As Micki McGee argues, it was a notion that “fused religious and psychological discourses.… Work on the self—the quest for a path, the invention of a life, or the search for authenticity—is offered as an antidote to the anxiety-provoking uncertainties of a new economic and social order.29 McGee calls the subject that is produced by these discourses

“I think we’re in the process of reverse-engineering ourselves.