Narcissism Is A Survival Mechanism In An Age Of Anxiety
Is social media really a “vanity project”?
On May 20, 2013, Joel Stein of Time magazine published an article titled “Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation,” an attack on the narcissistic tendencies of the millennial generation, a calling out of my generation as “lazy, entitled, selfish, and shallow.” Stein’s analysis of millennials, the generation born from 1980 to 2000, goes beyond a cookie-cutter use of statistics to support his point, but analyzes why we have become the most narcissistic generation ever: “They are the most threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution, not because they’re trying to take over the Establishment but because they’re growing up without one.”
Stein couldn’t label millennials simply the “Me” generation, because that title is taken by our predecessors, the baby boomers. He points to the invention of the concept of self-esteem in the 1970s, and the problem with that is “when people try to boost self-esteem, they accidentally boost narcissism instead.” He later quotes researcher Sean Lyons in saying that we are in “a crisis of unmet expectations.”
The only thing worse than our narcissism is what arises from it: entitlement. We have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any group…
