Sublime

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

Teresa Brennan coined the term “bioderegulation” to describe the brutal discrepencies between the temporal operation of deregulated markets and the intrinsic physical limitations of the humans required to conform to these demands.3

One reason for the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit, and this is especially true in the United States, with its heavily private and often for-profit health system. How is a doctor—or hospital or drug company—to make money from essentially healthy patients?

rising death rates in middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans who do not have college degrees, opening a debate about “deaths of despair”—suicide, drug use, and alcoholism—

I am being paid to be disposable, to sell clothes that are disposable, to sell something I have no right to sell, to be someone I dislike, to be uncomfortable, until I can no longer see my whole self because I also see what they see and give it willingly.

It was all part of a way of doing things in the United States that, as I would gradually realize, forced you to be constantly on guard, constantly worried that whatever amount of money you had or earned would never be enough,

In a culture that deifies physical beauty, she lives in a constant storm of unattractiveness. Isn’t the flip side of all her attention-seeking a desperate plea for friendship, love, care, attention, meaning?

We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.