The posturing of DTC brands as cults reveals an impasse. People are looking for more meaningful narratives and communities than brands can offer, and companies want to supply this “meaning demand”—but are structurally disincentivized to do so.

As Micki McGee argues, it was a notion that “fused religious and psychological discourses.… Work on the self—the quest for a path, the invention of a life, or the search for authenticity—is offered as an antidote to the anxiety-provoking uncertainties of a new economic and social order.29 McGee calls the subject that is produced by these discourses

“crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”

Having been immersed in the age of authenticity, and having swallowed the hook of youthfulness, we overlook that what ultimately upends faith is the loss of the plausibility of transcendence and the presumption that our world is only a natural and material place. In the age of authenticity, the self is buffered, the world is disenchanted, and God i