Cyndi

“The most savage of consumerism's ironies is that those who consume the least offer suffer far more of consumption's harms than those who consume the most.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“And so it has continued, with back-to-the-land movements, reconnect-with-nature movements, fads for decluttering, manias of worry about the nerve-fraying pace of modern life, all rising time and again only to be swept away by a rush of consumption unlike anything seen before. The hippies became the boomers. Generation X rejected conspicuous consumption of the 1980's only to take up what psychologist Geoffrey Miller called 'conspicuous precision,' or the public display of artisanship, quality, provenance and ethical virtue-drawing more sophisticated lines around positional consumption than ever before.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Almost everyone has a psychological gap between the way they believe they should act in daily life and how they actually behave. The more materialistic a person is, the wider that gap is likely to be. Knowingly or unknowingly, materialists often feel conflicted over their failure to be better people-they experience a sense of incongruence between their ideal self and their real self. Simplifiers tend to have narrower gaps and greater congruence.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Fortunately, ideas already exist for how to achieve every aspect of deconsumer society that appears in this book. Lifespan labeling can encourage product durability: new tax regimes and regulations can favour repair over disposability, job-sharing programs and shorter work days or work weeks can keep people employed in a slower, smaller economy. Redistribution of wealth can reverse income inequality, or prevent it from worsening in a lower-consuming world.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves