REVIEW: "Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves" by Sophie Gilbert 2025 (3 stars)

What Girl on Girl Misses — and Why the Context Matters

Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl raises compelling questions about comparison, competition, and the ways women learn to see themselves through the eyes of others. Her cultural analysis is sharp and, at times, painfully resonant—especially in her exploration of homogenized beauty standards, the commodification of empowerment, and the pressures amplified by visual media. These examples matter; they’re part of the lived reality of contemporary womanhood in the U.S.

But Girl on Girl is also a very specific slice of culture—rooted squarely in U.S. mainstream pop culture and overwhelmingly centered on white, middle-class, millennial experience. And without deeper grounding in the systems that produce these pressures, its arguments risk confusing the medium for the message, attributing cultural shifts to the platforms that broadcast them rather than the forces that shape them.

This isn’t a failure of observation. It’s a failure of context. And that’s the heart of my frustration with the book.

Gilbert details how today’s visual culture—Instagram, reality TV, celebrity aesthetics—encourages women to benchmark themselves against a narrow, commodified ideal of femininity. She’s right that beauty “is for sale,” referencing industries in the U.S. and Brazil that promise transformation through consumption: hair, lashes, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, luxury wellness, and endless self-optimization.

But this phenomenon didn’t begin with millennials, nor with digital culture.

Long before ring lights and filters, beauty in the U.S. functioned as a market-regulated system of value—something women were expected to invest in as a form of social and economic capital. Gilbert herself quotes Tressie McMillan Cottom’s insight at the beginning of Chapter 5: “Beauty isn’t what you actually look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.”

This line—framed in Girl on Girl but underexplored—points directly to larger structures.  These aren’t just cultural quirks—they’re baked into bigger systems. White supremacy sets the rules, capitalism cashes in, perfectionism keeps us striving, and American exceptionalism tells us it’s all our fault if we don’t measure up.

In this context, beauty is not merely cultural. It is political and economic.

Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” Gilbert, however, often flips this—treating the medium (porn, Instagram, reality TV) as if it were the cause of women’s suffering, rather than the conduit for ideologies that long predate those technologies.

• Porn did not invent sexualized expectations of women.

• Reality television did not invent beauty hierarchies.

• Instagram did not invent comparison.

These platforms amplify, accelerate, and intensify what the culture already demands. By attributing relational difficulties, sexual scripts, and self-worth issues primarily to media exposure, Girl on Girl risks implying that the problem lies in women’s “overconsumption” of harmful images rather than in the systems generating those images in the first place.

Media are mirrors, not architects.

Much of Girl on Girl reads like a chronological catalogue of pop culture, weaving together celebrity moments, viral trends, and reality-TV storylines. A significant portion of the book is also devoted to detailed descriptions of sexualized imagery and violations against women, which, while illustrating cultural pressures, can feel sensationalized and at times overshadow attempts at systemic analysis.

While Gilbert’s examples of beauty, comparison, and commodified empowerment are compelling, they are also largely drawn from a very specific cultural context. Much of her analysis centers on U.S. reality television, celebrity culture, corporate feminism (#Girlboss, Lean In), Instagram aesthetics, and narratives about ambition and beauty. This narrow focus highlights the pressures experienced by a particular slice of society, but it can make the patterns she identifies feel culturally specific rather than reflective of broader, systemic dynamics.

This matters because it makes the analysis feel culturally specific rather than structurally universal. The pressures she describes—competition, comparison, and self-surveillance—exist globally, but the forms they take vary widely across class, race, nationality, and culture.

By treating these pressures as if they are primarily millennial phenomena shaped by social media and pornography, the book overlooks deeper continuities across generations and histories of patriarchal control. These tensions are not new. They are simply newly branded, turbo charged and monetized.

Gilbert references racial disparities but doesn’t fully integrate intersectionality into her argument. The experience of beauty and comparison is profoundly shaped by race, class, disability, and nationality—but Girl on Girl remains focused on the dominant narrative of white, U.S.-based feminine insecurity.

And while the book centers women, a broader sociological view reveals that men and boys are also being shaped—and harmed—by these systems.

And it’s not just women.  In her book Men Who Hate Women, Laura Bates shows how boys and men are also trapped in these systems—though their pain often gets weaponized instead of commodified. These forces flow from the same systems of patriarchy and capitalism. The pressure to perform masculinity, to dominate rather than connect, to seek status through appearance or achievement—these are also forms of gendered control.

Girl on Girl is thought-provoking and at times emotionally powerful. Gilbert is deeply attuned to the lived experiences of comparison, aspiration, and insecurity among contemporary women. Her observations ring true—because the cultural patterns she highlights absolutely shape the world we live in.

But the story she tells is only one layer of a much larger structure.

Beauty standards, competitive femininity, curated empowerment, and the commodification of selfhood are not new problems created by digital media. They are expressions of systems that long preceded the technologies that now broadcast them.

When we focus on the images, we risk missing the architecture. The question is not simply why women compare themselves, but who benefits from a society in which women (and increasingly men) are: perfectible, self-surveilling, relentlessly optimizing, and continuously investing in their own inadequacy. The problem is not women looking at the “wrong screens.” The problem is the systems that built the screens—and profit when women lose themselves in the reflection. That’s why, for me, Girl on Girl is powerful but incomplete. It captures the feeling of living inside the mirror—but doesn’t fully explain who built it, nor what a better world would look like.

REVIEW:  "Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves" by Sophie Gilbert  2025 

RATING: 3 stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff (3-stars)

Ruskhoff is in a privileged position – He makes his living as a speaker (let’s face it – books are publicity for the speaker circuit) – and he’s established himself as a “thought leader.”   

While the book is a bit of ramble – it reads like blog postings or bits of a Ted talk – it’s clear that he’s a voracious reader, and he absorbs concepts and streams of information to synthesize and develop persuasive arguments that skirt the edge of radical recommendations that might get him voted off the Marketworld acceptable speaker’s list.  A lot of what he writes seems kind of “insider-y” for those of us who have been in the tech world (at the Commonwealth Club, he and the moderator chuckled about the wonderful days of Well.com, for example). 

Rushkoff has made a living doing what I wish I had the guts to do since college when a respected sociology professor discouraged me from applying to a MA program in Chicago focusing on pop culture and media as “a fad.” In the first dot com boom – my inner sociologist was totally wigging out on the possibilities of technology and the strangely predictable boom and collapse, increasing bureaucratization and specialization and efforts to “monetize” everything and to “gamify” things to trap users into addictive and exploitive behavior patterns.  

I almost have to say that I enjoy the end notes more than the book itself – unfortunately, he doesn’t use any sort of citations in the text to link users back to these notes which would improve the experience a lot.

He makes a lot of generalizations but since he’s going for a visionary approach – I think that’s acceptable.  Some of what he says strikes me as overly cynical (you can see that in my notes) and I don’t agree with all of his assessments.  He has a fairly linear, causal chain assessment of developments in human society and communication. Hindsight, as we all know, is 20-20. 

For example “Before language, there was no such thing as a lie.”  Really?  So, we’re to believe that pre-language cave drawings were entirely accurate?  Some cave artist never fudged a few extra kills or such?  

Again – as with “Winners Take All” – this author is focusing on a process of co-optation that is inherent in the development of non-distributive, hierarchical human societies.  Of course, web technology has been co-opted to commerce – that’s what commerce does.  We’re so immersed in the pursuit of the success and ideals of Capital that business language and processes are saturating all spheres of our lives.  

While I don’t necessarily believe his dark vision – that computers are programming us to learn how to replace us – but he says some interesting things and overall the book is very thought provoking.  He encourages us to look at the underlying forces and ideologies driving and shaping the requirements of the world around us:  “Technology is not driving itself. It doesn’t want anything. Rather, there is a market expressing itself through technology.”  

“Human ideals such as autonomy, social contact, and learning are again written out of the equation, as the algorithms’ programming steers everyone and everything toward instrumental ends.”

Ruskhoff made a great argument somewhere in this book as well as an NPR interview about education for education’s sake – it’s necessary for people to learn, explore and get exposure to a wide range of ideas and to have the space to experiment intellectually and develop their own perspectives about things.  This is a similar argument to “The Coddling of the American Mind” – and Ruskhoff takes this a step further, eschewing the push to make education a place where people are trained to join the corporate world and to be “useful.”  Education is meant to make you interesting, to make you a human, and to teach you how to interact with adults who have different ideas.  Education is also not meant, as detailed on “Coddling,” to protect you from ideas you find offensive or “triggering.”

Finally – he gets around to the meat of his arguments and his recommendations. He talks about how capitalism as it is implemented is the enemy of commerce because it extracts value and gives it to remote shareholders.  The solutions for underemployment revolve around “getting everyone ‘jobs,’ as if what everyone really wants is the opportunity to commodify their living hours” and punishing the hungry or homeless for “not contributing” even though we don’t really need everyone to be working full time with the abundance we have in our society and economy. 

“We must not accept any technology as the default solution for our problems.”  And – further – question everything around you:  commercial media, mainstream diversions – what are the values they are promoting?  So much of the models around us leave us unable to cope in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty – but increasing our prosocial behavior and interdependence can give us the resilience and resources to solve so many of our contemporary problems.

“Transcending the game altogether means becoming a spoilsport – someone who refuses to acknowledge the playing field, the rules of engagement, or the value of winning” – much like the shaman (or hermit) who lives apart from the tribe.  Delete the app, leave your phone at home, connect with people because “Weirdness is power, dissolving false binaries and celebrating the full spectrum of possibility. Eccentricity opens the gray area where mutations develop and innovations are born.”

Finally, Rushkoff’s key recommendation:  “Just as we can derive an entire ethical framework from the single practice of veganism, we can apply the insights of permaculture practitioners to education, social justice, and government: look for larger patterns, learn from elders, understand and leverage natural cycles.”

“The greatest threats to Team Human are the beliefs, forces, and institutions that separate us from one another and the natural world of which we are a part.”

“We must learn to distinguish between the natural world and the many constructions we now mistake for preexisting conditions of the universe.”

“Find the others.” 

REVIEW: Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff 

RATING: 3-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Winners Take All (2018) by Anand Giridhardas (3-stars)

People who are making money at the expense of the common good are not ignorant about the effects they are having on the world around them.

Take as an example – the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, built by the widow who was the heir to the fortune of Winchester rifles. She earned something like $10,000/minute without having to do a thing because of the pivotal role that those weapons served in the genocide that took place across the US West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sarah Winchester lived in mortal fear of the horrors being caused by those weapons in mass killings of innocent people across the landscape of a country that promoted “freedom.”

To avoid the wrath of angry spirits of the slain, and perhaps because she lacked the power, being a woman in the 19th century, Sarah Winchester commissioned continual work on her house to confound the spirits. This is instead of halting production of the Winchester rifles and closing down the business. Given the power and authority of women at that time, I imagine if she had tried, she would have been committed to an asylum. She did not NEED the money – so why continue a business that was so contrary to her own values?

We live in a society where people at the top are encouraged to accumulate and hoard money – and then to use that money for power to manipulate laws and create conditions for them to continue to make even more money. This can only result in ever-increasing socio-economic polarization.

“The Winners Take All” is written by someone who was raised in a fairly affluent neighborhood in Cleveland, worked as a consultant and has circulated with social/economic elites most of his life. Our author has an epiphany – as many people do in their mid-30s – and realizes that the philanthropy of the wealthy was not addressing the root causes of the social issues they were trying to resolve. Our intrepid young author makes a speech that shocks all his colleagues. Surfing on this wave of credibility as a “whistle blower,” he rushes publish detailing how the wealthy protect their ability to continue increasing their wealth and how people are co-opted into this system – whether they are entrepreneurs, consultants or thought leaders.

Let’s be clear: the emperor is starkers. This is not news. The elites who are part of the power structure will work to co-opt and de-radicalize people, movements and culture. Most people, if not everyone, knows this – or maybe it’s just my good fortune for having pursued an undergrad degree in sociology.

Based on the wide array of reviews of this book – so much hyperbole such “scathing” and “important” – it seems to me that many people fail to see it as “a good start” on a better book. He’s got a lot of great anecdotal detail from his first-hand experience and his interviews – but it is definitely skewed toward the politically liberal elites. He presents his evidence as a body of case studies of individuals – and leaves out important details about what they might actually do to create real change.

“Economistic thinking dominates our age,” says our author -- this has been pointed out by plenty of other people. Business processes are being seen as the best solution for many other domains where they may not be exactly applicable. His first case study of an idealistic young graduate student being co-opted into such economistic thinking as a means for making positive changes in the world provides a small glimpse into the changing beliefs about such education in our society.

Are schools just a way to train and future workers at all levels of the capitalist machine and indoctrinate them into economistic thinking? As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss in “The Coddling of the American Mind” – schools are becoming less of an environment where young people are exposed to a variety of ideas, taught how to think critically and independently and given space for intellectual experimentation.

Instead, according to Lukianoff & Haidt, schools are becoming more insular and resisting that which is “different” as just flat out harmful or wrong. Is this an outcome of the increasing need for co-optation into MarketWorld or a is MarketWorld a result? There’s much to explore here in the world of secondary and post-secondary education that is unexplored in this chapter.

As a society – we need to revisit what we believe about education and schools: schools aren’t just for training future workers. Increasing socioeconomic polarization and the fear of falling into poverty provides plenty of incentive to conform and make oneself as marketable to MarketWorld as possible.

One of the biggest problems highlighted in this book is the fundamental problem of putting reform of social problems in the hands of wealthy philanthropists. In addition to failing to address/masking the root causes of social problems, allowing the elites to operate in this way increases the power of these elites over the political structure and influence over changing laws to benefit themselves.

He provides a few questions here and there which seem to be straw men and which he doesn’t flesh out or address in depth. “In a world of true gender equality, might not the beauty industry shrink?” Isn’t the beauty industry just a part of the overall problem – what about professional sports, for example? Millionaires playing games (for a limited time until they are literally too physically damaged) for billionaires. I would argue that affects and drives perceptions of masculinity at least as much as the cosmetics and fashion industries affect femininity – are either of these areas so easily taken down buy “true gender equality”? Giridhardas provides a profile of the Sackler family – founders of Purdue Pharma, the creator of Oxycontin. It’s common knowledge that our nation is in the midst of a national epidemic of, not just opioid abuse, but the incredibly addictive Oxycontin – which was aggressively marketed by Purdue Pharma.

As with my example of Sarah Winchester – the Sackler family doesn’t need more money. So, why not just halt the production of Oxycontin altogether? They must still have some rights to the formula – so why not just halt production? Focus some of their money and attention on resolving the addiction issues and helping promote non-addictive pain management therapies (how many acupuncture clinics do you suppose are in “ground zero” McDowell County?).

Throughout the book, Giridhardas touches on the calls from within and outside the elite to increase taxes on the uber wealthy – but doesn’t dive into any actual proposals and what it might look like for the elites to lead the way to reforming what capitalism means.

An increase taxes on any income over $10MM – say to 70% -- might encourage the reinvestment of the profits into the company in the form of increased wages across all levels of an organization, especially if paired with a value of reducing difference in salary between lowest and highest paid employee of a company to, say, 500:1 (instead of the 2,438:1 at Manpower, for example). An increased tax might also be used to fund other initiatives (such as the proposal by NY Representative Ocasio-Cortez to fund a “Green. New Deal”).

While I appreciate the spirit of the book – it presents a terribly skewed perception of the players as mostly US and liberal – leaving out, for example, the Koch brothers and others, giving the impression that maybe they are somehow golden geese (what about the philanthropy of the Gates foundation, for example)? Giridhardas leaves out analysis of the broader global issues (and makes a few snipes toward globalization) and ignores recommendations for solutions entirely.

Giridhardas doesn’t even come close to recommending any such ameliorative strategies for people whose incomes are derived from socially destructive activities. In fact, in his wrap-up, he seems to leave the door wide open for any other alternative, good or bad:

“For the inescapable answer to the overwhelming question – Where do we go from here? – is: somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us.”

Perhaps the elites are malicious and intentionally manipulating perception through philanthropy – or perhaps philanthropy is just a “Winchester Mystery House” being pursued by people who don’t know how to undo the damage being caused by their addiction to capitalism and the unending drive to hoard wealth. What we need – as much as the criticism and “emperor has no clothes” kinds of reportage in “Winners Take All” – is an escape from this system for the elites and a way to rethink our values around society and wealth.

For more reviews of this book – check out Black Oxford’s review of this book from a broader intellectual and moral perspective. Michael Siliski’s review dives into the proposals as well as other defects of the book

REVIEW: Winners Take All (2018) by Anand Giridhardas 

RATING: 3-stars

 © Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini (5-stars)

This is a thorough examination of different tactics and techniques involved in influence and persuasion -- lots of great information from research and great examples.  

The book is very nicely structured and includes summaries at the end of each chapter, along with questions for discussion.  He even offers sections titled "Defense" to help understand how to diffuse or deflect the different types of influence.  He delves into reciprocation, liking, social proof, compliance to authority, scarcity, and consistency/conformity.

The premise of the book is that humans are all wired in certain ways -- we look for cognitive shortcuts to save time and energy in making decisions.  Sometimes this is useful and sometimes, not so much.  We're wired to accept things that are familiar, and to reciprocate and like people and to want to get along in certain ways.

Cialdini talks a lot about "compliance professionals" -- folks in marketing and sales who understand the concepts he describes in the book, and at the end of the book -- advises us to rebel against those unscrupulous types who seek to manipulate us with false information.  

Since the book was written in 2009 - I was curious to see what Cialdini has written more recently, especially on the recent presidential elections in the US.  It turns out that "Team Cialdini" has written quite a bit  and it's interesting reading (start here: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-presidential-election-was-donald-trumps-to-lose-2016-12-13).

REVIEW: Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini 

RATING: 5-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch (5-stars)

 We've all heard the jokes about midlife crisis and folks who are experiencing difficulties in midlife are often pooh-poohed -- I remember one middle aged friend laughing at midlife crises as self-indulgent, saying "I can't afford a midlife crisis!"  

Would we do the same thing with respect to adolescents?  There may be many satires and jokes about adolescence but we are all very aware of the real changes and challenges faced by humans in this phase of their development.  It exists and it's not a joke.

Well, the same can be said of midlife, as it turns out.  Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Happiness Curve" starts off by diving into a huge pile of research:  dozens of research teams have seen this u-shaped curve in self-reported life satisfaction scores.   We start off VERY happy in life and our satisfaction gradually decreases at mid-life, and then begins to increase again after this midlife trough.  It's not just cultural -- it's found across multiple cultures and samples across decades.  And, it's not just humans --  researchers working with primates around the world, in various settings, have found the same curve in our nearest non-human primate relatives and may be biological.

Rauch defines this midlife slump as "normal and natural."  it's not just a "crisis" but "a change in our values and sources of satisfaction, a change in who we are."

"It is about the dawn of 'encore adulthood,' a whole new stage of adult development which is already starting to reshape the way we think about retirement,education, and human potential."

Studies have examined all sorts of extrinsic and intrinsic factors -- income, education, wealth, fast or slow growing economies, depression, and so on.  The author provides a very indepth review of these studies and how different kinds of happiness are defined (affective vs longer term life satisfaction).  

Humans are programmed to start off big and then switch gears -- so when we get to middle age and we haven't saved the world, we get a negative feedback loop that says "Something's wrong with  me."

The keys to surviving or "muddling through" this trough are to first and foremost, accept as "normal" what you are going through and resist the urge for comparison to others or to your own goals/expectations.  Then, despite your inclination to become a hermit and hide out -- connect and reach out to others who are going through it or who have gone through it:  connectedness is one of the keys to surviving.  Finally, make changes in small steps, not giant leaps -- and build on your strengths, skills and experience.  

Just before that section of the book -- the author gets into the wisdom studies and some very pragmatic and clear information on what it is and why it is important to those 

Rauch also supplies plenty of studies that demonstrate the universal principles of underlying wisdom and where people usually end up on the other side of the trough: 

"compassion and prosocial attitudes that reflect concern for the common good; pragmatic knowledge of life; the use of one’s pragmatic knowledge to resolve personal and social problems; an ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, and to see multiple points of view; emotional stability and mastery of one’s own feelings; a capacity for reflection and for dispassionate self-understanding."

There are three basic components of wisdom -- and they have to be balanced with each other, and serve to enrich and strengthen the other components.  The author uses "Star Trek" as an example: "In Star Trek, undoubtedly the wisest of all television shows, a recurrent theme is that the most blazingly intelligent character, the Vulcan Spock, lacks the instinctive empathy of Dr. McCoy and the pragmatic decisiveness of Captain Kirk. None of the three alone is wise.  Wisdom arises from the (sometimes tense) interaction of the triumvirate."

The studies on wisdom align nicely with the basic tenets of Buddhism -- which may explain why so many folks are drawn to it in middle age, it provides a structure and community for their changing values and beliefs.  There's no association between wisdom and intelligence, "What wise people know about is life."

Wisdom, he says, is balanced, reflective, active -- "the happiness curve is a social adaptation, a slow-motion reboot of our emotional software to repurpose us for a different role in society."

"You may be dissatisfied, but you don’t need to be quite so dissatisfied about being dissatisfied!"

It's a long slow adjustment that is normal, not pathological, and you're NOT crazy or losing your mind!   

The book is really well written, enjoyable and informative.  I really appreciate that it doesn't focus entirely on perimenopause or "hormones" -- but I do wish that there was a bit more coverage on that area aside from a mention of "the grandmother effect" and the interesting bit of trivia that humans are one of 3 species on this planet where the female of the species long outlives her fertility (the other two species are whales).

REVIEW: The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch 

RATING: 5-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr (5-stars)

 First, this book is magnificently structured.  The quality of writing and clarity of concepts laid out from the preface to the last page is well organized and clear without being overly pedantic or repetitive.  The author refers to concepts and goals of previous sections of the book - even mentions upcoming areas that will be addressed later - and it all just flows really nicely.  Very tightly written book - it's only 202 pages (the rest are notes).

Second - this book does a really great job of talking about the need for solitude as a balance to the need for human relationships and interactions using the experiences of highly accomplished historical figures including Beatrix Potter, Kant, Dostoevsky, Newton and many others.  

This was originally published in 1988 - so many watershed events happened in the 80s, and most people in developed countries were on the precipice of previously unknown opportunity for connection, distraction and surveillance of each other's activities.

"At the time of writing, it is generally considered that the highly introverted person is more pathological than the very extraverted person. This is because of the current emphasis upon object relationships, and the disregard of processes which take place in solitude."

The premise is that people who want solitude or who are single are missing out and have something wrong with them.  We even use the Greek word for a person who lives alone - troglodyte - as an insult to indicate some kind of stupid or defective person.

Storr goes into detail about the intrinsic need for humans to spend time alone -- sleep, for example, and dreams -- they provide our brain with time alone to integrate and heal and process experiences, ideas and thoughts about things.  Humans always crave some kind of solitude -- and even in the face of social convention and obligation, we come up with ways to get time to ourselves -- Florence Nightingale feigned a health complaint so she could get time alone to study and write.  Victorian women would have time to "rest" in the afternoons after spending so much time being empathically focused on the needs of others.

So - why is it that 30 years after this book was written, it seems like we are still not allowing people to take or make space to integrate their thoughts, experiences and ideas so that they can be healthier, happier and more productive?

I'm thinking specifically here of corporate professional work and the move to crowd people into "open workspace" areas and the retraction of control over where one works (many employers are repealing remote/work from home policies).  It seems counter productive to require an "always on", in the office for 8 hours workday when that's not really how human brains function.  

Being alone is necessary not just for personal life - but for professional life as well.  While corporate culture values ideation, collaboration and consensus for decision-making -- where is the space for integration and problem-solving on an individual level?  

Lots of great material to dig into here -- it feels like this is just another spot on the tip of the iceberg of a subject that fascinates me:  the psychology of creativity.  If you enjoy reading "Finding Flow" and other books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- you'll enjoy this book.

REVIEW: Solitude: A Return to the Self  by Anthony Storr 

RATING: 5-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.