Relationships as Commodities

A recent book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, says that private family life is no longer, as historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch named it, “a haven in a heartless world.” The book description summarizes a point that many have been making for a generation:

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet . . . that is no longer the case: everything that was once part of private life—love, friendship, child rearing—is being transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to confused, harried Americans. . . .