QUOTE : I tell myself that these tiny scraps of relief and convenience and advantage will eventually accumulate into something transformative--that one day I will ascend to an echelon where I won’t have to compromise aymore ,where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self-interested scrabbling that came before. This is a useful fantasy, I think, but it’s a fantasy. We are what we do, and we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.