Douglas Coupland

successophobia - the fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one will no longer have one's childish needs catered to. (page 30)

"I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather .... Could the situation be that we no long believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison."

ultra short term nostalgia - homesickness for the extremely recent past: "God, things seemed so much better in the world last week." (page 96)

survivulousness - the tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last remaining person on earth: "I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell." (page 62)

We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.

underdogging - the tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. The consumer expression of this trait is the purchasing of less successful, "sad", or failing products: "I know these Vienna franks are heart failure on a stick, but they were so sad looking up against all the other yuppie food items that I just had to buy them." (page 137)

Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

virgin runway - a travel destination chosen in the hopes that no one else has chosen it. (page 172)

Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.

… after you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? … What moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet?

status substitution - using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: "Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW." (page 54)

I don't want dainty little moments of insight …