Daily Inspiration Quote by James Hillman

Hillman lands the punch with a consumer object that doubles as a diagnosis: the air bag. It evokes safety engineered in advance, a cushion that deploys at the first sign of impact. By calling us an "air bag society", he’s not praising prudence; he’s arguing we’ve turned risk itself into a product feature, something to be minimized, outsourced, and ideally refunded.

The line moves like a receipt: guarantees, returns, replacements. Hillman’s subtext is that we’ve imported the logic of retail into the inner life. If a purchase disappoints, we swap it out; if a relationship, job, or identity bruises us, we start scanning for the next model. The expectation isn’t resilience but coverage. That’s why the list ends not with another store policy but with 401(k)s and Social Security, the high-liturgical institutions of modern reassurance. He’s not attacking retirement programs so much as the fantasy they can do what they’re asked to do: eliminate contingency.

Context matters. Hillman, a post-Freudian critic of therapeutic culture, spent decades pushing back against a psychology that treats discomfort as a malfunction. Here he’s diagnosing a society that medicalizes uncertainty and moralizes security. The irony is that the more we demand guarantees, the more fragile we become, because the self is trained to interpret ordinary bumps as violations of contract.

The rhetoric works because it’s deliberately unfair in a way that feels true. It stings the reader into recognizing how easily "being responsible" slides into being insured against life.