Quite! How about this from the comments:

*****

Offroad
16 Sep 2026 15.02
Guardian Pick

I think describing this simply in terms of ‘shoulds’ or ‘virtue’ is a bit trite. The lovely cardboard box arriving at the door, seasonal vegetables, healthy food, local growers - the thing is marketed with an idea of abundance, care and even a kind of domestic security. The reality: turnip overdose, scrubbing potatoes, and having to use everything before it goes off.

For creative people who make quite considered, sometimes aesthetic choices about how they live, I think there can be a particular pleasure in finding the thing that fits. You’re not simply buying a product or even passively accepting its marketing. You take the idea it offers and incorporate it into your own narrative about how you want to live. Practical, ethical and aesthetic reasons come together, and there’s a creative satisfaction in the coherence of the whole thing.

But perhaps that also makes it possible to become strangely loyal to the idea. Once something has found its place within a wider arrangement that you’ve thought about and shaped, you can go on accommodating a reality that increasingly contradicts it without quite reopening the original question. The narrative changes, circumstances change, but the choice itself can remain protected from scrutiny long past the used by date.

Until one day you look at it again and realise that the lovely box of seasonal abundance is, in fact, mostly a lot of turnips you don’t want.

*****

Wtf is wrong with these people? I'd like to take the idea of throwing this person head-first into a sewage lagoon and 'incorporate it into [my] own narrative about how [I} want to live. Practical, ethical and aesthetic reasons come together, and there’s a creative satisfaction in the coherence of the whole thing.'

jeers x2,
I