
“Now, before you begin to worry, the section of the gaol that I’m standing in is completely secure. No problems here. I’m not in any danger whatsoever.”
“And the section I’m standing in?”
“Well,” he said, “the important thing to remember is that I’m perfectly safe.”
Valkyrie sighed. “I’m stuck in here with the bad guys, aren’t I?”
“Or you could be glass-half-full about it and say that they are stuck in there with you. Which might make you feel better.”
“Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.”
“the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.”
“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
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