The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening

“The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” is the title of Tom Wolfe’s influential essay diagnosing American culture in the 1970s. Wolfe, a leading figure of “New Journalism,” used the phrase to frame what he saw as a shift from the collective ideals of the 1960s to a 1970s preoccupation with self-fulfillment, therapy, and personal transformation. The essay appeared in New York magazine and helped popularize the label “the Me Decade” for the era, linking trends in lifestyle, religion, and psychology to broader social disillusionment after Vietnam, Watergate, and economic turbulence.

As a quotation, the phrase functions less as a sentence than as a thesis compressed into a headline. Wolfe juxtaposes “Me Decade”—a period of heightened individualism and self-regard—with “Third Great Awakening,” invoking the history of American religious revivals to suggest that the era’s inward turn had quasi-spiritual intensity. The implication is that self-help, therapeutic culture, and new forms of belief operated like a revival movement, promising redemption through personal change rather than public reform. The title’s irony is characteristic of Wolfe: it both names and satirizes the cultural moment it describes.