Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization Movement

It’s a great idea for a stunt book, and the results are written up in a tremendously enjoyable form of alternating diary entries, which importantly avoids any kind of second-guessing hindsight. We follow the adventures of each author in what seems like real time – Cederström in Stockholm, Spicer in London – and we also witness one side and then the other of their conversations about the show more project. The result is something like an internet-age buddy movie in which the heroes vie to outdo one another in extreme self-fashioning, and constantly trade amusing insults in the manner of the academics in Lars Iyer’s Spurious trilogy of novels. Spicer goes to a cultish self-improvement seminar and writes: “During the next break, I wrote an email to Carl asking him what he thought my blockage was. He responded with one word: yourself.” show less