“We’ve been choosing more and more and creating less and less for some time now, but I am just catching on that in becoming a society of choosers rather than of creators, we a rebecoming a society of people who take the passive role: the traditionally female role. Increasingly, we’re leaving the driving to others. We are leaving the fine, feathered display, the “choose me to be your mate” role, the traditionally male role, to the corporations that purvey products. It’s like the old sex dance of penguins or cockatoos, and we are the quiet one, the silent one, the female one, and the producer is the showy one, the one who offers, the male one. What will happen as we—both men and women—shift from expressing ourselves individually by making things into expressing ourselves only by choosing? What will happen to us as a culture when we have been completely conditioned only to choose between options, rather than come up with solutions?”

“And if we are about choosing and not about creating, and if the palette of responses continues to narrow as consumers vote with their cash for whitened smiles and cinnamon breath, and as other, less-successful choices are dropped from the purveyor’s roster of available options, at what point are we still actually choosing ? At what point are we just jostling along like a cow down a slaughterhouse chute?”

– Natalia Ilyin, excerpted from the excellent and inspirational Chasing the Perfect