evidence: Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. — Tyler Durden, Fight Club The FI version of this is often distilled to some version of an often misattributed quote that goes something like: "We spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like." (I’ve seen this credited to Dave Ramsey, Will Smith, Warren Buffett, and others. Most likely it was written by humorist Robert Quillen in 1928.) [...] In that Fight Club rant, I think the most important line isn’t all the stuff about marketing, it’s this: "No purpose or place."