The Burden of Dreams

A woman lies face down on the wall-to-wall carpet of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, eyes closed, concentrating on her hemorrhoids. Around her, 249 other souls are doing the same with their own private agonies. The trainer has told them to think of the one thing they most wanted to eliminate from their lives and to really feel it—and she is feeling it. Her moan rises to a wail, the wail to a scream, and the scream spreads across the room until there are no longer 250 separate voices but a single collective howl—united, briefly, in the worship of Me. It is an Erhard Seminars Training session in the summer of 1976, and the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” essay, published in New York Magazine on August 23, 1976.