Daily Inspiration Quote by John Updike

Updike’s line lands like a polite accusation: not that Americans enjoy novelty, but that they’ve been trained into it, as if consumer desire were less a preference than a reflex. “Conditioned” is the tell. It borrows the language of behavioral science and advertising psychology, implying a culture where instincts are engineered and rewarded. Respecting “newness” isn’t framed as curiosity or innovation; it’s reverence, a kind of civic religion whose rituals are upgrades, replacements, and the little rush of being current.

The kicker is “whatever it costs them.” Updike doesn’t limit the bill to money, though he clearly means the churn of planned obsolescence and status spending. The deeper cost is cultural and emotional: impatience with continuity, contempt for repair, amnesia about what came before. It’s also a moral cost. If newness is automatically respectable, then older things (objects, ideas, even people) slide toward disposability. The quote quietly sketches a country where progress gets confused with turnover, and where the market’s tempo becomes the tempo of the self.

Context matters: Updike wrote from inside the postwar American boom, when suburbia, television, and mass marketing didn’t just sell products; they sold a story about the future arriving in monthly installments. Coming from a novelist attuned to domestic rituals and middle-class unease, the line reads less like an economic critique than an intimate one: the sensation of living in a place where the latest thing feels mandatory, and where falling behind is treated as a kind of failure.