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Think of it as a massive experiment in mind control.

Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America

We’ve gone so far down this yellow brick road that “positive” seems to us not only normal but normative—the way you should be.

Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America

In America, losing a job means making a hundred phone calls to a state unemployment-insurance system. Getting hit by a car means becoming your own hospital-billing expert. Having a disability means launching into a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce–type legal battle. Needing help to feed a toddler means filling out a novel-length application for aid.

The Atlantic • The Time Tax

A cynic might conclude that preventive medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex.

Barbara Ehrenreich • Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

It is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don’t work—the old, the disabled—lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another’s humanity.

The Baffler • The New Neurasthenia

In this moral system, either you look on the bright side, constantly adjusting your attitude and revising your perceptions—or you go over to the dark side.

Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America

Like twentieth-century Russian workers or nineteenth-century Polynesians, the American working class—or at least the white part of it—which could once hope for steady work at decent pay, has lost much of its way of life.

Barbara Ehrenreich • Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

As one of those women, Lois Carrier, told me, “Until a woman learns to value herself, she’s not going to be valued by an employer (or client).”

Barbara Stanny • Overcoming Underearning(TM): A Simple Guide to a Richer Life

Being old enough to die is an achievement, not a defeat, and the freedom it brings is worth celebrating.