Our Worst Strength: American Individualism And Its Hidden Discontents

We are all settlers on our own personal frontiers.

It’s our national way of life. Individualism. And, since at least 1970, we have taken individualism to its logical extreme like no other society on Earth. But at what cost for individuals? Radical autonomy without wisdom and lots of social support is a dangerous gift. Geographic rootlessness far from family with often weak, unstable friendship circles easily causes depression through disconnection. Excessive autonomy combined with rigid privacy norms can easily lead to self-destruction beyond any easy intervention. This genre-bending book blurs the boundaries of academic research, narrative nonfiction, and memoir to explore how individualistic thinking permeates the five major domains of everyday life that comprise 80% of our waking time as Americans – work, fun, food, friendship, and family.

Using fresh national research on older Americans’ life experiences, his training as a cultural anthropologist, and his own awkward life experiences, Dr. Richardson has crafted a first-of-its-kind social history of the late 20th-century American middle class.

Part One – How to Make a Hyper-Individualistic Society in Seven Easy Steps
Part Two – How It Became Awkward at Work
Part Three – How We Got Lost in the American Funhouse
Part Four – How We Came To Eat Whatever, Whenever
Part Five – How We Turned Friends into Entertainment Devices
Part Six – How We Shriveled the American Family
Part Seven – The Future of Individualism in America

Dr. Richardson argues that individualism is not an inevitable way of life. We can take our gifts of autonomy and calibrate them to a more community-oriented future. We can develop new ways to heal the broken and struggling if we can stop seeing them as isolated failures who deserve their fate. But to do this, we have to truly understand what we have before we make changes we would regret as a country.