" But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing, in any other civilization, in any other epoch, could compare itself to the mobile perfection of a contemporary shopping center functioning at full tilt. I had thus consumed, with joy, shoes most notably; then, gradually, I had grown weary, and I had understood that my life, without this daily input of basic, renewable pleasures, was going to stop being simple. "

― Michel Houellebecq , The Possibility of an Island