<p>No method. No mercy. Just this.</p><p></p><p>What if the self you've been tending-defending improving believing in-was never really there? In these unsparing but lucid essays psychologist and philosopher Robert Saltzman examines the machinery of meaning in an age of performative presence and synthetic minds.&nbsp;With dry wit and a refusal to console he exposes our hunger for stories our need for coherence and the illusions that pass for identity in the 21st century. What remains is not&nbsp;despair but the end of waiting for the plot to redeem itself.</p>