Anti Materialism Quotes

“The idea that America is one great shopping mall, and that all anyone wants to do is, you know, grasp their credit card and run out and buy stuff is a stereotype, and it’s a generalization but, but but as a way to summarize a certain kind of ethos in the U.S., it’s pretty accurate. [...] Language like that, the wounded inner child, the inner pain, is part of the kind of pop psychological movement in the, in the United-States, that is a sort of popular Freudianism, that, that has its own paradox which is that the more we are thought to list and resent the things of which we were deprived as children, the more we live in that anger and frustration and the more we remain children. For young people in America, there are very mixed messages from the culture, that, there is a streak of moralism in American life that extol the virtues of being grown up and having a family and being a responsible citizen, but there is also the sense of… of . Do what you want, Gratify your appetites because of … of when I’m a corporation appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things, right?” ZDF German Television Interview”
― David Foster Wallace

“We have traded our intimacy for social media, our romantic bonds for dating matches on apps, our societal truth for the propaganda of corporate interests, our spiritual questioning for dogmatism, our intellectual curiosity for standardized tests and grading, our inner voices for the opinions of celebrities and hustler gurus and politicians, our mindfulness for algorithmic distractions and outrage, our inborn need to belong to communities for ideological bubbles, our trust in scientific evidence for the attractive lies of false leaders, our solitude for public exhibitionism.

We have ignored the hunter-gatherer wisdom of our past, obedient now to the myth of progress.

But we must remember who we are and where we came from.

We are animals born into mystery, looking up at the stars. Uncertain in ourselves, not knowing where we are heading. We exist with the same bodies, the same brains, as Homo sapiens from thousands of years past, roaming on the plains, hunting in forests and by the sea, foraging together in small bands.

Except now, our technology is exponentially increasing at a scale that we cannot predict.

We are overwhelmed with information; lost in a matrix that we do not understand.

Our civilizational “progress” is built on the bones of the indigenous and the poor and the powerless.

Our “progress” comes at the expense of our land, and oceans, and air.

We are reaching beyond what we can globally sustain. Former empires have perished from their unrestrained greed for more resources. They were limited in past ages by geography and capacity, collapsing in regions, and not over the entire planet.

What will be the cost of our progress?

We have grown arrogant in our comfort, hardened away from our compassion, believing that our reality is the only reality.

Yet even at our most uncertain, there are still those saints who are unknown and nameless, who help even when they do not need to help.

They often are not rich, don’t have their profiles written up in magazines, and will never win any prestigious awards.

They may have shared their last bit of food while already surviving on so little. They may have cherished the disheartened, shown warmth to the neglected, tended to the diseased and dying, spoken kindly to the hopeless.

They do not tremble in silence while the wheels of prejudice crush over their land.
Withering what was once fertile into pale death and smoke.

They tend to what they love, to what they serve.

They help, even when they could fall back into ignorance, even when they could prosper through easy greed, even when they could compromise their values, conforming into groupthink for the illusion of security.

They help.”
― Bremer Acosta

“No Duniadari, Just Comfort.”
― Shiv Sangal

“If you are willing to live at a low enough standard there is nothing you cannot do, nowhere you cannot go.”
― Ithell Colquhoun, The Living Stones: Cornwall