Cyndi

“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

“I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth.

Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Another core difference that Michael S. W. Lee found between anti-consumers and consumers is a wider 'scope of concern,' or regard for issues bigger than themselves and their personal needs. Anti-consumers are more likely to engage with issues such as climate change, species extinction, racial injustice, and poverty-matters that can be disturbing, depressing, or even frightening. Since engagement with such topics is congruent with their values, however, it makes life meaningful-but perhaps not cheerful.”
― 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