James F. Richardson's Blog, page 5

Episode 7 - What "Fun" Did to America

Girls just want to have fun, I hear. My research suggests that almost all Americans just want to have fun. Leisure time is our number one time-consuming activity after work. But we approach this very oddly compared to most other cultures. And the media wants it that way.

We “party” as a youth cohort and then slowly watch TV/video content as we age.

This…

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How Couples Meet in the 21st Century

Exponential social change is rare in my research on modern America. Most social trends move steadily, almost linearly. We’re stubborn apes, I guess. But this topic—how couples meet—has driven a historically unprecedented mass shift in how romantic couples meet in the last 15 years alone.

For the record, I met my wife in a bar/music venue during a fundraising event. My close friend was a loose acquaintance of hers. It was not an internet match.

Watch this fantastic animated visualization of recent research by Stanford sociologists and take notes. I’ll share my interpretations after you’re done watching. PS - The entire study, original charts, and methodology are HERE for those who simply must know.

Key Trends in Meeting Life Partners

Here are the major trends I culled from watching this animation (and before I read the academic paper)

“Friends” Takes Off After World WWII As Family Leverage Declines

In the 1940s, couples now meet primarily through friends, and family is no longer the dominant source of coupling (semi-arranged marriage). The family would continue to plummet in importance as the family became a declining source of employment opportunities and as lifestyle fragmentation and delayed marriage accelerated.

“Bars” and “Coworkers” Grow as Sources in a Steady, Linear Fashion

The rise in coed offices is a significant driver here, further eroding the family’s influence and increasing all sorts of non-traditional matches. And lots of shallow, horny ones that didn’t last. Co-ed offices also helped drive the growth in “bars” as a source due to post-work happy hours, the explosion of white-collar business trips, etc. By the 1980s, “Bars/Restaurants” was among the top three sources for meeting a life partner in America.

The Triumph of “Friends” in the 1990s

I guess there was a valid reason the TV show “Friends” became so popular by the late 1990s. Urban strangers-made-good were now the dominant source of coupling. At least there was some foreknowledge before you asked someone out on a date. But did it compare to the intensely networked, local knowledge of a 1930s church coupling? I doubt it. Of course, knowing more about your life partner does not necessarily correlate with a stable, healthy marriage.

“Online” Overtakes “Friends” in the 2000s

2003 was when I first dabbled in online dating. But, ultimately, it was not for me. I did not foresee the rapid collapse of “friends” as the primary source, having come of age in the 1980s and 1990s. This single shift in the dataset is genuinely exponential, almost hyperbolic in its slope. I can only say that the triumph of online dating must now lead to many misfires and instant rejections. I wrote about why in a recent essay. It’s far more performative and prone to B.S. than asking someone out at the office.

1930 vs. 2024

In 1930, people got married young and early, and family ties were stronger for everyone. The dominance of family, school (K-12), and friends represents a rapidly urbanizing world. If we took this data back to 1830, “church” and “neighbors” would have been much higher. “Friends” would have been “Church” anyways, no?

Today, couples mainly meet online (first). The power of traditional networks (family, school, church) is minimal. Yet, friends are still hanging on tight as the #2 vector. I suspect they still play a crucial role in filtering your online choices…somehow. My big takeaway from the 2024 chart is that people are meeting within a pool of weak ties where mutual knowledge of each other is shallower than ever in deep historical terms.

This permits romance to morph from a softening of patriarchy into a tool of sexual predation and bullshit artistry (if mis-used). The issue here is less about the internet than what online dating encourages - shallow match-making based on misleading individual performances designed to charm.

If you have close friends who knew you and your potential partner well before you married, you are among a minority who understand how powerful that total knowledge is.

The triumph of virtual encounters may become a shallow first stage in modern dating, allowing you to soak in enormous choices before committing to a real-life test date. If so, this just drags out the process. I don’t see how it improves it more than sourcing from your friend network. It could lead to years of disastrous time-wasting and fantasy-seeking.

As I wrote in my recent book, offering this much choice in a domain of life so crucial to our mental health seems like a power you would only give to an older, mature adult. Not to young adults with little romantic or sexual experience. Right? They need filtered choices, not endless choices.

Filtering was precisely what sourcing a mate from within established, local social networks accomplished prior to World War II. There was lots of filtering and accumulated wisdom, resulting in a narrower set of choices built on collective wisdom, not individuated preferences.

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A new podcast appearance! invited me on his podcast “Coffin Talk,” where he candidly discusses America’s views on death and dying. As a former hospice nurse, he has seen up close how emotionally unprepared we are for this inevitable life experience.

Check it out on Apple Podcasts.

Don’t forget that my new book, Our Worst Strength: American Individualism and Its Hidden Discontents, is now available as a rolling podcast series, narrated by me, but only for paid subscribers. I’ve recorded up through Chapter 12 of 35. In a few months, the beast will be binge-able! It’s a big book.

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Episode 6 - Our Awkward Careers

Thanks for listening so far! You must be hooked! Wait, you haven’t upgraded? You’re just getting teasers each Wednesday? Such a sad state of affairs. See the green button below.

For paid subscribers, please listen!

In this episode, I finish Part Two - How it Got Awkward at Work - with chapters on The Great College Divide and Career ZigZag.

If you have a …

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The Campbell's Soup Inflation Index

[This is an updated version of last year’s original piece]

In 1900, Campbell’s condensed soup was three years old. It sold for 12 cents a can. Campbell’s even printed the price in their ads (a tactic for a less competitive era). Many brands did this, even though print ads appeared in magazines and newspapers that would lie around your house for months. So, what if someone picked up a six-month-old issue of The Saturday Evening Post, got misled about the price, and then started an angry confrontation at the local A&P?

Hang on. Take a deep breath. Inflation was meager in this period despite the economic growth caused by high industrialization.

How low? Unbelievably low.

“The dollar had an average inflation rate of 0.40% per year between 1897 and 1900, producing a cumulative price increase of 1.20%.”1

What?! 0.40%! How do we get that time machine I keep seeing movies about?

There was zero risk of Campbell’s printed ad price being out-of-date.

Campbell’s condensed soup was invented by John Dorrance, a company employee soon rewarded with a company Director position (those days are over, kids). His descendants control the company’s Board of Directors to this day. Well played, John. 

To make condensed soup, you cook the soup, extract much of the water, and squeeze two servings into one tin can. This condensing process reduces the cost of freight, inventory storage, and packaging. Condensing boosts profits while technically lowering the cost per serving to the end consumer, who happily provides the water. The end consumer also receives a not-so-subtle message—feed more people, buy more soup.

OK, this is all fascinating historical trivia, James, but what do 12 cents mean to us as denizens of 2024? I don’t even use coins anymore. Twelve cents is not even a currency value I’ve seen outside my savings account interest in the 2010s.

OK. Let me help you find an equivalent to a 12-cent can of Campbell’s condensed soup in our modern era. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. You spoiled residents of the 21st century may be disgusted with your vapid privilege when you’re done reading this piece.

Understanding the 2024 Equivalent Value of a 12-cent Can of Soup in 1900

The best way to comprehend the actual value of a 12-cent can of Campbell’s condensed soup in the year 1900 is to equivalize the can financially and culturally in today’s bizarre context.

This involves four variables:

Dollar inflation (i.e., declining purchasing power ) of the U.S. Dollar from 1900-2024 (!) - 3100%2

Number of soup ounces in a 1900 can condensed soup vs. one today (at Walmart) - same (!)

The price of one can nationwide in 1900 vs. today at Walmart - $0.12 vs. $1.26

Our cultural definition of a soup serving in 1900 vs. today - 10 ounces of soup fluid vs. about 18 ounces of soup fluid.3 When we eat soup, we want more of it today. We want more of everything. Look around. So, a 10.75-ounce can of condensed soup (which yielded 21.50 ounces of hot soup for two people) is presumed to have a 55% smaller serving size than today’s food culture demands.

OK, now cue some super-secret, fancy math: A $0.12, 10.75 oz. condensed soup can in 1900 = 0.55 cultural soup servings today = ($0.12*31*1.81)

= $6.73 equivalent value in $2024!

In today’s context, $6.73 is like buying a Grande, triple-shot latte at Starbucks or a grab-n-go salad from the Safeway Deli. In other words, the 1900 condensed soup can comps well culturally to how we approach restaurant and food service pricing today.

“Just make the food for us please,” we say all the time now, when, in 1900, this was a pretty new cultural desire.

Understanding Early Canned Soup As a Premium Status Item

Campbell’s soup wasn’t just for the rich in 1900. It was one of the early consumer brands to push into seasonal grocery buying patterns and trigger trade-ups based on modern notions of domestic convenience and an appeal to industrial awe.

Those crazy factories. What will they make for us next?

Condensed soup back then, like a Starbucks latte today, was a trade-up purchase for the middle and working classes - an affordable luxury. You did it for special occasions, not every week. You didn’t store cases of soup in your pantry. Not at 12 cents a can. No way. The average household in 1900 spent around $164 a month on food. And this was 43% of their monthly spending. Twelve cents was not aristocratic, but, like our overpriced lattes, it was not a trifle for ordinary folk.

Today, the modern cultural equivalent volume of Campbell’s condensed soup sells for only $1.26. Soup was much more precious by volume in 1900, especially given how much effort it took to make fresh soup (and how much of your monthly spending went to food back then).4 Canned soup today is the epitome of a low-value commodity for us, in large part, because the price of Campbell’s condensed soup has come down about 83% (when equivalizing for the declining value of a dollar and declining cultural value of soup). When something becomes too cheap, we devalue it even if we use it regularly. This phenomenal price relaxation required modern supply chains, a severe decline in ingredient quality to reduce costs, and a switch from tin cans to steel alloy containers (tin was not cheap packaging in 1900).

The wow factor behind canned soup was the marvel of industrial food processing that could perfectly simulate the work of a home cook at an enormous scale AND preserve the food for months. Remember, in 1900, most American women knew how to make fresh soup on the stove. But it takes hours to cook fresh soup, which requires lots of wood or coal as fuel. Centralizing cooking in a canned item eliminated much of this soup-making fuel cost, the annoyance of monitoring the cooking, and the bother of it all! And there was no refrigeration. Your time-consuming, fuel-sucking fresh soup had to be eaten that day. People with low incomes were not in the condensed soup game at all. I also wonder if the urban poor back then would have ever bothered to make fresh soup due to the fuel cost of heating a burner for hours. I have doubts.

Early users seemed to consider canned soup with a long shelf life a luxurious modern marvel. It broke ALL the rules of female-dominated home food production and augured a world where cooking, one day, would be optional. Really? What next, an ice box that runs on electricity? Or a machine that sweeps my floors for me? Or a store where I could just drive up and pay for a hot meal tray through a window?

I suspect that the ‘ancient’ tradition of using Campbell’s recipes for Holiday meals originates from the brand's original entry into American homes as an affordable luxury item—when kitchen convenience was seen as a luxury, not a civil right.

By 1904, Campbell's reportedly sold 16,000,000 cans of soup annually. For a U.S. population of 82,000,000, this yielded one can sold for every five Americans. Again, this is the typical population reach of affordable luxuries but not everyday necessities like toilet paper, milk, sugar, or laundry detergent.

Today, however, condensed soup sold about 1.1 billion units (in 2016) to a population of 330,000,000, or ~3 cans per American annually!5 That’s a 15X increase in annual per capita soup consumption…when you make it super easy and cheap.

PS - The End of Soup?

Soup's cultural relevance and price have also declined. It’s hot now, and more Americans want cold food and drinks on more occasions per year. I recently read somewhere that 74% of SBUX drink sales are now cold drinks! What?

What is going on? Are the cold weather curmudgeons of New England doomed to extinction to be buried with their scratched-up soup bowls?

A lot more Americans live in warm-weather states than in 1900, states where it is only cold in the mornings most of the year (i.e., not savory soup time). The effective soup season distributed across national geography leads to an increasing misalignment that no marketing campaign can overcome. Have a look for yourself.

Here is the U.S. population density at the county level in 1900 vs. 2010. I’ve overlaid the % of the population living in the southern, warm states (CA, AZ, NM, TX, LA, AL, MS and FL)

Soup doesn’t sell well in Arizona or Florida. And we frankly don’t seem to care at all down here. I hear no pining for soup in Tucson.

Or maybe soup has become so bad and cheap that we just forget about it, like a cheap IKEA end table.

Or maybe we’re too busy doing a Starbucks latte run.

Soup has lost its cool, for sure.

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1

https://www.officialdata.org/

2

This coefficient comes from the CPI online inflation calculator, which only goes back to 1913. Economic historians suggest that inflation between 1900 and 1913 was close to zero to use 1913 as my starting point. So, it is possible that the value of a 12-cent soup can was slightly less than this analysis indicates.

3

I arrived at this number by evaluating the size of your average ready-to-eat soup serving by using the average container size from Progresso, Campbell’s, and other brands - 18 ounces. If you heat up any container from these brands it will also be roughly the equivalent to a “bowl of soup” at a restaurant. In other words, there has been at least a 50% increase in our definition of the appropriate cultural serving size (driven by the restaurant bowl standard).

4

A rare government source reveals that the average American household spent around XX% on food each month. Today we spend only around 11% on average according to the BLS.

5

Statista, my analysis

Episode 5 - Part Two Begins!

Thanks to the loyal cohort of folk listening to every one of these episodes. I hope this narration of my new book is working for you…!

Part Two begins the long process of showing readers how individualism as a choice ideology affects how we experience each of the primary activities of urban life AND their awkward interrelationship as only an anthropolog…

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Looking for a Man in Finance...

AI image - woman dating very tall man in finance

Not since the 1990s release of “Ice, Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice has a vapid pop song made me laugh out loud instantly. Unlike Vanilla Ice’s deadly serious yet trashy pop hit, 26-year-old Megan Boni’s viral TikTok song from earlier this year is highly intentional, musically efficient satire of dating in her generation. I feel for these kids. They have too many dating tools we never needed.

Have a listen on Spotify if you’ve missed it:

Click HERE to play on Amazon Music or HERE to play on Apple Music.

Note: I am NOT morally responsible for this song ‘appearing’ in my Amazon Music feed this Spring, despite ALL the muffled snickering I hear from you immature people.

OK. You’re back.

Women individually pursuing high-status men to date/marry without family involvement is very new in urban societies. The cross-cultural history of marriage I’ve consumed suggests that intentionally seeking high-status mates was mainly a practice of aristocratic and wealthy merchant families in prior centuries. And strict class endogamy (i.e., in-marriage among class peers) has dominated most of recorded urban history. The more dependent individuals were on family networks for their income, the more they could not flippantly cross these unspoken red lines. Cinderella was a popular fairy tale in Europe because it was so unlikely to ever happen.

Then came the modern labor economy, which emerged with late industrialization in the early 20th century, based mostly on jobs unrelated to one’s family network. Families might suggest matches, but that’s about it. You could wake up one teenage morning and aspire to date or marry a total stranger who was also unknown to your parents. As long as you could derive your income independently.

After World War II, America then pioneered human history's most open, free-flowing dating scene. With the advent of birth control for unmarried women in the late 1960s and legal abortion in 1972, dating rapidly became an extended period of young adult life (that never ends for some). By extending the feasible dating period so much, young people can experiment with multiple relationships before making a big commitment. In some pre-literate societies, a shorter but similar practice called “trial marriage” also occurred. Honestly, it’s super intelligent NOT to force young people to commit for the rest of their lives to the first sexual partner they choose. Most of us are NOT that lucky. And, most of us are NOT self-aware enough to make a great first choice either. So, the idea of ‘trial’ relationships makes absolute sense.

Yet, the issue Megan Boni’s song points to is a more insidious outcome of this more open, free-flowing American dating scene in the 21st century. Once you free up dating, mating, and marriage choices from traditional constraints enforced by family (e.g., religion, race and class), individual lifestyle preferences your parents do not even understand will now enter the cognitive fray. Fast.

And this is where modern commerce and dating have created an unholy cultural love child we didn’t need.

New Podcast Appearances for My New Book!

Meredith for Real - Episode 260 - Is Individualism Overrated? - Live links are HERE - We covered the impact individualism has on our work, mental health, friendships & romantic relationships:

The playground of autonomy

How he navigates the pull towards individualism as a person with Asperger's

The prison of privacy

The optimism that drives us to bankruptcy

Friends as recreation vs interdependence

2. Friendship IRL - Episode 85 - Is Individualism Costing Us More Than We Realize?

How American society often values personal autonomy and freedom at the expense of responsibility and obligation

Things that have affected communal interactions in America, from societal norms that prioritize achievement to the rise of modern media and entertainment

Having meaningful conversations and sharing skills with friends instead of using friendship as a source of entertainment

The need for community members to observe and inquire about the emotional well-being of others 

Check Out My New Book

Dating as Shopping For Premium Goods

Enter the 21st century dating site/app. Generation X was the first age cohort to use dating sites during their increasingly desperate, horny single years. Match. Eharmony. Nerve. OKCupid. Yes, I was also one who also made this temporary error in judgment. In 2003, I quickly saw how dating apps take an open dating scene with remarkably few rigid boundaries and turn it into a creepy marketplace by placing sexual partners into a rental storefront of sorts.

On ‘date’ after ‘date,’ I met someone whose interactions IRL seemed pretty far off from the non-interactive persona I had seen online. We were all trying too hard and failing miserably. You don’t want to marry someone with an ‘attractive’ profile who then behaves exactly like their shallow, B.S. online dating profile when you first meet in-person. That’s really creepy, folks. Shudder.

Placing humans into an online, 2D catalog activates a modern shopping mentality. This was true long before online shopping became normal, because a dating site is just a digital version of a classic mail order catalogue template as old as the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Shopping for dates encourages us all to focus on all sorts of ‘features’ and status markers that are easy to notice quickly in a picture and profile description. It is very easy to obsess about all the bells and whistles when the ‘person’ online is not interacting with us - when the non-interactive human is acting like a ‘product’ in a catalogue. Then, there’s the issue of simulating interaction with ‘chat features.’ Don’t get me started about how unnatural that is in the human history of matchmaking.

But online matchmaking (as some used to call it) also encourages us to look at dating like trading up. When our brains go there, we aspire for the Rolex of mates, when there is no evidence whatsoever that this will make us happy. We all become Cinderellas of sorts. Even the straight men.

Conversely, dating as shopping encourages the profile creator to perform according to idealized versions of herself that lives primarily in the murky realms of half-assed, malformed aspirations she barely understands.

We bullsh*t others and ourselves on dating sites. And the matches fail again and again. My favorite bullsh*t aspiration in the 2000s was social tolerance - “I really enjoy meeting all kinds of people.” No, you don’t. You just haven’t met Walter White or my criminal friend, Ravi, from Tamil Nadu. That’s why you’re writing this un-self-aware nonsense in your profile.

My favorite example of this from the early years of online dating was Nerve, an early hookup site for straight people. A whole bunch of people who used it aspired to hooking up but actually did not have the nerve to do it when the sexy profile was sitting next to them. Pretty easy to see how this would happen, right?

Lack of self-awareness in front of a bewildering array of dating choices leads to lots of goofy, aspirational misfires. Looking for a man in finance…really? Have you spent one platonic evening with a man who has been in finance for more than five years? HINT: the good ones bail early.

My awkward point is that America has conjured up an ultra-loose, socially de-regulated dating market that has turned dating into a form of frenetic shopping with a Costco-like return policy.

FLASH NEWS ALERT. Human relationships do not function like my ‘relationship’ with my overpriced VariDesk. Trading up to a motorized, variable height desk does not require the desk's consent. My VariDesk also does not pack up and leave my office when it discovers that I have no intention of standing a lot for my physical well-being and that my stated aspiration for a healthy desk was Instagram-fed bullsh*t. My VariDesk does not tease me for being a poser each time I use it.

I have not spoken with Megan about her song, but one interview with her suggests she knows exactly what I’m trying to communicate here.

Dating in 2024 is … miserable. Online dating has made me far too picky. You keep X’ing people over just one trait, even though they’re great.1

Turning dating into a two-dimensional catalog shopping activates a ridiculously classist, ‘trade up’ behavior where even the slightest ‘flaw’ gets a hard ‘no.’ This happens even though, in real life relationships, people will stay happily with a partner who bites his own toenails! That was NOT in the profile! I printed it out and graded it according to my preferred attribute mix.

Oops.

If you only interact with potential mates you shopped for online, you will show up on the first date with an unconscious desire to ‘inspect the merchandise’ for, among other things, truth in advertising. Do the profile elements match what I see?

Of course, your date will NOT meet your shopping standard because people typing a profile have no incentive to be honest when they know they are being shopped like a fancy watch. AND, your poor date has no access to the fantasies you’re projecting onto their profile bullet points! Come on, people! Why did we think this would ever work?

Growing up in the United States in the late 20th century, when local community was rapidly declining before an onslaught of the noncommittal Leisure Industrial Complex, I and others were handed enormous autonomy to set our standards and expectations for anything.

In the absence of rules enforced by local communities of real people, consumer capitalism simply stepped in and encouraged us to transform matchmaking into a bizarre form of luxury goods shopping.

My brief experience with online dating convinced me quickly that the only possible way to meet someone you want to partner up with is to…

…take a deep breath…

…make friends by doing things with real people that you both enjoy doing!

And then let the rest happen on its own timeline.

Just be a happy ape. And your happy ape partner will appear…and yell at you for eating your toenails! Gross!

Civilization has remarkably little to add to this ancient process of pair bonding.

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1

://www.phillymag.com/news/2024/06/21/meg...

Episode 4

The final elements of a hyper-individualistic society set readers up to better understand the bulk of the book to come!

Chapter Six - Distract Ourselves With Personalized Entertainment

The distraction of Americans did not begin with smartphones. It began with television. And it began slowly. It took a half-century for Americans to go from viewing TV as a …

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The Rise of the "Authentic Self"

adults sitting in a circle of chairs

“What would you do to ensure students can be their authentic selves on campus?” a parent recently asked one of the Head of School candidates at my children’s independent school.

Sure, it’s a trendy question, but it’s also very odd in human cultural history. (For the sake of this essay going smoothly, I will ignore the possibility that this phrase only comes from the mouths of upper-middle-class elites and the rich).

This parent’s question is odd because the origin of modern schooling is the enforcement of disciplined conformity and the absorption of canonical knowledge sets. The origin of contemporary education in America was Bible teaching. Our oldest “college,” Harvard, was originally a theological seminary. I studied the Puritans intensely in high school and then again in graduate school. These world-negating Calvinists were communalist, ideologically fatalistic, and had no use for a concept such as the “authentic self.” Colonial America is not the source of this idea.

Modern schools and offices organize themselves to induce conformity and accomplish complex work. Some are horrible at what they purport to do, but authentic self-expression is not their primary organizing principle. Frederick Taylor, the late 19th-century ‘father’ of early management theory, looked at factory workers as tools requiring systemic surveillance and control by disciplined plant managers. Peter Drucker built on this work after World War II as white-collar administrative bureaucracies grew in size and complexity (resting on top of large manufacturing ecosystems). He aimed to train modern desk managers to be efficient in a high-growth economy the world had never before experienced. He was also an early proponent of professional managers developing deep self-awareness and a long arc of professional development during their careers (the beginnings of ‘promotability’).

Aside from the fully retired, Americans spend nearly half of their waking hours in either school or work (see the American Time Use Survey for more details). These bureaucratized social domains are set apart dramatically from our informal, screen-heavy ‘personal’ leisure lives. The behavioral gulf between our leisure selves and our work/school selves could not be more extreme. We’ve forgotten about this because most of us dance between the two worlds daily. It just seems natural to us.

But, historically, it’s very new in human cultures.

Boosting individual self-expression at work or in the office, especially authentic self-expression, is not only a new, 21st-century goal, but it is also a solution whose problem we’ve completely forgotten to explore.

“Authentic Self" Defined

Here’s a great definition from a P1 (page 1) Google-indexed site (for the phrase “authentic self”) -

Being authentic helps us to be true to ourselves and trust our own choices. Authentic people don’t let themselves be influenced by others, they follow their own path and are aware of what they want or don’t want. But, as always, that’s easier said than done. 1

I’ve read this paragraph about ten times just to soak it in. Honestly, it reads like a hymn to personal autonomy. The last part is a bit ominous. Is this quest for the authentic self doomed from the start?

At one level, the definition above is excellent advice in the kind of society we currently live in. If you allow yourself to be buffeted around by your peers, your Instagram feed, and marketing messages, you may be living someone else’s vision for your life without realizing it. If you have overbearing parents, they could also be smothering your authentic self by Zoom or SMS, making it hard for you to adapt to a rapidly changing urban life independently.

On the other hand, the belief in an “authentic self” also reinforces our primal conceit as Americans —that individuals should make big life decisions by tapping into their inner core instead of conferencing with (or following the lead of) the community - with those who possess far more wisdom about the big choices we encounter in life (e.g., career, dating, etc.).

In one of the top backlinked books for the search phrase “authentic self,” the author explores the new therapeutic method (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) in therapy circles. In this method, patients learn to push past the “inhibitory emotions” of shame, guilt, and anxiety to fully experience their core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, doubt, etc.). The goal is master one’s emotions through direct awareness of them unfiltered by social inhibitions (most therapists agree on this objective).

It doesn’t take a PhD to see that the dichotomy between “core emotions” and “inhibitory emotions” seems to line up well with the dichotomy between the personal and the social.

The subtext of this author’s work is that we must be free of the socially inhibiting emotions that constrain our valid emotional expression. When we do this, we can better know our true feelings consciously, control them, and work through them. Traditional human societies use guilt, shame, or anxiety to do this emotional work on our behalf. The individual is not meant to be steering their emotions independently. If we repress our feelings due to social inhibitions, in the modern world, we can not understand and change our behavior patterns as autonomous actors. We become products of social collisions and interactions and not masterful, skillful agents. I’m oversimplifying this summary to get you to think about something later.

An Absurdly Brief Linguistic History of “Authentic Self” Talk

The phrase older folks (50+) are more familiar with than “authentic self” is “true self.” And there’s a reason for this. The phrase “true self” took off in printed English in the late 19th century as industrialization exploded across the globe. It also coincides with the development of modern clinical psychology and its implied, silent handling of human adaptation to urban life.

In the late 19th century, entire countries plunged young families into industrial “city life.” Wages in return for endless farm work. In the United States, we generated an embarrassing amount of urban immigrant squalor and general poverty that compounded urban life's perceived danger and chaos. Many forget that the “American city” in 1900 was far more sketchy, criminal, and dangerous to a lone outsider than it is today. It has taken us a century to learn how to manage modern cities suffused as they are with high levels of transiency and social inequity. And we’re still learning!

When we look at the rise of the phrase “authentic self,” we see how it correlates beautifully with the rise of 1960s counterculture. A chunk of the New Age movement focused on this concept, using a blend of Buddhist meditation, yoga, and other mind-centering techniques to push past our surface-level emotions and inhibitions to ‘unlock’ some true core self. For many, there was a hidden desire to create, more than ‘find,’ a new self full of new assumptions and lifestyle orientations and heavily delinked from one’s parents and elders. The link between finding and creating is very murky here, as with human memory.

For most of human history, though, there has been no need for “true selves” or “authentic selves.” None whatsoever.

And now for a brief pause in this week’s essay -

New Podcast Appearance!

I had a very energetic chat with Meredith Edwards’ popular show recently.

If it’s Oct 8th or 9th, please Subscribe to Meredith’s show on YouTube and be the first to watch our conversation on Monday morning!

If it’s Oct. 10th or later, live links are HERE -

We covered the impact individualism has on our work, mental health, friendships & romantic relationships:

👉The playground of autonomy

👉How he navigates the pull towards individualism as a person with Asperger's

👉The prison of privacy

👉The optimism that drives us to bankruptcy

👉Friends as recreation vs interdependence

More podcast appearances are coming out in October and November! I am archiving them all on my Institute home page…for easy entertainment…

Now, back to your regularly scheduled essay…

Putting Our Authentic Selves in Sociological Context

The need to know ourselves more profoundly is the outcome of industrial urban life, its assault on family and clan, and its deprioritization of deep relationships for our basic sustenance. You alone are the individually responsible architect of your life, curating a social network of your choosing to serve your needs and desires. Our physical lives do not depend on most people we know and love. Instead, our lives rely on third-party bureaucracies and complex social coordination among total strangers in exchange for cash. The current relief effort in Asheville, North Carolina, is an impressive example. The death toll in North Carolina would probably be in the tens of thousands already due to lack of clean water, were it not for FEMA, state government disaster plans, modern supply chains, modern roadways, and transport vehicles.

Notice that we moderns quickly submit our “authentic selves” to relief agencies, government relief systems, and FEMA in disasters. We have no other way to deal with the situation since we are no longer a nation of homesteaders. We must submit to impersonal systems because our immediate social networks are no longer set up to ensure survival. Our social networks are me-centered webs of exchange that rest on top of mostly guaranteed survival.

I suspect humans are the least anxious in moments of disaster and crisis because our concern with our interior ‘self’ turns off more or less. We enter a flow state of sorts. It may be stressful and exhausting, but daily life is extraordinarily clear when in crisis. Notice how much easier it is for everyone to overlook petty differences during relief efforts (especially when they are well organized).

In everyday life, though, American society offers an enormous scope of leisure-focused autonomy. In the last half-century, the pace of social change and intra-generational changes in morality, acceptable sexual behavior, workplace norms, and family life have been bewildering to more than a few of us. There is so much lifestyle variation that we can’t keep up with it all.

In societies like ours, making a poor assumption or judgment about a stranger is now extremely easy because we interact frequently with people we never really get to know. How many of your colleagues do you really know in a well-rounded way?. This shallow network dependence only increases the surface area for poor interpersonal judgments and behavior. We increasingly find it easy to stumble because of how modern life throws us constantly in front of strangers and weak ties.

Social competence or social fitness is related to our need to know our authentic selves and true emotional states - to master ourselves.

The Real Origin of a Need for an “Authentic Self”

If the concept of the “authentic self” has any value, it is because it ties to a generalized, modern need for intense self-awareness in a lifestyle-diverse society. Self-awareness allows us to surveil our triggered emotions in real-time, carefully filter them, and manage them deftly. Without this skill, individuals who rely purely on shame, guilt, or anxiety to control their behavior will flail around madly in a fragmented lifestyle-based society like ours. They will express emotions inappropriately or repress them inappropriately. They will suffer lots of relationship problems.

Social scientists tend to view emotions as interpretations of social experience. Emotions do not arise in a social vacuum, we say. Emotions are critical coordination tools for social life, social cohesion, and interpersonal communication. However, historically, society provided stringent rules and inhibitions such that the community did most of the emotional control work for you. This took place in the form of rituals. You were told when to express and repress based on local needs that did not change much in your lifetime. Individuals did not need much self-control because they lived with carefully set-out guard rails. Society exerted control on your behalf (even if you chafed against it).

The modern need to become highly self-aware is about executive functioning in a society that drowns you in lifestyle choices you never asked for. You will be seriously confused if you do not form an inner executive compass. Your gift of autonomy will become an unwitting submission to peer-based and media messages. You will ping-pong around in your twenties, chasing mirages of happiness.

The rise of the new cultural quest for an “authentic self” is about more than becoming highly self-aware, self-controlled individuals (or good little Victorians!) That’s the incidental, positive outcome for a 21st-century world in which your parents and family can not necessarily give you much meaningful street advice on careers, dating, friendship, or leisure activities. And a society where you will quickly encounter all sorts of different lifestyles without any warning.

I think the movement to fine-tune one’s ‘authentic self’ is also about resolving a massive conflict between the degree of personal autonomy Americans experience outside of work and the limited autonomy any American workplace can ever give anyone.

Most offices operate with some degree of bureaucratic organization and control once more than four or five people are involved. Sure, it could be a sloppy bureaucracy, but there is no real free reign in an office (unless you’re the owner).

The more you chase lifestyle autonomy outside of work, the more work itself will annoy you at a deep, unconscious level. In fact, the gap between autonomy at home and autonomy at work has never been more extreme than in modern America, where families with kids at home are a minority of the residential make-up.

The more we aspire to an authentic self, the more this gap bothers us, and the more having children threatens to suffocate us with obligations. The latter perception can only occur when the culture’s baseline expectation is high personal freedom.

The modern desire to express an “authentic self” at work strikes me as a quiet civil rights movement for the self inside highly bureaucratized, low autonomy environments.

I’m not yet convinced this is a very adaptive behavior. I think it’s a cry of confusion, most likely due to unresolved inner conflict in a culture that overhypes the merits of unrestricted social choice.

I was a classic example of this, a PhD refugee from academia trying to fit into a corporate work environment driven by client satisfaction. I was frustrated at the autonomy I had lost at work because work was no longer mostly about… me.

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Episode 3

In this episode, the recipe for an individualistic society continues and touches some real hidden nerves in American life.

Chapter Four - Make Individuals Responsible for Their Problems

The challenge with Americans’ strict view of personal privacy is that it comes with a lonely trade-off: the obligation to solve your own problems without burdening others…

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Choice Creates Social Hierarchy

Costco has a new system for picking up food at its popular in-store cafes. If you are a veteran Costco member, you’ve seen the new yellow-striped pickup lane in front of the old steel counter. The yellow lane has replaced the ‘ancient ritual’ of nervously listening for your ticket number while salivating and standing amidst the tarmac-like din of the world’s busiest warehouse stores.

There are now two ways to get food at Costco, whereas there used to be only one. Where there was no choice, now there is a choice. Ah, yes, so American indeed. A behavioral choice must lead to better things, right? Sigh.

Until 2024, when you wanted Costcos’ famous cafe food, you walked up to one of the registers arrayed on a polished steel countertop, paid via credit, debit, or cash, took a numbered receipt, stepped back, waited for the Hallowed Numerical Call-Out, and then approached the counter again to receive your food and beverage items. There were four to five registers and, therefore, four to five ordering lines during busy times of day (like Saturday at 1 p.m.).

There was something thrilling about being reduced to a three-digit number in an anonymous crowd. Only you secretly knew the ultimate meaning behind “457” or “723”… all of its life secrets, strengths and weaknesses, defects and virtues, preference for cats vs. dogs.

And no one behind the counter cared who you were. You were deliciously, silently anonymous as you were in no other retail interaction. Even the McDonald’s drive-through was more personable and intimate.

Yes, Costco food courts were open to the general public until recently. You didn’t have to be a member to join the fun. Many cafes are adjacent to the entrance and NOT inside the store, beckoning the public to swing by for an impulsive bite.1

During the pandemic, Costco’s famous $1.50 foot-long frankfurter replaced many a fast food meal. Actually, using Costco as a fast food joint had been going on for years, especially for parents with rug rats doing errands around town, before e-commerce heaven arrived.

Do we need anything in the store?

Nope, just the dogs!

However, Costco’s Hot Dog public commons and its rigid liturgy did not guarantee you would be served in numerical order. Oh no, this was never the supermarket deli counter, people. Who knows when “737” will get its food? It was anyone’s guess. So, you stood there, anxiously awaiting your Hallowed Numerical Call-Out, hoping your order was worthy of expedited assistance because your two-year-old just shat his pants, and you really need to get back to the car, whip open the rear door and execute a Seal Team Six diaper change before losing your appetite entirely (or strangling your husband who stands there oblivious).

Not that I took any of the anxious waiting personally, Lord Costco. Oh, never. I am forever unworthy to register a complaint at the greasy altar of Costco edibles.

Then, sometime in 2018, Costco began beta-testing digital food orderings kiosks at Seattle-area warehouses. Our family lived there then, so I saw them early on. But I never used them. Why? One more way to catch the flu or Noro. Um, no.

The kiosks were supposed to smooth out the ordering lines by letting you bypass them, but it wasn’t that popular initially. I guess we liked presenting our orders in person to the thoroughly uninterested cafe employees. Then, COVID-19 hit and delayed kiosk adoption even more. Get ill from the touch kiosk and then still wait for your number to be called out in the amorphous, lurking crowd of salivating people. Why?

However, as of this Spring, Lord Costco ended the edibles liturgy: both the number calling and the mysterious waiting period.

The cash registers vanished from the steel counter.

Solo ordering and payment now happen at the kiosks.

Then, members wind through the yellow-striped, first-come, first-serve pickup lane.

Except for…wait…what’s that on the right-hand side?

There is one lonely cash register on the right-hand side of the old steel counters. You won’t likely find anyone standing there because everyone behind the counter is busy filling orders for the numberless first-come, first-serve orders in the yellow lane.

Gone is the chaotic horde of carts and salivating dudes waiting for the number to be called out. The mystery. The nervous, giddy waiting. The anxious crowding.

Ooh, I might be next!

“757!”

“YES!!!”

No more of that.

Now you have a sad cross between a bank teller line from the 1980s and a Disney ride queue…And your cart won’t fit in it. So, if you’re alone, you’ll have to abandon your cart somewhere nearby and get in the yellow line. That’s $200-500 in paid merchandise sitting there as a test of member trust.

Hey, do they really prevent the public from coming in now? Are you sure it works? Can I lock the wheels?

But wait….what is up with the lonely cash register with no line in front of it? Why leave a cash register, if we’re supposed to order at the Covid-smothered touch kiosks?

And why is there a separate, very straight line to that lonely register?

If you pay in cash, folks, you can skip the disease-spreading touch kiosks AND the winding bank teller line.

You get to cut. Like any good ‘internet hustling bro’ would do.

But only if you pay in cash.

Of course, virtually no one inside a Costco carries ANY cash anymore.

The amorphous horde waiting for its Hallowed Number to be called out has morphed into two hierarchically arranged castes.

One is for the card-dependent masses who can’t plan anything ahead of time. The other is for savvy, cash-retro members who most likely planned ahead. They knew they’d get food on their Costco run and brought their cash.

Costco has created a behavioral social hierarchy between:

those who buy on impulse (most of us, let’s be real)

and those who come to Costco knowing they will take communion with the Sacred Frankfurter. The true devotees.

Now, there is an ultra-fast, savvy, scrappy way to get your Costco edibles and a chump way. And, like good Americans, we honor the separation because it’s earned by pre-meditated behavior.

Hey, they planned ahead and brought cash. Good for them!

Just bring cash on your next Costco trip, folks…

Stop acquiring the flu at the kioks and standing in the silly yellow line for chumps.

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Unlocked from the Homo Imaginari archives to tempt thee further…!

Book News!

Authors’ Show-and-Tell - How I Want the World to Be

Tuesday, October 1st at 5 pm PST / 8 pm EST

Join us for an evening of inspiration with fellow authors Allen Klein, David Yale, James Richardson, Judah Freed, and Robert Christie on the topic of how I want the world to be.

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Passcode: 466752

Audio Edition of Our Worst Strength - Check out the first two episodes of my serial podcast, where I narrate the entire book over the next several months. Only available to paid subscribers.

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Costco usually prevents the public, anyone, from entering the ‘exit’ lane and heading to an indoor cafe. They have receipt checkers who re-direct people to the ‘entrance’ side. Now, Costco has installed membership card scanners, replacing the manual scanning of cards that members used to flash at employees with hand clickers.