There is death in this. Twenge and Campbell are getting at something when they urge people to worry less about their identities and more about their lives. Between life and the self, there is a choice. This is implicit in the idea of an attention economy. The more compulsively we curate the self, the less we live. We may find it helpful to forget ourselves from time to time. We may need, that is, a form of ‘anti-identity’ politics, a resistance to all trends which force one to spend too much time on the self, or on a particularly narrow, depressing and ultimately coercive idea of what a person can be. It would treat all the labour spent on the self as wasted potential. It would cultivate forgetting and disconnection.