Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing To Us

Will Storr

Oct 2018 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Shaun Grindell

About this audiobook

We are living in an age of heightened individualism. Success is a personal responsibility. Our culture tells us that to succeed is to be slim, rich, happy, extroverted, popular-flawless. We have become self-obsessed. And our expectation of perfection comes at a cost. Millions are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. The pressure to conform to this ideal has changed who we are. It was not always like this. To explain how we got here, award-winning journalist Will Storr leads us on a "terrific tour through the history of self-obsession" (NPR, On Point) that explores the origins of this notion of the perfect self that torments so many of us: Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell? Full of thrilling and unexpected connections among history, psychology, economics, neuroscience, and more, Selfie is an unforgettable book that makes sense of who we have become. Ranging from Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of the "selfie" generation, and the era of hyper-individualism in which we live now, Selfie tells the epic tale of the person we all know so intimately-because it's us.

About the author

Will Storr is an award-winning novelist and long-form journalist. He has reported from refugee camps in Africa, war-torn rural Colombia, and remote Aboriginal communities in Australia. He is a contributing editor at Esquire, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Observer, the Sunday Times, and the Guardian.

Born and raised in Southampton, England, Shaun Grindell is an accomplished actor who trained at the Calland School of Speech and Drama and the Lee Strasberg Actors Institute in London. An AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator, Shaun has narrated many titles in different genres.