PERSON TO PERSON

A new paradigm for personal and social reinvention.

“Many of us have felt boxed in at one point or another,” Torfs and Ampe write in what will strike most readers as an effective note of empathy, “by crippling debt, or a toxic boss, or a bank that didn’t endorse our business plan.” These frustrations have only been heightened by technology and social media. To combat (and subvert) these habits, their guide examines the ways people typically form personal and social relationships and illustrates advice for these scenarios via a series of hypothetical characters, like 19-year-old college student Jake, who faces the typical dilemmas of impending graduation. In his case, one facet of the solution is to cultivate a greater degree of acceptance from his family in order to lessen his anxiety. The family is to “set aside their frameworks of expectations of what he should be, and instead, consider how to support who he is.”  The authors explore concepts such as the eight “domains” that contribute to one’s quality of life, including emotional and physical well-being, leisure interactions, self-determination and basic rights, learning and personal growth, and so on. In identifying “tensions” in these domains, readers can take action to bring their well-being into balance and rise above the “ethos of blame.” The guide’s sentiments unfold in the bland, often cliched language of most self-help or motivation books: “Your core values will determine how you make choices,” etc. This tendency sometimes makes the book’s 500 pages feel slow and bloated, but patient readers will find the core concept here—the idea of a “heterotopia,” i.e., a radical re-envisioning of human social structures, to be fascinating and well fleshed out. The book is overlong, but the tenets of creating “an optional, effective, secure financial environment,” where people are autonomous agents but also communally responsible, are deftly explored and thought provoking.

A meandering but intriguing blueprint for changing social relationships.