Everything They Hoped For (Just No Change)

"Two journalistic events of the 1970s defined the Age of Narcissism. First, the term 'Me Decade' was introduced by novelist Tom Wolfe in a New York magazine article in 1976. A few years later, Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism provided a more substantive commentary on the diminishing ability of modern society and culture to provide a sense of identity and security for its members.

Changes in cultural values, economic structures and personal relationships, according to Lasch, created a society unmoored from historical measures of status based in work, religion, achievement or lineage. As a result, Americans were caught up in a never-ending, never-fulfilling competition for the symbols of status. You’re unsure of your status, and in fact, it’s almost never clear in your neighborhood just who is the boss of who — or at least who is socially superior. So we’re free to fake each other out with houses, cars, clothes, friends, Facebook pages, cosmetic surgery and other 'big-ticket items' to satisfy our need to be special, and to matter in the scheme of things.

While Lasch saw our narcissistic culture as the result of having lost our historical bearings, Wolfe saw the opposite. The Me Decade, he wrote (an amazing, funny, eloquent article, if you’ve never read it), was a natural outgrowth of the embarrassment of material riches cranked out in the postwar industrial boom. Having satisfied all of our basic needs and many of our big-ticket fantasies for flashy things, a new generation of Americans decided to just bypass the symbols of happiness, going whole-hog instead for direct access to the real thing through some kind of personal enlightenment.

Gurus, spiritual movements, self-improvement programs such as est and Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, fringe therapies such as Primal Scream — Wolfe saw these as an expression of encroaching societal narcissism. Years after the New York magazine article, Wolfe expanded his critique of narcissistic American culture to include the young financial wizards of Wall Street, or 'Masters of the Universe' as he called them in the novel — and later the movie, Bonfire of the Vanities."

-- Russell Collins, a Santa Barbara psychotherapist and divorce mediator, on this NewAge we suffer through, with the Noozhawk.