Two pieces in The Atlantic this week, published days apart, accidentally form a diptych about American materialism and its discontents. The first: a meditation on garage sales, where the writer spends $100 on bric-a-brac and concludes it explains a nation. The second: a report on engineered psychedelics, asking whether the therapeutic trip can be customized. The connection is not accidental. Both are stories about what Americans do with accumulation: one asks what we do with the objects we've gathered, the other asks what we do with the neural architecture those objects helped build.
The Garage Sale as Archaeological Site
The garage sale essay is, underneath its Americana framing, a piece about objects as repositories of unprocessed feeling. The bric-a-brac doesn't explain a nation because it's representative. It explains a nation because it's what didn't get processed. It's the residue. The $100 of accumulated stuff is a map of what people acquired during moments of hope or anxiety and then couldn't integrate. The object is always a frozen emotion in the garage sale context. This is precisely the material that Matt McCormick's practice treats as primary source: baseball cards, zines, found ephemera as emotional archaeology.
Engineered Trips and the Personalization of the Interior
The psychedelics piece is asking whether the chaotic, uncontrollable interior experience can be made safe and targeted. What if the trip could be customized the way a Nuuly subscription customizes your wardrobe? The irony is structural: the most effective thing about psychedelics, clinically speaking, may be precisely the loss of control. A 2021 paper in Nature Medicine by Robin Carhart-Harris found that the therapeutic effect of psilocybin correlates strongly with mystical experience intensity, which is to say: the disorientation is the mechanism, not the side effect. Engineering it away might engineer away the point. Both the garage sale and the psychedelic share the same implicit American anxiety: that the uncontrolled encounter, with objects, with consciousness, with other people's abandoned histories, is where the actual meaning lives. And both suggest we are increasingly building infrastructure to avoid it.