Please see the previous post, where I explain that this is something I originally published in 1981. The chapter title, Present Shock, was probably meant to contrast with the idea of Future Shock, a book by Alvin Toffler that was quite popular in the 1970s. Present Shock As long as anxiety has an identifiable object… Read more
I once wrote an essay – actually it was a chapter in a book I wrote — where I described my childhood reality shock as “anxiety in its purest form, an awareness of the gap between the self and the world it has come to know and depend on.” I’ve reproduced that (rather long) chapter… Read more
When I was eleven, I had what I later decided to call a “reality shock.” The world suddenly seemed unreal, as if I were having a dream. I remember going up the street to the home of a friend and standing with her in the backyard by the swing set. I kept asking her: Is… Read more
Blogging makes me uncomfortable, but it’s a discomfort that interests me. It’s not the discomfort itself I find interesting (especially my own), but the experience of being a self in a public space, the self-consciousness that engenders, and the reflection that provokes on what it’s like to be a conscious self. When I first started… Read more
As I mentioned in the last post, it was my personal experience of healthism that motivated me to start a previous blog. When I now ask myself why I want to start a blog on the self, I find multiple motivations. I decided to write a few initial posts where I talk about this. I’m… Read more
When I started the Health Culture blog in 2008, I was interested in the question Why was there such an increase in health consciousness (healthism) in the last quarter of the 20th century? I had a personal interest in that question because, in retrospect, I could see that healthism had had an impact on my… Read more