No, Life isn’t ‘Yours’

‘I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life’

There is a sample circulating on social media featuring this line from Billy Joel’s ‘My Life’ (1978). Is there not a better encapsulation of this era’s ethos? Joel’s memorable emphasis on the word ‘my’ (which should really be caps locked) captures the rampant individualism which is fuelling our fatal overconsumption.

The idea of individualism, and even the individual, is, today, taken for granted. All of our fundamental axioms are rooted in these ideas (from human rights to free will) which makes it difficult to imagine a world without them. But these ideas are, relatively, very new. The idea of the individual was ‘invented’ (to paraphrase Larry Siedentop’s book title), and individualism is one of the consequences of this invention.

Like all truly revolutionary inventions, there are good consequences and there are bad. Individualism is responsible for almost all of the things that make modern life better (civil rights, democracy, abundance), but it is also responsible for some of the worst aspects of modernity, including increasing narcissism, materialism, and overconsumption.

Joel’s anthem, repeated in looping clips, is the self-perpetuation of these tendencies. It is the hypnotic cliché that you cease to hear because it is said so much…