McKibben

And here is how I'd like to pose it. We speak often, and sentimentally, of being "enchanted" by the natural world. But what if it's the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems entirely more likely - that the consumer world amounts to a kind of lulling spell, chanted tunefully and eternally by the TV, the billboard, the suburb. A spell that convinces us that the things we want most from the world are comfort, convenience, security. A spell that by now we sing to each other. A spell that, should it start to weaken, we try to strengthen with medication, with consumption, with noise. A slightly frantic enchantment, one that has to get louder all the time to block out the troubling question constantly forming in the back of our minds: "Is this all there is?" (Bill McKibben, "A Shirt Full of Bees: How getting stung woke one man up to the sensuous world," in Utne, April 2005)