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It’s this ‘more faster’ aspect of ‘more happy me’ that particularly disturbs Elliott, the author of The New Individualism: the Emotional Costs of Globalization. “Our quick-fix society is very different from the days of Freudianism. People used to commit to a lengthy process of self-reconstruction involving an hour’s psychoanalysis, four to five times a week, for five years or more,” he says. That’s no longer the case. If you instantly change your face or your name as a guarantor of your identity, what will be the results? Elliott spent six years interviewing radical self-reinventors and says he has seen various levels of emotional damage, ranging from confusion and anxiety through to fairly intense depression and two cases of suicide. This problem helps to explain why women who have breast implants are three times more likely to kill themselves. It’s not that the implants cause some kind of silicon psychosis, it’s the fact that women who seek implants often have a poor self-image, and the implants sadly fail to keep their promise to transform it.

Radical self-improvement does not just frequently fail to fulfil its promise of a happier self, it can cause real harm in another, deeper way – a process that Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X, has defined as ‘de-narration’. He believes that modern consumers can become so obsessed with ditching or improving aspects of their selves that they can ultimately lose hold of their life stories. They become an agglomeration of tacked-on extras with no integrated soul at the middle, no consistent ‘I am’ narrative, only a fractured identity consisting of imperfectly improved bits and implanted desires. Coupland claims that Marilyn Monroe was our first de-narrated celebrity, a beautifully facaded emptiness. When the former Norma Jeane Mortensen was found dead at her anonymously fashionable home, the only personal items in her bedroom were a pile of handbags and purses.

Excerpted from pages 192 to 193 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish