Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation (By Joel Stein)

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Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation
By Joel Stein .
I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected ! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.
Here’s the cold, hard data: The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982. Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance. They are fame-obsessed: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a famous person as want to be a Senator, according to a 2007 ; four times as many would pick the assistant job over CEO of a major corporation. They’re so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60% of millennials in any situation is that they’ll just be able to feel what’s right. Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80% of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60% did.
In the U.S., millennials are the children of baby boomers, who are also known as the Me Generation, who then produced the Me Me Me Generation, whose selfishness technology has only exacerbated.

Whereas in the 1950s families displayed a wedding photo, a school photo and maybe a military photo in their homes, the average middle-class American family today walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. Millennials have come of age in the era of the quantified self, recording their daily steps on FitBit, their whereabouts every hour of every day on PlaceMe and their  data on 23 and Me. They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group.This is a generation that would have made Walt Whitman wonder if maybe they should try singing a song of someone else.
They got this way partly because, in the 1970s, people wanted to improve kids’ chances of success by instilling self-esteem. It turns out that self-esteem is great for getting a job or hooking up at a bar but not so great for keeping a job or a relationship. “It was an honest mistake,” says Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University and the editor of Self-Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard. “The early findings showed that, , kids with high self-esteem did better in school and were less likely to be in various kinds of trouble. It’s just that we’ve learned later that self-esteem is a result, not a cause.” The problem is that when people try to boost self-esteem, they accidentally boost narcissism instead. “Just tell your kids you love them. It’s a better message,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, who wrote Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic. “When they’re little it seems cute to tell them they’re special or a princess or a rock star or whatever their T-shirt says. When they’re 14 it’s no longer cute.” All that self-esteem leads them to be disappointed when the world refuses to affirm how great they know they are. “This generation has the highest likelihood of having unmet expectations with respect to their careers and the lowest levels of satisfaction with their careers at the stage that they’re at,” says Sean Lyons, co-editor of Managing the New Workforce: International Perspectives on the Millennial Generation. “It is sort of a crisis of unmet expectations.”
What millennials are most famous for besides narcissism is its effect: entitlement. If you want to sell seminars to middle managers, make them about how to deal with young employees who e-mail the CEO directly and beg off projects they find boring. English teacher David McCullough Jr.’s address last year to Wellesley High School’s graduating class, a 12-
minute reality check titled “You Are Not Special,” has nearly 2 million hits on YouTube. “Climb the mountain so you can
see the world, not so the world can see you,” McCullough told the graduates. He says nearly all the response to the video
has been positive, especially from millennials themselves; the video has 57 likes for every dislike.
Millennials are interacting all day but almost entirely through a screen. You’ve seen them at bars, sitting next to one
another and texting. They might look calm, but they’re deeply anxious about missing out on something better.Seventy
percent of them check their phones every hour, and many experience phantom pocket-vibration syndrome. “They’re doing
a behavior to reduce their anxiety,” says Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University at Dominguez
Hills and the author of iDisorder. That constant search for a hit of dopamine (“Someone liked my status update!”) reduces
creativity. From 1966, when the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking were first administered, through the mid-1980s,
creativity scores in children increased. Then they dropped, falling sharply in 1998. Scores on tests of empathy similarly
fell sharply, starting in 2000, likely because of both a lack of face-to-face time and higher degrees of narcissism. Not only
do millennials lack the kind of empathy that allows them to feel concerned for others, but they also have trouble even
intellectually understanding others’ points of view.
What they do understand is how to turn themselves into brands, with “friend” and “follower” tallies that serve as sales
figures. As with most sales, positivity and confidence work best. “People are inflating themselves like balloons on
Facebook,” says W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, who has written three books
about generational increases in narcissism (including When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself). When everyone is
telling you about their vacations, parties and promotions, you start to embellish your own life to keep up. If you do this
well enough on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, you can become a microcelebrity.
Because millennials don’t respect authority, they also don’t resent it. That’s why they’re the first teens who aren’t
rebelling. They’re not even sullen. “I grew up watching Peanuts, where you didn’t even see the parents. They were that
‘Wah-wah’ voice. And MTV was always a parent-free zone,” says MTV president Stephen Friedman, 43, who now
includes parents in nearly all the channel’s reality shows. “One of our research studies early on said that a lot of this
audience outsources their superego to their parents. The most simple decision of should I do this or should I do that–our
audience will check in with their parents.” A 2012 Google Chrome ad shows a college student video-chatting all the
details of her life to her dad. “I am very used to seeing things where the cliché is the parent doesn’t understand. Most of
my friends, their parents are on social and they’re following them or sharing stuff with them,” says Jessica Brillhart, a
filmmaker at Google’s Creative Lab, who worked on the commercial.It’s hard to hate your parents when they also listen to
rap and watch Jon Stewart.

In fact, many parents of millennials would proudly call their child-rearing style peer-enting. “I negotiate daily with my son
who is 13. Maybe all that coddling has paid off in these parent-child relationships,” says Jon Murray, who created The
Real World and other reality shows, including Keeping Up With the Kardashians. He says that seeing regular people
celebrated on TV gives millennials confidence: “They’re going after what they want. It can be a little irritating that they
want to be on the next rung so quickly. Maybe I’m partly responsible for it. I like this generation, so I have no issues with
that.”
Millennials are able to use their leverage to negotiate much better contracts with the traditional institutions they do still
join. Although the armed forces had to lower the physical standards for recruits and make boot camp less intensive, Gary
Stiteler, who has been an Army recruiter for about 15 years, is otherwise more impressed with millennials than any other
group he’s worked with. “The generation that we enlisted when I first started recruiting was sort of do, do, do. This
generation is think, think about it before you do it,” he says.”This generation is three to four steps ahead. They’re coming in saying, ‘I want to do this, then when I’m done with this, I want to do this.’”
Here’s something even all the psychologists who fret over their narcissism studies agree about: millennials are nice. They have none of that David Letterman irony and Gen X ennui. “The positivism has surprised me. The Internet was always 50-50 positive and negative. And now it’s 90-10,” says Shane Smith, the 43-year-old CEO of Vice, which adjusted from being a Gen X company in print to a millennial company once it started posting videos online, which are viewed by a much younger audience. Millennials are more accepting of differences, not just among gays, women and minorities but in everyone.”There are many, many subcultures, and you can dip into them and search around. I prefer that to you’re either supermainstream or a riot grrrl,” says Tavi Gevinson, a 17-year-old who runs Rookie, an online , from her bedroom when she’s not at school. It’s hard, in other words, to join the counterculture when there’s no culture. “There’s not this us-vs.-them thing now. Maybe that’s why millennials don’t rebel,” she says.
There may even be the beginning of a reaction against all the constant self-promotion. Evan Spiegel, 22, co-founder of Snapchat, an app that allows people to send photos, video and text that are permanently erased after 10 seconds or less, argues that it’s become too exhausting for millennials to front a perfect life on social media. “We’re trying to create a place where you can be in sweatpants, sitting eating cereal on a Friday night, and that’s O.K.,” he says.
But if you need the ultimate proof that millennials could be a great force for positive change, know this: Tom Brokaw, champion of the Greatest Generation, loves millennials. He calls them the Wary Generation, and he thinks their cautiousness in life decisions is a smart response to their world. “Their great mantra has been: Challenge convention. Find new and better ways of doing things. And so that ethos transcends the wonky people who are inventing new apps and embraces the whole economy,” he says. The generation that experienced Monica Lewinsky’s dress, 9/11, the longest wars in U.S. history, the Great Recession and an Arab Spring that looks at best like a late winter is nevertheless optimistic about its own personal chances of success. Sure, that might be delusional, but it’s got to lead to better results than wearing flannel, complaining and making indie movies about it.
So here’s a more rounded picture of millennials than the one I started with. All of which I also have data for. They’re earnest and optimistic. They embrace the system. They are pragmatic idealists, tinkerers more than dreamers, life hackers.Their world is so flat that they have no leaders, which is why revolutions from Occupy Wall Street to Tahrir Square have even less chance than previous rebellions. They want constant approval–they post photos from the dressing room as they try on clothes. They have massive fear of missing out and have an acronym for everything (including FOMO). They’re celebrity obsessed but don’t respectfully idolize celebrities from a distance. (Thus Us magazine’s “They’re just like us!” which consists of paparazzi shots of famous people doing everyday things.) They’re not into going to church, even though they believe in God, because they don’t identify with big institutions; one-third of adults under 30, the highest percentage ever, are religiously unaffiliated. They want new experiences, which are more important to them than material goods. They are cool and reserved and not all that passionate. They are informed but inactive: they hate Joseph Kony but aren’t going to do anything about Joseph Kony. They are probusiness. They’re financially responsible; although  have hit record highs, they have less household and credit-card debt than any previous generation on record–which, admittedly, isn’t that hard when you’re living at home and using your parents’ credit card. They love their phones but hate talking on them.
They are not only the biggest generation we’ve ever known but maybe the last large birth grouping that will be easy to generalize about. There are already microgenerations within the millennial group, launching as often as new iPhones, depending on whether you learned to type before Facebook, Twitter, iPads or Snapchat. Those rising microgenerations are all horrifying the ones right above them, who are their siblings. And the group after millennials is likely to be even more
empowered. They’re already so comfortable in front of the camera that the average American 1-year-old has more images of himself than a 17th century French king.
So, yes, we have all that data about narcissism and laziness and entitlement.But a generation’s greatness isn’t determined by data; it’s determined by how they react to the challenges that befall them. And, just as important, by how we react to them. Whether you think millennials are the new greatest generation of optimistic entrepreneurs or a group of 80 million people about to implode in a dwarf star of tears when their expectations are unmet depends largely on how you view change. Me, I choose to believe in the children. God knows they do.
The original version of this article said that Jean Twenge is a professor at the University of San Diego. Twenge is a professor at San Diego State University.