The money in our savings account was not money, in my mind, it was time. All those dollars were hours banked, to be spent on writing, not working.

Credit is a form of optimism, Yuval Noah Harari suggests. It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present.

Maybe from inside capitalism, Will says, every other system looks improbable and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe.

For both Baraka and O’Hara, the tone and texture of intimate conversation was an aesthetic of resistance.

“The desire to consume is a kind of lust,” Lewis Hyde writes. “But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.”

Weber proposed that early Protestants believed they must work to accumulate wealth as proof that they were in God’s favor.

We didn’t have mothers and grandmothers teaching us about capital. But here’s the thing—she circles her womb with her hand—we are capital. We are the means of production. I had three children, she says. I’ve been the means of production. Now I want to own the means of production.

Investment isn’t any more of a sin, I think, than gambling. But when shareholders profit at the expense of the workers who produce those profits, it’s a means of extraction. An economy of extraction is what we’re retiring on, those of us who get to retire.

Maintenance, she wrote, was the work of protecting progress, sustaining change, preserving the new, and keeping the dust off invention.