He couldn’t remember who it was who’d said that poetry was as essential to civilization as hot water.

Market contracting is, in an important sense, an adversarial process: purchasers try to obtain the best goods or services at the lowest price possible; sellers try to provide the lowest-cost goods or services at the highest price possible. Some individuals enjoy this contest, and most participants in market economies are acculturated to engaging in it with a fair degree of indifference, at least in conventional commercial contexts. Yet some individuals evidently find it unpleasant to obtain or provide goods or services through such adversarial relationships!

In assessing the relative efficiency of alternative economic arrangements, received economic theory generally ignores such preferences concerning transactional processes, as opposed to preferences concerning transactional outcomes such as price and quality of performance. It does not necessarily follow, of course, that these preferences are unimportant. And, where they are important, market contracting brings the cost of running counter to them.

An alternative interpretation of alienation is that individuals gain important satisfaction from having a feeling of control over an enterprise they patronize, or from participating with other patrons in its governance – satisfaction that may be lost when they deal with the firm only through market relationships.

Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make other mental events—such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions—happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

…like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust