This month marks the 50th anniversary of the essay that observed the moment when all of this began: Tom Wolfeâs August 1976 cover story for New York, published under a headline that lodged itself permanently in the language: âThe âMeâ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.â 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-actualization. âLetâs talk about Me,â Wolfe wrote, and he meant it as the eraâs Lordâs Prayer.
Fifty years later, the Me Decade is best understood as more than just a diagnosis for the 1970s, that itchy, sweaty waiting room wedged between the revolutionary â60s and the acquisitive â80s. 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 â60s promised to remake the world, and when the world declined to be remade, the great âweâ 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, Wolfeâs 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, itâs clear that Wolfe, the thin white duke of New Journalism, wasnât simply mocking the narcissists. Across his books like 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 âsocial autopsyâ on the â70s. Wrote Wolfe: âThe new alchemical dream is: changing oneâs personality â remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing oneâs very self ⊠and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!).â
Wolfeâs 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 â not in the way we mean it. They understood themselves less as sovereign individuals than as a link in what he called the âgreat biological stream,â living not only their own lives, but those of their ancestors, their children, their neighbors. The self was a vehicle, not a destination. What changed, he believed, was money.
Americaâs postwar bargain between capital and labor had handed the working and middle classes â unevenly, and with enormous racial exclusions, but on a mass scale â 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?
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That craving for recognition found a perfect delivery mechanism in the smartphone and social media. Your phoneâs central demand â the thing it asks of you dozens of times a day â is that you perform, curate, optimize, and, above all monitor, the self. And while âphones badâ may be the most exhausted take in America, the point isnât that social media rotted our brains. Itâs that social media offer the infrastructure the first Me Decade lacked: continuous self-regard with measurable feedback thatâs 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 â congratulations, youâre making content about the moral superiority of not making content. The exit door opens into the gift shop.
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