I suppose it’s the right of every generation to look at the generation that follows it and analyze its faults. Still, there’s no denying that America is only get sicker over time, not healthier. Thus, the Washington Times offers a look at the current generation by an author who calls it “an army of narcissists.”
(Let’s concede that this is a generalization. You can’t fit every individual in a generation into a template. For example, the Greatest Generation that fought WWII and brought the country of the Depression also included lots of criminals and psychopaths and the usual dregs of society.)
What this author, Jane Twenge, who wrote “Generation Me : Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before,” is saying is that Americans born after 1970 have not experienced a world of self-sacrifice and denial, at least not to the extent that previous generations have.
Instead, they were raised in a culture obsessed with self-esteem and feel-good mantras such as “Believe in yourself, and you can be anything” and “Never give up on your dreams.” The result is a generation of youths who are tolerant, confident, open-minded, ambitious—and have wildly unreasonable expectations about how they fit into the adult world. “They expect to go to college, to make lots of money, and perhaps even to be famous,” Mrs. Twenge says. But when reality hits, and they don’t get the coveted college placement or high-paying job, or they discover the high costs of housing and health care, many members of Generation Me crash emotionally, she says.
Life isn’t worth living
Technorati Tags: culture, generation me, self-esteem, youth
