Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me ...wp.lps.org/tnettle/files/2015/03/Every-Every-Every...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

MAY 9, 2013 1:35PM ET

Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me MeMe GenerationELSPETH REEVE

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Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Genera... http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/05/me-generation-time/...

1 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

apparently a marked departure from the Baby Boomers, who

were the plain old "Me Generation" (one me, no caps) and

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.

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


3 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

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.


4 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

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.


5 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

...

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


6 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

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


7 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

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


8 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

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.


9 of 19 3/17/15, 10:11 AM

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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Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me ...wp.lps.org/tnettle/files/2015/03/Every-Every-Every...Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation ELSPETH REEVE