How we move beyond burnout culture in an age of loneliness and instead reconnect with our deepest humanity and become authentic leaders
We’ve reached a tipping point. Today’s ecologically and socially precarious world is calling for new solutions to old problems. But at this time of urgency the Millennial Generation, the largest generation in the United States, is faltering. Strapped with unprecedented student debt and suffering from the double-punch of recent financial crises, the Millennial cohort of 72.1 million Americans is called a new “Lost Generation.” And these economic struggles have been accompanied by a crisis in mental health. Most self-help books that encourage individuals to “hack” life–to produce more and achieve more, even to “adult” more–are not meeting the needs of our time and may be part of the problem rather than the solution. Getting Over Ourselves shows people how they can orient to something beyond the endless and exhausting striving of achievement-oriented culture. It simultaneously offers a reprieve from burnout and a provocative call to move beyond the status-quo to tackle the problems of our time.
This book challenges the premise of the self-help genre–namely, that there is a separate, solitary self in need of constant improvement. Rather, it identifies our generation’s preoccupation with self-improvement as a source of their suffering and uses developmental psychology to guide members of this generation toward a new level of maturity—one that reconnects them with their deepest humanity and their greatest potential to lead in a troubled world.
