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Andrea Hiott talks with cultural researcher Patricia Martin about her book Will the Future Like You?: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention and the condition she calls persona fog.
By now we know that online life, with its endless content, algorithmic polarization, and pressure to present oneself publicly, is detrimental to our well-being; countless books and articles have dissected these angles. But after a decade of empirical research, Patricia Martin argues the damage goes deeper. We discuss her book Will the Future Like You?, which makes the case that the capacity to form and sustain an identity is itself being eroded by code built to keep us uncertain about who we are and cut off from our own inner authority. She calls this condition persona fog.
About Patricia Martin
Patricia Martin is a cultural researcher, author, and Director of the Institute for Psyche and Culture, a depth-psychology think tank based in Chicago. She is the founder and host of the podcast Jung in the World, now in its sixth season with over two million cumulative downloads. Author of four books, including RenGen, featured by the New York Times, and her latest, Will the Future Like You? (Karnac, 2026), which Kirkus recommended as an "incisive, fresh work." For the past decade, she has led independent research on the erosion of selfhood through digital persona management, advancing her theory of persona fog. She completed postgraduate training in Jungian theory at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and holds a certification in Medical Narrative from Duke University, an MA in Irish Literature and Culture from University College Dublin, and an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College. She is a Research Affiliate of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.
More about this show:
In Jung’s model, the persona is the thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life: useful, but never meant to be load-bearing. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study with roughly 100 participants and a decade of data on online self-presentation, she describes what happens when we pour our whole sense of self into multiple online personas: fragmentation, chronic self-doubt, and estrangement from a core self.
The conversation moves through Patricia’s own “undoing” (divorce, three moves in 18 months, her mother’s sudden death, her child’s transition, and the loss of a major project), her path into Jungian psychology, and the difference between resilience and endurance. Passion, she reminds us, once meant the capacity to suffer and hold steady amid uncertainty. Along the way: Csikszentmihalyi and flow, social pain research, Winnicott’s attentive gaze, and why everyday attention to one another may be a form of love.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction: persona fog, endurance, and the art of enough
- 04:00 Missing the school bus and a childhood moment of transcendence
- 08:00 What the persona is, and why it was never meant to be load-bearing
- 11:30 The self as product and the post-identity era
- 17:00 What changed since our grandparents’ generation; the three factors of identity
- 23:00 From public libraries to the early internet
- 25:00 Patricia’s personal undoing and the question “Who am I?”
- 29:00 Fragmentation, resilience, and endurance
- 34:30 Persona, brand, and optimization; passion as endurance
- 37:00 Social pain online and the neuroscience of rejection
- 38:30 Movement, the body, and the micro-singularity of the self with its devices
- 41:30 Who listens to Jung in the World, and a yearning for depth
- 44:00 How Patricia found Jung; Jason’s story
- 48:00 Jonathan’s descent story and preparing to endure the AI era
- 50:30 Csikszentmihalyi, flow, and 45 minutes offline
- 53:45 The transcendent function, and the Jung lecture that inspired Csikszentmihalyi
- 55:00 Why high achievers can be the most fragile; chronic self-doubt
- 59:45 Janet’s story: auditing her “wardrobe” of personas
- 1:05:30 Love, attention, and Winnicott’s good-enough gaze
- 1:08:30 Why the self still matters; persona and romantic love
- 1:11:00 Listening as love, participatory sense-making, and stewarding attention
- 1:16:30 The spiral: returning to where we started, but anew
Links
Patricia Martin
Will the Future Like You?
Jung in the World podcast
Participatory sense-making with Hanne De Jaegher (Love & Philosophy ep. 68)
Love & Philosophy
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