Somewhere in America right now, a 26-year-old is standing in his bathroom, downing his stack: creatine, a fistful of supplements, ashwagandha for the cortisol. Dab some tallow on the face, because seed oils are poison and beef fat is ancestral. He then mouths a wide-open vowel to sharpen his jawline — mewing, they call it — and checks the angle in the mirror, much as a jeweller examines a stone. Just down the hall, his girlfriend examines her birth chart for the day, lights the palo santo, and wonders whether Mercury is going to wreck her Tuesday. Neither of them belongs to a church, a union, a neighbourhood group, or a recreation league. Neither has voted in a local election. But both of them are, in the deepest and most sincere sense available to modern people, working on themselves; they’re self-maxxing.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the essay that observed the moment when all of this began: Tom Wolfe’s August 1976 cover story for New York, published under a headline that lodged itself permanently in the language: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” It was Wolfe at his most gleeful and profanely merciless, a 10,000-word safari through Human Potential Movement talks, encounter groups, Aquarian communes, and the new therapeutic religions, which pointed toward a single insight. Americans had discovered a subject more absorbing than God, country, or class: themselves. The great national project of the age was self-actualisation. “Let’s talk about Me,” Wolfe wrote, and he meant it as the era’s Lord’s Prayer.
Fifty years later, the Me Decade is best understood as more than just a diagnosis for the Seventies, that itchy, sweaty waiting room wedged between the revolutionary Sixties and the acquisitive Eighties. The essay now feels like a Rosetta Stone for understanding the shift to permanent navel-gazing that followed the collapse of the postwar order. The Sixties promised to remake the world, and when the world declined to be remade, the great “we” of the New Left splintered into 1,000 private quests for meaning. In the mid-2020s, after the hyperpolitics and populist moments of the late 2010s and early 2020s burned out, Wolfe’s Third Great Awakening has returned in the form of self-care and therapeutic identity on the Left; and looksmaxxing, longevity, and personal sovereignty on the Right.
Rereading the essay now, it’s clear that Wolfe, the thin white duke of New Journalism, wasn’t simply mocking the narcissists. Across his books such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the author, who died in 2018, had watched the New Left and the counterculture at close range and seen the dream of political revolution giving way to the search for private revelation. By the bicentennial of the United States, he was performing what he called a “social autopsy” on the Seventies. Wrote Wolfe: “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodelling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!).”
Wolfe’s deeper claim was that this was something genuinely new under the sun. For most of human history, he argued, ordinary people had no self to speak of — not in the way we mean it. They understood themselves less as sovereign individuals than as a link in what he called the “great biological stream”, living not only their own lives, but those of their ancestors, their children, their neighbours. The self was a vehicle, not a destination. What changed, he believed, was money.
America’s postwar bargain between capital and labour had handed the working and middle classes — unevenly, and with enormous racial exclusions, but on a mass scale — more leisure, privacy, mobility, and bodily freedom than their grandparents could have dreamed of. The great question posed by midcentury American abundance was: now that the masses have security, leisure, and disposable income, what would they do with it?
The hope, Jefferson’s hope and the labor movement’s hope and the hope of every civics teacher who ever lived, was that they would use it to become enlightened citizens. Some did, perhaps, but the rest — Wolfe said — bought ranch houses, ever-larger televisions, diet books, and the right to be left alone. “Once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s,” he wrote, “they did an astonishing thing, they took their money and ran … they discovered and started doting on Me.”
My father went to war with a demon bird
Wolfe called this the Third Great Awakening because the self-serious seminars and encounter groups and Diet Coke Buddhisms had the structure of religion but had inverted its ancient formula. Where the old faiths began with self-abasement before something larger — God, the congregation, children, the dead — the new religion began, in his phrase, “with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short”. The sacred object was the self. You did not join to submit but to be affirmed or, as the kids say now, to be seen. It was the miserable little Protestant sinner reborn as buried treasure.
Denominations appeared across the ideological spectrum. On the Left, the energies of the Sixties diffused into the human-potential movement, mass-market psychology, communes, feminism, gay liberation, racial identity, and a boutique marketplace of occult and imported spiritualities. Among conservative Americans came charismatic Christianity, born-again politics, and the Jesus People, movements that spoke the language of salvation but placed enormous weight on personal testimony, personal crisis, and personal rebirth. For yuppies and upper-middle-class strivers — on both the Left and the Right — came the cult of the body: dieting, jogging, aerobics. These groups often hated one another, but all shared the belief that the inherited self was inadequate and the chosen self might be glorious.
By the end of the decade, Wolfe wasn’t alone in sensing that something had cracked in America. In mid-1979, Jimmy Carter delivered what history lazily remembers as the “malaise” speech, although the 39th president never used the word. Officially an address on energy, it became a diagnosis of a country losing its appetite for sacrifice, common purpose, and the future. That same year, the heterodox historian and social critic Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, which offered a darker, Freudian analysis of the Me Decade.
Lasch’s narcissist wasn’t simply vain, because vanity is almost too healthy a word for the creature he described. Lasch’s American, rather, was psychically dependent on recognition, terrified of aging, suspicious of the future, estranged from the past, and unable to locate himself inside any stable order beyond therapeutic self-preservation. Carter, Lasch, and Wolfe differed enormously, but all three understood that the old postwar world was giving way to a society in which the individual self would become the central arena of politics, religion, consumption, health, and meaning (as it happens, Carter staffers hosted Lasch at the White House to discuss his runaway best-seller; to have been a fly on the wall!).
What none of them could have known was how durable — and how renewable — that hyperindividualism would become. The obvious objection is that the Seventies ended, and the Eighties, Nineties and everything since have looked rather different. The hippies got haircuts and jobs. Reagan arrived to explain that the void in your private life was actually a tax problem, and “Morning in America” turned a spiritual crisis back into a consumer proposition. The yuppies swapped mantras for corporate mergers. Conservatives found purpose in the flag after 9/11; liberals found purpose in Obama. The inward turn looks, from a distance, like one phase among several.
But ultimately, what the last 50 years have proved is that freedom from society — freedom from the human chain, from the obligations of the democratic experiment — has only been part of the ideal. What people also wanted was recognition — to be seen not by the neighbour or the congregation, whose gaze came bundled with obligations, but by the only thing that now seems to confer reality: the spectacle, the media discourse, the national screen.
That craving for recognition found a perfect delivery mechanism in the smartphone and social media. Your phone’s central demand — the thing it asks of you dozens of times a day — is that you perform, curate, optimise, and, above all monitor, the self. And while “phones bad” may be the most exhausted take in America, the point isn’t that social media rotted our brains. It’s that social media offer the infrastructure the first Me Decade lacked: continuous self-regard with measurable feedback that’s always on, where every injury becomes content, every hobby a possible side hustle, and every political position both an opinion and a costume. It even swallows its own antidote: log off, move to the country, bake bread, cultivate the simple, local life — congratulations, you’re making content about the moral superiority of not making content. The exit door opens into the gift shop.
You can measure the deepening in the negative space left by everything Americans have quietly stopped doing. This is the story Robert Putnam told in Bowling Alone, published in 2000, and every line on his chart has kept sliding. In 2020, membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque fell below half of American adults for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade series. Barely 1 in 10 workers belongs to a labor union. Each week, two local newspapers stop publishing; a quarter of adults told Pew they hadn’t read even part of a book last year; off-cycle municipal elections draw a rounding error of the electorate. The Rotary Club, the Girl Scouts, the precinct meeting — the dense mesh that, for Tocqueville, sustained American democracy — has thinned to gossamer.
The present looks more like Wolfe’s 1976 than we care to admit. The engine of the Seventies was the failure of the Sixties. Fast-forward, and you can see that the years from roughly 2016 through the early 2020s were America’s most feverishly political stretch in generations, an instance of what the historian Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics”: intense politicisation without durable organisations or proportionate consequences. On one flank stood a populist insurgency that promised to burn down the establishment and drain the swamp. On the other, the Great Awokening, a convulsion that swept through universities, newsrooms and corporate America promising a national reckoning. Both were maximalist, and both failed to build the transformed society their rhetoric advertised.
And what does thwarted revolutionary energy do when it has nowhere durable to go? As it did after 1968, it goes toward the one realm that still seems transformable, the self. It splinters into private quests for meaning — the pattern documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis keeps tracing in his video essays such as The Century of the Self, and the one Bono identified back in 1981 when he sang, “I can’t change the world / But I can change the world in me.”
We are all Bryan Johnson now
You can see it split down the familiar seam. On the Left in the late Seventies, disillusion flowed into the New Age and the human-potential movement, into a rediscovered occult, modern art, and academia, and a smorgasbord of invented and imported religions. Today, it flows into many of the same things but rebranded as “self-care”, a term associated with Audre Lorde’s 1988 description of caring for herself during cancer as “an act of political warfare”, and since domesticated into a marketing category for Johnson & Johnson and expensive spas. It now flows into astrology, which is newly commercialised through subscription apps and personalised notifications, and into the figure of the witch reborn as a political identity with the imagined power to “hex” Trump. A generation that lit a candle for George Floyd in 2020 now lights a scented candle in the bathtub.
And on the Right, we see the mirror image. The Seventies had the cult of fitness, the sudden national mania for jogging, aerobics and dieting, the body as a project to be perfected. The overlapping worlds of MAHA, the manosphere, and Silicon Valley have looksmaxxing and testosterone infusions, ice baths and the carnivore diet, along with the tech billionaire spending millions to reverse his own aging and streaming his blood work to the world. It is the cult of the body again, but now with the promise cranked up from mere fitness to immortality — forever youth, death itself reframed as a solvable engineering problem.
For all the tedious arguments about who is and is not woke, both sides now qualify in Wolfe’s older and more useful sense of the word awakening: each is trying to fashion a self strong enough to survive the collapse of everything the self was once supposed to belong to.
This is also why so much of our politics feels counterfeit even when the emotions appear sincere. In the Me Decade, Wolfe sardonically noted that journalists of his own time compulsively applied the F-word (fascism) to hippies, Scientologists, and Moonies, then reminded them that the term derives from the fasces: sticks bound into a single, unbreakable bundle. Whatever else Trumpism may be, including a movement with real authoritarian appetites, it isn’t fascism. It doesn’t ask its followers to dissolve their personalities into a common national will.
Trumpism offers almost the opposite fantasy: national restoration through the elevation of a man who appears gloriously free from every obligation, inhibition, and shame that binds ordinary people. It is cheap, televisual, consumerist, and American — and it demands no genuine self-abnegation. It is Spirit Halloween nationalism, a longing for the symbols of midcentury cohesion without the institutions that made such cohesion possible. Trump himself is perhaps the purest Me Decade product America has elevated: a man of appetites, brands, and grievances whose supporters love him precisely because he appears unbound, unashamed, and entirely himself.
Likewise, much of what passed for radical Left-wing politics in the last decade consisted of locating yourself on the grid of identity and curating a public self certified as virtuous. It offered the profoundest pleasures of the Me Decade — the look inward, the moral distinction, the separation from the unenlightened — while allowing the seeker to experience all of it as selflessness.
None of this is a forever destiny. There is a backlash now, a genuine one. You can feel it stirring in the emergence of in-person reading clubs, and the sudden fashions among Zoomers for organised religion, “third places”, and “touching grass”. It’s also visible in the small revolt against phones, AI, and the data centers that power them. I have written in praise of it in these pages. But it is worth being honest about the scale of this counter-movement: withdrawal from society is the mainstream, and the return to it is still a hobby.
We are now half a century into the inward gaze, and we are not climbing out. We are, at most, coming up for air. Wolfe’s cruel joke was that Americans had discovered Me. Our problem is that, 50 years later, we haven’t found a reason to drop the mirror, and we’re more than ever transfixed.
Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.