"The present looks more like Wolfe’s 1976 than we care to admit. The engine of the ’70s was the failure of the ’60s."

"Fast-forward: The years from roughly 2016 through the early 2020s were America’s most feverishly political stretch in generations. On one flank stood a populist insurgency; on the other, the Great Awokening. Both failed to build the transformed society their rhetoric advertised. What does thwarted revolutionary energy do when it has nowhere durable to go? As it did after 1968, it goes toward the one realm that still seems transformable: the self. It splinters into private quests for meaning.... On the left in the late ’70s, disillusion flowed into the New Age. Today, it flows into 'self-care'.... It flows into astrology... and into the witch with the imagined power to 'hex' President Donald Trump.... The right in the ’70s had the cult of fitness. MAHA, the manosphere and Silicon Valley have looksmaxxing and testosterone infusions, ice baths and the carnivore diet, along with the tech billionaire Bryan Johnson spending millions to reverse his own aging and streaming his bloodwork to the world. It is the body as a project to be perfected, but with the promise cranked up from fitness to immortality...."

Writes Ryan Zickgraf, in "Tom Wolfe’s ‘Me Decade’: Still going strong 50 years later/The peerless social critic skewered a culture of self-absorption much like today's" (WaPo gift link).

And here's the August 1976 New York Magazine essay by Tom Wolfe, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening."