Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation

Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Genera...
http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/05/me-generation-time/...
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MAY 9, 2013 1:35PM ET
Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me
Me Generation
ELSPETH REEVE
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Millennials are the "ME ME ME GENERATION," writes
Joel Stein for the cover of Time magazine, which is
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Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Genera...
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apparently a marked departure from the Baby Boomers, who
were the plain old "Me Generation" (one me, no caps) and
4 The Science of Near-Death
Experiences
who created the "Me Decade" in the 1970s, and who coined
the phrase, "But enough about me… what do you think about
me?" in the 1980s when they were raising the next
narcissists, Generation X. Sometimes you get the sense that
these magazines' cultural writers have very little experience
with the entire American culture, and prefer to make their
grand analyses based on what people they know in the
gentrified parts of cities like New York and Los Angeles were
talking about at brunch last weekend. The type of young
person that magazine writers come across most frequently
are magazine interns. Because the media industry is
high-status, but, at least early on, very low pay in a very
expensive city, it attracts a lot of rich kids. Entitled, arrogant,
spoiled, preening — those are the alleged signature traits of
Millennials, as diagnosed by countless magazine writers.
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Those traits curiously align perfectly with the signature
traits of a rich kid. Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of
Instagram? If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to
crafting the composite personality of a generation that
fought three wars for you.
To Stein's credit, he has some sociological research to
make his case — he brings "the cold, hard data."
However, much of his data can be countered by other
data. For example, Stein writes:
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. In 1992,
the nonprofit Families and Work Institute
reported that 80 percent of people under 23
wanted to one day have a job with greater
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responsibility; 10 years later, only 60 percent did.
Yes,
people are marrying later and the economy sucks. The
unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, a full point
lower, if Washington — you might know them as "old
people" — hadn't implemented spending cuts in 2011,
The New York Times reports. As for laziness, the chart
at right shows that as worker productivity has soared,
wages have remained stagnant. We're all working hard,
we're just not getting paid.
But here is Stein's most important bit of 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 percent
more college students scored higher on a
narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.
About that. There is another paper over at NIH.gov that
argues that that is kind of maybe completely wrong. In
a 2010 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological
Science and titled "It Is Developmental Me, Not Generation
Me," Brent W. Roberts. Grant Edmonds, and Emily Grijalva
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write:
First, we show that when new data on
narcissism are folded into preexisting
meta-analytic data, there is no increase in
narcissism in college students over the last
few decades. Second, we show, in contrast,
that age changes in narcissism are both
replicable and comparatively large in
comparison to generational changes in
narcissism.
Basically, it's not that people born after 1980 are
narcissists, it's that young people are narcissists, and
they get over themselves as they get older. It's like doing
a study of toddlers and declaring those born since 2010 are
Generation Sociopath: Kids These Days Will Pull Your Hair,
Pee On Walls, Throw Full Bowls of Cereal Without Even
Thinking of the Consequences. Further, they write:
In turn, when older people are told that younger
people are getting increasingly narcissistic, they
may be prone to agree because they confuse the
claim for generational change with the fact that
younger people are simply more narcissistic
than they are. The confusion leads to an
increased likelihood that older individuals will
agree with the Generation Me argument despite
its lack of empirical support.
Hahaha, you doddering old confused fools! Generation Abe
Simpson!
For some visual evidence of this phenomenon, here is a
century or so of culture writers declaring the youth to be
self-obsessed little monsters.
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The Atlantic,
September 1907: In
the cover story,
"Why American
Marriages Fail,"
Anna A. Rogers
warned, "The rock
upon which most of
the flower-bedecked marriage barges go to pieces is the
latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the
brazen calf of the Self."
Life, May 17, 1968: "The
Generation Gap." An uncle
and his 20-year-old
nephew detail their
experiences living
together one summer. It
goes how you'd expect,
except that Uncle Ernie
tried weed for the first
time. Like, one time, Ernie
met his nephew's friends at a diner:
Then somebody said, "Would you take the Dow
account?"
"You bet," I said.
"Even though they make napalm?" he asked.
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...
Even as I said it I knew the phrase to make a
living could have absolutely no meaning to
these children of the affluent society.
New York, August 23,
1976: "The 'Me' Decade
and the Third Great
Awakening." Tom Wolfe
opened this story with a
sobering account of some
kind of Los Angeles thing
in which a couple
hundred people got
together and pressed "the
reset button" on
something that really
bothered them, and for one lady, that thing was hemorrhoids.
"In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand
puzzles of the 1970s, a period that will come to be known as
the Me Decade."
New York
Times, October 17,
1976: "'76 Politics
Fail to Disturb
Campus Calm and
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Cynicism." The
youth were too
busy navel gazing
to care about
politics. "The Now Generation has become the Me
Generation," the Times said. A photo of a napping youth read,
"A student at UCLA was more interested in an afternoon nap
last week than a speech by Gary Familian, a Democratic
House candidate."
The Washington
Monthly, February
1980: Greg Easterbrook
wrote about how young
people were having
trouble coupling in
"Fear of Success"
(subhed: "If you want
me, she said, I’ll be
hiding under the bed").
And while he said we
can't
blame everything on
self-obsession, he did
acknowledge a major
social trend. "It is tempting to see willing
disappointment in romance as a symptom of
self-obsession: since no lover can rival in grandeur the
upper-case Self, what is to be gained from giving one's
affection? But me-mania is a fashion, not a level of
spirit." This was plugged on the cover as "THE NOT-ME
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GENERATION."
Newsweek, December
30, 1985: "The Video
Generation." There they
are, those preening
narcissists who have to
document every banal
moment with their
cutting-edge
communications
technology.
Time, July 16,
1990: Cover:
"Twentysomething."
Inside: "Proceeding
With Caution." Yes, like
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every generation, Gen X
was a bunch of
screwups: "They have
trouble making
decisions. They would
rather hike in the
Himalayas than climb a
corporate ladder… They crave entertainment, but their
attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial… They
postpone marriage because they dread divorce."
However, in 1990, Time ranked them as not as terrible
as their parents on at least one score: "By and large, the
18-to-29 group scornfully rejects the habits and values
of the baby boomers, viewing that group as
self-centered, fickle and impractical." That scorn does
not lead to being much different. "Like Madonna in her
hit song 'Vogue,' this generation knows how to 'strike a
pose.'"
Swing, September 1996:
"Generational Warfare." Look
out old man, there's a
well-groomed nihilist in his
sexual prime coming your
way.
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Time, August 6, 2007:
"It's All About Me."
China's
"twentysomethings"
had boldly gone where
every other generation
had gone before.
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