Front cover image for Selfie : how we became so self-obsessed and what it's doing to us

Selfie : how we became so self-obsessed and what it's doing to us

Will Storr (Author)
"We are living in an age of heighted individualism. Success is a personal responsibility. Out culture tells us that to succeed is to be slim, rich, happy, extroverted, popular--flawless. We have become self-obsessed. And our expectation of perfection comes at a cost. Millions are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. The pressure to conform to this ideal has changed who we are. It was not always like this. To explain how we got here, award-winning journalist Will Storr takes us on a journey across continents and centuries to explore the origins of this notion of the perfect self that torments so many of us: Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell? Full of thrilling and unexpected connections among history, psychology, economics, neuroscience, and more, Selfie is an unforgettable book that makes sense of who we have become. Ranging from Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the "selfie" generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualism in which we live now, Selfie tells the epic tale of the person we all know so intimately--because it's us."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2018
The Overlook Press, New York, NY, 2018
Nonfiction
403 pages ; 24 cm
9781468315899, 1468315897
1028640709
The dying self
The tribal self
The perfectible self
The bad self
The good self
The special self
The digital self
How to stay alive in the age of perfectionism
Text in English