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Desperately seeking self-improvement : a year inside the optimization movement / Carl Cederström and André Spicer.

by Cederström, Carl, 1980-

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OR Books, distributed by Publishers Group West, 2017.

Cederström, Carl, 1980-

Spicer, André.

Self-help techniques -- Anecdotes.

Self-help techniques -- Humor.

9781944869397 (pbk.)

358 pages ; 21 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 355-358).

For an extraordinary year, authors Carl Cederström and André Spicer (authors of The Wellness Syndrome) threw themselves headlong into the multifarious and often bizarre world of self-optimization, a burgeoning movement that seeks to transcend the limits placed on us by merely being human. As willing guinea pigs in an extraordinary (and sometimes downright dangerous) range of techniques and technologies, our heroic protagonists used apps that deliver electric shocks in pursuit of improved concentration, wore headbands designed to optimize meditation, attempted to boost their memory through associative techniques (and failed to be admitted to MENSA), trained for weightlifting competitions, wrote a Scandinavian detective story under the influence of mind enhancing drugs, enrolled in motivational seminars and tantra sex workshops, attended new-age retreats and man-camps, underwent plastic surgery, and experimented with vibrators that stimulated parts of the body they barely knew existed. Somewhat surprisingly, the two young professors survived this year of rigorous research and have drawn on it to produce a hilarious and eye-opening book. Written in the form of two parallel diaries, their account is a biting analysis of the narcissism and individual competitiveness that increasingly pervades a society in which, as social solutions recede, individual self-improvement is the only option left. Carl Cederström is Associate Professor at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. André Spicer is Professor at Cass Business School, at City University London.

Spicer, André.

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