One is saved from a life of meaningless contingency and accident by a self-conscious life plan. Work is reimagined, not as a deprivation for which one ought to be compensated but as means of expressing oneself, as a source of identity and personal fulfillment.

Some social theorists have called this phenomenon “the jobless future” or the “end of work.”16 But in a strange twist for American workers, the result has been something akin to work without end.

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 Chopra’s universe, where distinctions between self and other, matter and energy, past and present are blurred, the self at work on the self isn’t really at work on the self: everything is effortless, everything is as it should be, and everything can be just what you want it to be, too. While it is difficult to engage such a worldview in a ration

Hochschild notes that “the authors of advice books act as emotional investment counselors. They do readings of broad social conditions and recommend to readers of various types, how, how much and in whom to ‘invest’ emotional attention.”45

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

A sense of personal security is anomalous, while anxiety is the norm. To manage this anxiety, individuals have been advised not only to work longer and harder but also to invest in themselves, manage themselves, and continuously improve themselves.

Traditionally, the mythology of the self-made man had relied on the exploitation of women’s labor in their roles of wives, mothers, and sisters, as well as on a pejorative understanding of “the feminine.” Often the measure of a man’s success was calculated on the basis of his ability to out-earn his wife’s capacity for spending, a criterion for suc

Paradoxically, the imperative of inventing the self that is found in the literatures of self-improvement is often cast in the form of discovering or uncovering an authentic, unique, and stable self that might function—even thrive—unaffected by the vagaries of the labor market.