Sublime

With the blurring of the boundaries between public and private life—evidenced in part by the rise of a construct like Peters’s CEO of Me, Inc.—one is no longer compelled to manage the heart only in the context of the corporate workplace. Or rather, more accurately, the corporate workplace is interiorized: one takes the workplace with one everywhere

In the place of a social safety net, Americans have been offered row upon row of self-help books to boost their spirits and keep them afloat in uncharted economic and social waters.

Maintaining the fiction of the autonomous self, a laborious fiction that is ultimately unsustainable, has become hard work.

Demands for recognition without a parallel demand for economic justice is at the heart of why the self is belabored.

One might reasonably expect that new modes of being, new individual identities, and new conceptions of selfhood would abound. And such does seem to be the case.

The feeling of abundance is substituted for the reality of economic insecurity—a substitution that is hardly new in American popular culture.

the decline of corporate structures that emphasized group affiliation has fostered a resurgence in the Protestant ethic, but in its contemporary version this ethic returns as both entrepreneurial and artistic, rational and expressive.

In the context of late-twentieth-century America, mind-power offered magical explanations for the source of wealth when hard work was clearly no longer a reliable means of securing prosperity.

The consolidation of vast wealth in the hands of a few industrialists, and a burgeoning population of new millionaires, required moral justification.