"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it"
About this Quote
Normal, in Ellen Goodman s hands, is not a comforting baseline but a rigged loop: a self-financing treadmill disguised as adulthood. The sentence is engineered to feel like rush-hour itself, stacking clause on clause until the reader is boxed in by logistics. That breathless accumulation is the point. It mimics the way modern life gets defended, not through grand ideology, but through errands, payments, and the soft tyranny of the next due date.
Goodman targets a particularly American bargain: freedom performed as consumption. Clothes are not personal style; they are work-appropriate armor. The car is not mobility; it is debt with upholstery. The house, supposedly the prize, becomes a prop you purchase access to and then abandon for most of your waking hours. The twist of leaving the house empty all day lands like a quiet punchline, exposing the absurdity without needing to shout.
Subtext: the system does not merely pressure people to work; it recruits them into needing work by making basic participation contingent on ongoing purchases. The repetition of pay for is a moral indictment of circular necessity, where choice exists mostly in brand selection. Coming from a journalist steeped in late-20th-century labor and consumer culture, the line reads like an early warning about a life organized around status maintenance and financed identity. Its intent is less to romanticize escape than to make compliance feel, finally, as strange as it is.
Goodman targets a particularly American bargain: freedom performed as consumption. Clothes are not personal style; they are work-appropriate armor. The car is not mobility; it is debt with upholstery. The house, supposedly the prize, becomes a prop you purchase access to and then abandon for most of your waking hours. The twist of leaving the house empty all day lands like a quiet punchline, exposing the absurdity without needing to shout.
Subtext: the system does not merely pressure people to work; it recruits them into needing work by making basic participation contingent on ongoing purchases. The repetition of pay for is a moral indictment of circular necessity, where choice exists mostly in brand selection. Coming from a journalist steeped in late-20th-century labor and consumer culture, the line reads like an early warning about a life organized around status maintenance and financed identity. Its intent is less to romanticize escape than to make compliance feel, finally, as strange as it is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work-Life Balance |
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