The Outsourced Self What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us

A BRILLIANT INVESTIGATION OF THE STATE OF OUR LIVES TODAYWe've long imagined the family as immune to market forces, the one place where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet as Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in The Outsourced Self, the market - ever more specialized and global - is very much present at home. Many aspects of private life - love, friendship, child rearing - are being transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to anxious, time-starved Americans.From dating services that train you to be the CEO of your love life to wedding planners who create a couple's "personal narrative'; from nameologists (who help you name your child) to wantologists (who help you name your goals); from commercial surrogate farms in India to hired mourners who will scatter your loved one's ashes in the ocean of your choice - Hochschild reveals a world in which the most intuitive and emotional of human acts have become work for hire.Clear-eyed and empathic, Hochschild puts a finger on the most important unacknowledged trend of our time.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of The Time Bind, The Second Shift, and The Managed Heart. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Her articles have appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today, among others. She lives in San Francisco.