Will Storr

How the West Became Self-Obsessed

Selfie

Beau

I love thinking about people, culture, technology, and the psychology in between all of those things. For that reason Selfie proved to be a fascinating read which explored a bit more than I initially expected. Storr really zooms out and starts by painting the spectrum of how culture's perception of 'the self' has evolved over the history of humanity; from the Ancient Greek desire for 'the perfectible self' to early Christianity to 'the compression' and eventually onto the modern day Silicon-dreamers of California who consider the self something significantly different from what our ancestors did. I learned a great deal about social perfectionism (and the tragedy of those who weren't been able to escape it's claw), our 'tribal self', and the timeline of where we went from so-called 'humble' and self-sacrificial people to demigods. The self-esteem movement of the 80's and 90's was also discussed at length, with some fascinating supporting research around the modern day results of such initiatives.

This is a solid 3.5. It was a 4 to begin with but I found some of the chapters quite disorganised. Tangents are good but there were a tad too many in some cases which didn't go well with trying to follow a train of thought.

Selfie How the West Became Self-Obsessed

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