The Friendship Industrial Complex
If blindly adhering to your tribe’s goals or working bullshit jobs at a corporation is about somebody else’s goals (“other”), and the creator economy is about you (“me”), this collectivism I speak of is about a redefinition of “us”.
Sari Azout • #58 friends > communities
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
... See moreRosalind Gill • Confidence Culture
Rather than renouncing or denying our interdependence, perhaps it has come to the point where anxious readers of self-help literature need to refuse to participate in futile efforts at individual self-improvement and instead focus collectively on eliminating the vast social and economic inequities that have rendered us such a ready market for this
... See moreMicki McGee • Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
The latest in a long line of belief systems that encourage people to see a lack of society-defined ‘success’ as the result of personal failure.
Phoebe Lovatt • Good Vibes Only™
We internalize the message of what Byung-Chul Han has called the “achievement society” where the primary goal of a life is to constantly improve, nudged to become “entrepreneurs of [our]selves.”1 But constantly trying to be “better” can push us toward goals that are not ours, robbing us of our connection to ourselves.
Paul Millerd • Good Work : Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition
The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a non-... See more