The Invisible Committee:

Thirty years of "crisis," mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. ... We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it.

They say the family is coming back, the couple is coming back. But the family that's coming back is not the same one that went away. Its return is nothing but a deepening of the prevailing separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through this masquerade. Everyone can testify to the doses of sadness condensed from year to year in family gatherings: the forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending in vain, the feeling that a corpse is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though it were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity of the sad family nucleus, but most seem to believe that it would be sadder still to give it up. The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where "becoming self-sufficient" is a euphemism for "finding a boss." They want to use the "familiarity" of the biological family as an excuse to undermine anything that burns passionately within us and, under the pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. We need to guard against such corrosion.

The couple is like the final echelon in the great social debacle.

Paul Graham:

It's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees.

Matthew Crawford:

One of the hottest things at the shopping mall right now is a store called Build-a-Bear, where children are said to make their own teddy bears. I went into one of these stores, and it turns out that what the kid actually does is select the features and clothes for the bear on a computer screen, then the bear is made for him. Some entity has leaped in ahead of us and taken care of things already, with a kind of solicitude. The effect is to preempt cultivation of embodied agency, the sort that is natural to us.

Curtis White:

When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.