In a review of Vertical Self, by Mark Sayers, Jared Totten says," . . . instead of writing about the blending of the bourgeois and bohemian classes, Mark Sayers delves into the Christian individual's abandonment of an identity defined by the vertical (God) in exchange for one defined by the horizontal (society, Hollywood, self, etc.).
With startling insight, Sayers perfectly describes a Christian generation that has turned its eyes downward for a sense of identity. Movies and reality TV have us all acting out our own scripts. The Internet has fostered our separation between who we are and who we want to be. Narcissism feeds off this horizontal self, "in which our worth is tied to what others think of us, we end up obsessed with ourselves".
Simon Summers adds this review:
What is your identity? What is important to you? What or who affects your decisions and happiness?
These are questions that are posed by Sayers in his book – Vertical self.
Sayers identifies the fact that in this pop-cultured, image-orientated, 21st century world that we live in, identity is everything. The problem with this, however, is that people today have a very twisted view of identity. People don’t know who they are. Styles come and go, fashions move on and people are never satisfied.
In the first part of the book Sayers illustrates simply, through the use of ‘ 5 influences’ how humanity has traded its “Vertical self” for a discontented “Horizontal self” and how this horizontal self has become the goal of almost all societies and peoples world wide.
He then goes on to contrast the Vertical and the Horizontal and gives Biblical advice and suggestions on how we can reclaim and should reclaim our true image – the image that is made in the likeness of God.
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