Screens and the Ego

By: Jane-Marie Auret

Narrated by: Jane-Marie Auret

I am a victim of my own lies, and the doctors didn’t stop me. I’m not the only one. I’ve seen my peers face suicide, overdose, transition, and live their social lives on screens. Gen Z suffers disintegration of the nuclear family, hypersexualization, and emasculation. We are lost. We float in the internet. Screens and the Ego intersperses true stories and fiction to meditate on our confusion. While we use the language of mental health to describe our personalities and our sadness, my Arab grandma still uses the language of the soul. I wrote this book to mourn my generation’s loss of that concept. I wrote this book to reclaim my soul.

©2023 Jane-Marie Auret (P)2023 Jane-Marie Auret

Thought-provoking

Book review Screens and the Ego-
This is an extremely thought-provoking read that I enjoyed thoroughly. Auret uses short stories well to make the reader question if the current messages from elite institutions concerning sexuality/gender, politics, religion, psychology, social media, and other important topics are as true as they purport to be. She offers a refreshingly original solution: a return to God. As a Christian, this resonates deeply. I’d commend this book to anyone looking to think deeply about our modern world.

Also, this is great as an audiobook. Auret reads it herself and you can feel the emotion in her voice as she reads it.

The kids are not alright.

Something has happened to us as a society. It's happened so fast that some adults are not even aware of it. It's taken over so completely that some kids are not even aware of anything besides it. Thousands of years of human civilization have been built, brick by brick, generation by generation. We pulled ourselves out of the jungle. But something changed, very recently. Like first contact with an alien being, it happened, it changed us, it's infected us, and yet we don't even really know what it is.

Our souls have been ravaged by this invisible beast. Auret has poured hers into Screens And The Ego. The book is the lament of an ailing, dying generation, a generation that feels dead before it has even begun to live. A lament, yes- a cry from the afterlife; a cry for something lost. Yet this book is no defeated wail, no mere eulogy. It is a testament: it is the last accusation of a dying spirit, who burns her final embers to expose and curse the murderer.

Auret is a writer with a rare combination of fire and sanguinity. Screens And The Ego alternates between emotionally scorching, masterfully crafted stories, and clear-minded, purgatorial meditations. My Brother The Fanatic plunges the reader into the contradiction of Western liberalism: its total denial of the violent truth of nature. The drama continues, with a wholly different character, in the eponymous Screens and the Ego that follows. The reader faces the cruel yet comforting embrace of the death-drive; the psychic disease (or the spiritual demon?) that we know all too well. In A Meditation on Freedom, Auret reminds us of the hope that we all carry; a call to remember the morality within each and every one of us.

Like the Blind Men and the Elephant, with each of her pieces Auret identifies another aspect of the beast that we face. This is not problem that can be understood impersonally, scientifically. Auret knows this, and she takes on that task admirably, painting its ugly face in sharp relief. Emotion is her medium; her characters are her brush: the book calls into each of our hearts and unveils something hidden that we already knew.

The soul of this book is the soul of this generation: youthful, yet traumatized; full of life, yet submerged in despair. Screens and the Ego is a hand that may yet pull us out.

A unique take of current circumstances!

What a great read! I love how it provides a fantasy view on present times and current, in coming generations.