What if the healthiest thing you could do is stop being yourself? A bracing philosophical case against our age of self-obsession.
We are told to find ourselves, express ourselves, be true to ourselves. Alexander Douglas thinks the greatest minds would call this a trap. Drawing on three thinkers separated by continents and centuries — the Daoist sage Zhuangzi, the radical philosopher Spinoza, and the French theorist René Girard — he argues that our fixation on identity is the source of much of our anxiety, rivalry and unhappiness, and that a rich tradition of wisdom points the other way: toward escaping the self rather than endlessly curating it.
A short, sharp antidote to the age of the personal brand.
Praise
“Deeply interesting… a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession.” — Guardian
Perfect for readers of
Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, Derek Parfit, the Stoics shelf — and anyone exhausted by the mirror.
About the author
Alexander Douglas teaches philosophy at the University of St Andrews.
