mutilated metaphor for the day

[garlicbreath]

Have decided the stuff we buy function like concrete tetrapods scattered to prevent erosion at the crumbling shore of our personality. Bulwarks against all the other people you could be if you bought all the other stuff there is to buy. You're not necessarily trying to convince anyone but yourself. Books in particular, because I need reminders

Comments

(ex-rootlesscosmo here)

[anonymous]

Not so mutilated as all that. The idea of forming an identity around consumables (rather than practical activity or inherited status or whatever) is (i think) fairly recent, probably post-WW1 or even 1945 in Europe and the US, post-1960 elsewhere, and I doubt it prevails even now in (say) Afghanistan or Paraguay, though I wouldn't say so definitively. Of course it dovetails with the maintenance of an economy focused on Marx's "Department Two" of the economy, goods for the end-consumer, rather than goods employed in the production process; that's not to claim, however, that it was consciously constructed for this purpose. In fact our situation is much more dire if it's the outcome of processes too big and inexorable for anyone to have steered to their present position.