["When I set out to discover how working-class men and women experience adulthood at the level of the self, then, I was incredibly surprised to find that my working-class informants were absolutely fluent in the language of therapeutic needs, desires, emotional suffering, and self-growth. They used it without self-consciousness or skepticism, discovering through it the hidden roots of their past failures and their central purpose going forward. Whether poring over self-help books to develop strategies to manage their attention deficit disorder, religiously attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings and learning to express themselves through art, attending obsessive compulsive disorder conventions at the suggestion of Oprah, or coming to terms with a pornography addiction, the men— and women— of the post-industrial class could not sound more dissimilar from the working-class of a generation or two ago if they tried. The sources of meaning and dignity— hard work, social solidarity, family— found in previous studies of the industrial working class (Lamont 2002) had been nearly eclipsed by an all-encompassing culture of emotional self-management.
For the post-industrial generation of working -class men and women, it is not blue-collar work but rather the flux and flexibility left behind by its disappearance that defines their coming of age experiences. Young working-class men and women employ emotional suffering as the new currency of adulthood; it is through managing this suffering within the self that they access the dignity and sense of forward-moving progress due adults. This model is ubiquitous in their everyday interactions, propagated through school psychologists, family services, the service economy, self-help literature, online support groups, addiction recovery groups, medical trials, or even talk shows such as Oprah (Black 2009; Hochschild 2003; Illouzs 2003; Imber 2004; Nolam 1998).
The mood economy underlines a drastic transformation in the relationship among selfhood, inequality, and emotion. As working-class young people come to understand emotional self-management as the key to happiness, the predominance of the family past obscures the shaping power of the market present. Like Wanda, many draw unforgiving boundaries against their family members and friends who cannot transform their selves— overcome addictions, save money, heal troubled relationships— through sheer determination alone. Just as neoliberalism teaches young people that they are solely responsible for their economic fortunes, the mood economy renders them responsible for their emotional fates. Weaving together the therapeutic ethos with timeless American cultural tropes of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, and religious narratives of redemption, the mood economy transposes self-reliance, progress, and success from one's character or one's soul to one's psyche (Illousz 2007). To put it succinctly, the mood economy dovetails with neoliberalism by privatizing happiness."]
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