In a previous post, I said that half of us want to live the unexamined life, assimilating into the culture, and half of us want to write our own marching orders. It’s not so easy, though, to be an original, to bring to bear the autonomy of self-command. How we have already been determined and shaped by the cultural impress resists our efforts to be other than the relentlessly acquisitive-of-stuff individuals by which the metaphorical Scoreboard now grades us. Its end-all and be-all: to rank our merit based on its evaluation of the worth of the money we have and the stuff we buy.