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. America has now taken individualism to its logical extreme like no other society on Earth. And the results are mixed. Radical autonomy without wisdom and lots of social support is a dangerous gift. It can even become a curse of self-destruction.

This book explores how individualism affects the five major domains of American life that comprise 80% of our waking time - work, fun, food, friends, 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 and what it yielded to us as a nation.

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 Fun-house

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 have to truly understand what we have before we make changes we would regret as a country.

Author: James Richardson
Publisher: Social Awareness Institute
Published: 05/17/2024
Pages: 438
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.62lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9798988768005

About the Author
Richardson, James: - "James F. Richardson is a Ph.D. cultural anthropologist who has studied American society for twenty years as a market research consultant. He has interviewed Americans in 40 different states and has lived all over the country, including New England, the Chicago-to-Madison corridor, Seattle, and Tucson, Arizona. For nearly three years in the late 1990s, he also lived in South India, studying a very different society than our own. Today, he lives with his wife, children, and dogs in sunny Tucson, Arizona, where he writes nonfiction and consults with a national client base. He also writes a Substack - Homo Imaginari - for a growing international readership."

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