The 'Me Decade' — 50 years later

Somewhere in America right now, a 26-year-old is standing in his bathroom, downing his stack: creatine, a fistful of supplements, ashwagandha for the cortisol. Dab some tallow on the face, because seed oils are poison and beef fat is ancestral. He then mouths a wide-open vowel to sharpen his jawline — mewing, they call it — and checks the angle in the mirror, much as a jeweler examines a stone. Just down the hall, his girlfriend examines her birth chart for the day, lights the palo santo, and wonders whether Mercury is going to wreck her Tuesday. Neither of them belongs to a church, a union, a neighborhood group, or a recreation league. Neither has voted in a local election. But both of them are, in the deepest and most sincere sense available to modern people, working on themselves; they’