zoe olesker’s Reviews > The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store > Status Update

“when you want less, you consume less — and you also need less money”

“advertisements and marketing campaigns had conditioned me to believe everything was now or never. it never occurred to me to wait until i actually needed something. the truth, i was learning, was that we couldn’t actually discover what we needed until we lived without it.”

“the silence would hurt, but the noise had to go.”

“who are you buying this for: the person you are, or the person you want to be?”

“that was all i was ever going to be to her: a novelty; something to talk about. i don’t want to be known as the sober one anymore. i wasn’t just the sober one. there was more to me than that. wasn’t there?”

“when people announce your sobriety, it […] makes you feel like they have whittled down your worth to one sentence and turned you into nothing more than office gossip.”

“people will always make comments when you decide to live a countercultural lifestyle”