The most ironic aspect of reading this book is that, despite the author's aim to dispel the fantasy of investing in all forms within the game of capitalism, I ended up starting more investments. And I actually want to reread it immediately.

Investment can be thought of a forfeiture in the present of more work, time, money or emotional resources than those whose fruits can immediately be consumed. It is motivated by the anticipation that their equivalents will be retrieved sometime in the future. Expected rewards may take on a range of forms, so long as they are of identical value to what was invested or include added value that represents the growth to which the invested value has contributed, granting some risk of backfire. As correlate to this conservative estimate, investment presumes continuity, coherence and predictability: linking present actions to future outcomes. It suggests a sequence in which value flows through material objects, savings deposits, credentials and social relations toward identical or greater values. And it suggests personal powers: the value realised at the end of the investment is believed to be an outcome of the effort and initiative that had originally set the process in motion. It further implies that the property, human capital or social relations invested in are durable. Their durability, in turn, depends on these objects and relations being rooted in a relatively stable system that allows them to store the value invested in them and that permits this value to be converted at will to its equivalents.

... what seems to be a universal means of meeting our possessive inclinations and storing the value of our investments is actually a construct designed to reconcile us, insofar as the value of our work is never fully remunerated, with our exploitation; and to encourage us, for the sake of owning what we imagine to be value-storing and -enhancing resources, to invest more than we would otherwise be prepared to.

... the middle class is an ideology of investment-driven self-determination, assigned to and largely embraced by workers with the means to invest extra work, time and other resources for the sake of their well-being in the future, rather than using everything up on the immediate satisfaction of their desires. The ideology is generated by and serves a capitalist system that feeds on people's investments while not affirming them in the self-determining way it suggests. This is because capitalism reproduces itself through an accumulation process that elicits ever more physical and material resources out of people who, in aggregate, are not fully remunerated for these investments, cannot opt out of making them without paying a formidable price, and are unable to steer their lives in a course that transcends the isolation and competition this elicitation imposes upon them. Their isolation and competition compel them to repeat the same behaviours over and over again and thereby reproduce the structure that entraps them.

Only by continuing to watch, listen, read, and learn—that is, by reinvesting—can we hope to nod knowingly at the next cultural reference. As with financialized property, tireless reinvestment alone might keep us from falling behind, and even then, there is nothing to assure us that our efforts will bear fruit.

By prudently and conscientiously investing in the well-being of our families, we are also investing in a system that dominates us by managing our work and resources in a way that chips away our powers as workers and citizens.

A hallmark of capitalism, when you consider it in its global totality, is the gross disparity between the mind-boggling amount of stuff that is produced and the left to waste, and at the same time the desperate deprivation and widespread struggle to earn basic necessities, or the backbreaking overwork by some alongside the demoralising unemployment of others.

This also sounds very much like the hallmark of "socialism with Chinese characteristics".