goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathetic therapists.… [The empty self] experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning, … a lack of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger.”6 Popular teenage culture provides a clear example of a social system that produces and contains an abundance of empty selves. Sadly, the traits of the empty self do not leave at the age of twenty;