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WHY MILLENIALS WILL SAVE US ALL
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
academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.
Here’s the code, hard data: the incident of narcissistic personality disorder in 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 survey; four time 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 as 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 Clarck University Poll
of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the non-profit 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.
Millennials consist, depending on whom you ask, of people born from 1980 to 2000. To put it
more simply for them, since they grew up not having to do a lot of math in their heads, thanks to
computers, the group is made up mostly of teens and 20-somethings. At 80 million strong, they are
the biggest age grouping in American history. Each country’s millennials are different, but because
of globalization, social media, the export of Western culture and the speed of change, millennials
worldwide are more similar to one another than to old generations within their nations. Even in China,
where family history is more important than any individual, the internet, urbanization and the onechild
policy have created a generation as overconfident and self-involved as the Western one. And
these aren’t just rich-kid problems: poor millennials have even higher rates of narcissism, materialism
and technology addiction in their ghetto-fabulous lives.
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. The Industrial Revolution made individuals far more powerful - they could
move to a city, start a business, read and form organizations. The information revolution has further
empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge organizations:
hackers vs. corporations, bloggers vs. newspapers, terrorists vs. Nation-states, YouTube directors vs.
studios, app-makers vs. entire industries. Millennials don’t need us. That’s why we’re scared of them.
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
exarcebated. 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
genetic 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, indeed, 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 latter 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 email
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. Though they’re cocky about their place in the world, millennials are also stunted, having
prolonged a life stage between teenager and adult that this magazine once called twixters and will
now use once again in an attempt to get that term to catch on. The idea of the teenager started in the
1920s; in 1910, only a tiny percentage of kids went to high school, so most people’s social interactions
were with adults in their families or in the workplace. Now that cell phones allow kids to socialize at
every hour – they send and receive an average of 88 texts a day, according to Pew – they’re living
under the constant influence of their friends. “Peer pressure is anti-intellectual. It is anti-historical. It
is anti-eloquence,” says Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, who wrote The Dumbest
Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t
Trust Anyone Under 30). “Never before in history have people been able to grow up and reach age
23 so dominated by peers. To develop intellectually you’ve got to relate to older people, older things:
17-year-olds never grow up if they’re just hanging around other 17-year-olds.” Of all the objections
to Obamacare, not a lot of people argued against parents’ need to cover their kids’ health insurance
until they’re 26.
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 of a hit of dopamine (“Someone liked my status update!”)
reduces creativity. From 1966, when the Torrance Tests of Creativity 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 to face-to-face time and higher degrees of narcissism. Not do only 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.
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.
Source: Time. Available at http://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/
Accessed on October 24, 2016.
In “this generation has the highest likelihood of having unmet expectations (...)” (paragraph 6),
the prefix un means