Somewhere in my twenties — maybe when I was drowning in Star Wars toys, maybe

Somewhere in my twenties — maybe when I was drowning in Star Wars toys, maybe when the credit cards started to rot through their limits — I realized something strange and simple:

Walmart wasn’t neutral. None of it was.

The plastic, the sameness, the disposability — it all felt like an ecosystem built to dull the senses. The bright lights didn’t illuminate anything; they erased texture. The food came wrapped in so much petroleum it felt like eating oil.

I didn’t want that life. Not anymore.

The revelation wasn’t moral at first. It was aesthetic.

It felt ugly. It felt deadening. It felt nothing like the backyard kingdom of pears and barns and winters heated by work.

I think this was the seed of my lifelong revolt against waste, against cheapness, against the logic of mass consumption.

It was the beginning of a new ethic: make things last, make things matter.