This has been a multi-year process of gradually deciding, "You know, I'm not supporting that company with my money anymore," and it's rapidly gotten to the point where my blacklist has a lot in common with the length of a CVS receipt.

We're witnessing the culmination of "the long march through the institutions," and there are a lot of Americans out there who are in the same boat as I am here with all this.

And if you find yourself looking for some sense of direction with the tangibles of daily life, feeling the need to pull a John Galt and opt-out from much of pop culture society in modern America, I think you'll find the 1800s Swedish concept of slojd (pronounced "sloyd") interesting.

In 1865, a Swede with a name reminiscent of a card game, Otto Solomon, created a teaching system for young Swedes with the intention of getting more of them skilled in a trade and independent when they finally graduated from high school. He called the concept slojd. Basically, the idea was that you would teach kids manual skills such as woodworking, metalworking, knitting, and the like, so that they would have some marketable skill they could earn a living from, they wouldn't have to purchase everything they needed, and they would be able to fend for themselves better.