Generation y narcissism

The Surprisingly Boring Truth about Millennials and…

Are millennials the most self-centered generation ever?

Many people think so. The list of charges against them is as long as it is familiar: They’re immature, lazy, and selfish. They’re constantly taking selfies and sharing them on social media. They won’t deign to pay their dues at entry-level jobs. They can’t buy houses because they spend all their money on hipster status symbols like avocado toast.

At the core of these charges is a single psychological trait: narcissism.

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The more narcissistic you are, the more excessively you view yourself as powerful, important, and attractive. Although they do tend to have high self-esteem and well-being by certain definitions, narcissists are also prone to impulsivity, risky decisions, and unstable romantic relationships. When their ego is threatened, narcissists often respond with aggression.

But is the generation born after 1980 really more narcissistic than the ones who came before?

Behind the headlines lies a much more nuanced debate. For the past decade, academic researchers across North America and Europe have been trying to figure out if narcissism actually is on the rise among college students. The answer is far from clear—which means it might be time to rethink how we view more than one quarter of the U.S. population.

Ten years of the narcissism debate

The academic debate about trends in narcissism has played out in a series of papers, each claiming to use better statistical methods and better data than previous ones.

In these papers, researchers aren’t studying the personality disorder of narcissism but rather the personality trait, which exists along a spectrum. We all have narcissistic traits, and some of us simply have more than others. The anthropologist Michael Maccoby draws a distinction between unproductive narcissism and a more productive kind, which is found in many successful leaders. “Productive narcissists are not only risk takers willing to get the job done but also charmers who can convert the masses with their rhetoric,” he writes.

But there’s a danger: “Narcissism can turn unproductive when, lacking self-knowledge and restraining anchors, narcissists become unrealistic dreamers.” Which pretty much sums up millennials, says some research.

In a foundational 2008 paper, Jean Twenge (coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic) and her colleagues reviewed 85 studies that surveyed more than 16,000 college students between 1979 and 2006. (Here and in subsequent studies, the surveys are not following individual students over time, but rather capturing a snapshot of college students in a given year—allowing us to compare the undergraduates of the ‘80s to the undergraduates of the ‘00s, for example.) The researchers found that college students were becoming more narcissistic—by a full 30 percent from 1982 to around 2006.

“Every generation worries about the next generation and thinks that it’s unique to that generation”

―Dr. Kali Trzesniewski

UC Davis’s Kali Trzesniewski and colleagues responded in 2008 by analyzing surveys of nearly 27,000 students at three University of California campuses—Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Davis—from 1979 to 2007. The results indicated no change in narcissism. They claimed that their analysis used a better statistical technique and less biased respondents; the participants here were introductory psychology students completing obligatory testing rather than students who chose to sign up based on a study advertisement, which might attract a certain type of person.

In yet another 2008 paper, Twenge and Joshua Foster re-analyzed data from the study led by Trzesniewski. By separating out the results by ethnicity, they found that narcissism rose among both whites and Asians from 2002 to 2007. But because Asians tended to have lower narcissism scores in general, and the Asian population at UC campuses increased during the time period under scrutiny, the overall trend may have been obscured.

Twenge and Foster also objected to the data that Trzesniewski and her coauthors had used: While the earliest surveys came from UC Berkeley and Santa Cruz, the 2002-2007 surveys only came from UC Davis, where students—for whatever reason—tend to score particularly low in narcissism.

Further studies in 2009 and 2010 found no rise in narcissism. But a 2010 paper by Twenge and Foster objected to their methods: Those low narcissism scores at UC Davis had highlighted the need to statistically control for which school the students attended, which would mitigate any campus-related differences in narcissism levels. When Twenge and Foster updated their seminal 2008 study to include new surveys conducted between 2006 and 2009, and to account for school, they once again found that narcissism was increasing.

“The debate on changes in narcissism [is] seemingly settled,” Twenge and Foster wrote in 2010.

“Seemingly” being the keyword: In late 2017, a new study appeared in Psychological Science that called all the previous ones into question. University of Konstanz researcher Eunike Wetzel and colleagues looked at surveys of more than 60,000 students at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who had attended school between 1992 and 2015.

They found a “small and continuous decline” in narcissism throughout that time period.

The millennial is in the details

This paper revealed another problem. All of these studies use a complex survey called the Narcissism Personality Inventory (NPI), which forces respondents to choose between two statements—many of which seem relatively benign, even if you pick the “narcissistic” option:  

“I am not sure if I would make a good leader” vs. “I see myself as a good leader”
“I am assertive” vs. “I wish I were more assertive”
“Sometimes I tell good stories” vs. “Everybody likes to hear my stories”
“I just want to be reasonably happy vs. “I want to amount to something in the eyes of the world”
“Compliments embarrass me” vs. “I like to be complimented”

The 2017 analysis found that students’ interpretation of some statements had actually shifted over time. For example, students in the ‘90s endorsed the statement “I think I am a special person” at unexpectedly high rates, perhaps because it had a less narcissistic meaning then than it does today; the opposite was true of the statement “I know that I am good because everybody keeps telling me so.” The possibility that the significance of the Narcissism Personality Inventory could be changing—that a certain answer could reflect something different about a person then vs. now—was one that no previous study had considered.

On top of this revelation, as Trzesniewski and her colleagues pointed out in 2008, the NPI measures a wide range of narcissistic traits—from relatively benign leadership qualities to somewhat problematic vanity to a toxic sense of entitlement. In fact, one 2006 study went so far as to call the overall NPI a measure of “healthy narcissism,” saving the label “unhealthy narcissism” for high NPI scores combined with low self-esteem. In short, talking about young people’s narcissism may be less meaningful than talking specifically about their sense of entitlement or vanity.

Another question is whether changes in NPI scores—giving a few more narcissistic answers than your predecessors did—reflect significant, observable differences in real life. “I doubt that any changes (decreases or increases) of the size that have been reported are going to have any effects at the practical, real-life level,” says Wetzel, lead author of the 2017 study.

In sum, then, the debate is far from settled. Researchers are still arguing over which surveys should be included in the analysis, what kinds of statistical methods and controls to use, and whether we can take decades-old narcissism surveys at face value. (One thing researchers do agree on: If narcissism is rising, we can’t blame technology—the alleged trend started long before smartphones and selfies.)

Based on new data he and his team are collecting, Keith Campbell—a University of Georgia professor and coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic with Twenge—now believes that narcissism has been decreasing among college students since the Great Recession of 2008, although he still maintains that it was rising beforehand.

Campbell points to research suggesting that people who come of age in times of higher unemployment tend to become less narcissistic adults, perhaps because they experience more failures and setbacks and need to rely on others more. And he suggests that the 2017 study might show this pattern, too, if it used different statistical methods—which means we’ll likely see a slew of more papers aiming to figure out what’s really going on.

How stereotyping hurts

As researchers debate methodology, the rest of us need to ask: What happens when we classify an entire generation as entitled and vain?

Trzesniewski worries that labeling young people as narcissistic creates a harmful bias. If we expect 20-somethings to have a superiority complex, we may respond to them differently than we would otherwise, she says. Someone who stops in the middle of the sidewalk to check their phone could be counting “likes” on Facebook, or they could just be looking for the nearest pharmacy.

Even worse, Trzesniewski seems concerned that negative perceptions of young people could affect broader trends like their access to jobs and promotions—and their own mental health. In the phenomenon of “stereotype threat,” stereotypes become self-fulfilling prophecies because people are worried about confirming them. In other words, if millennials keep hearing that they’re immature and irresponsible, they may start to believe it.

“There’s a lot of negativity toward young people today,” says Trzesniewski. “Stereotypes lead to prejudice, which leads to harming the group that’s receiving the prejudice.”

Yet the stereotype may say more about us than it does about millennials. Lamenting about “kids these days” may be something older adults like to do, no matter what generation. A 2014 study found that people rated young adults worse on a whole range of attributes compared to older adults: more narcissistic, more overconfident, more immoral, less agreeable, and less emotionally stable. Compared to earlier generations, people saw young adults as less hardworking, trustworthy, and caring and more self-centered and lazy.

“There are compelling reasons to believe that negative perspectives of emerging adults are exaggerations,” write the authors of the 2014 study. “Every generation worries about the next generation and thinks that it’s unique to that generation,” says Trzesniewski.

Why people exaggerate is a separate question. Maybe, Trzesniewski suggests, they forget how they used to act at a young age, a time in development when it makes sense to focus on your own identity and goals (narcissism does, indeed, naturally decline with age). Some groups may have agendas, not all of which are transparent. Critics of current trends in parenting and education gain some ammunition from citing a narcissism epidemic, even if research doesn’t actually link the two. Employers who are struggling to retain young employees don’t have to change their company culture if they can blame millennials’ selfishness.

Newsmakers may benefit from that pessimistic narrative that a narcissism epidemic implies: Things are getting worse, and you can find out how at 10 o’clock. Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, sees the debate as really being about values: “Do you believe in the promise of youth—and an optimistic future—or do you veer toward more pessimistic, dystopian beliefs?” Sometimes, stereotyping young people might just indicate our anxiety about all the rapid change that’s happening today.

But even if narcissism is rising, the trend wouldn’t say anything about any one young person, any one student, or any one employee. It might be easy to blame narcissistic millennials for everything from ruining the workforce to killing marriage.

What’s harder, but ultimately more fruitful, is to sit with the uncertainty—and consider what else might be causing society’s problems.

Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation

Correction Appended: May 9, 2013

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 cold, hard 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% 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 times 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 is 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 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the nonprofit 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.

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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 exporting of Western culture and the speed of change, millennials worldwide are more similar to one another than to older generations within their nations. Even in China, where family history is more important than any individual, the Internet, urbanization and the one-child 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 exacerbated. 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 later 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.”

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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 e-mail 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 family 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.

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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 for a hit of dopamine (“Someone liked my status update!”) reduces creativity. From 1966, when the Torrance Tests of Creative 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 of face-to-face time and higher degrees of narcissism. Not only do 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.

What they do understand is how to turn themselves into brands, with “friend” and “follower” tallies that serve as sales figures. As with most sales, positivity and confidence work best. “People are inflating themselves like balloons on Facebook,” says W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, who has written three books about generational increases in narcissism (including When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself). When everyone is telling you about their vacations, parties and promotions, you start to embellish your own life to keep up. If you do this well enough on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, you can become a microcelebrity.

Millennials grew up watching reality-TV shows, most of which are basically documentaries about narcissists. Now they have trained themselves to be reality-TV-ready. “Most people never define who they are as a personality type until their 30s. So for people to be defining who they are at the age of 14 is almost a huge evolutionary jump,” says casting director Doron Ofir, who auditioned participants for Jersey Shore, Millionaire Matchmaker, A Shot at Love and RuPaul’s Drag Race, among other shows. “Do you follow me on Twitter?” he asks at the end of the interview. “Oh, you should. I’m fun. I hope that one day they provide an Emmy for casting of reality shows–because, you know, I’d assume I’m a shoo-in. I would like that gold statue. And then I will take a photo of it, and then I will Instagram it.” Ofir is 41, but he has clearly spent a lot of time around millennials.

I have gone just about as far as I can in an article without talking about myself. So first, yes, I’m aware that I started this piece–in which I complain about millennials’ narcissism–with the word I. I know that this magazine, which for decades did not print bylines, started putting authors’ names on the cover regularly in 2004 and that one of the first names was mine. As I mocked reality shows in the previous paragraph, I kept thinking about the fact that I got to the final round for 1995’s Real World: London. I know my number of Twitter followers far better than the tally on my car’s odometer; although Facebook has a strictly enforced limit of 5,000 friends, I somehow have 5,079. It was impossible not to remember, the whole time I was accusing millennials of being lazy, that I was supposed to finish this article nearly a year ago.

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I moved home for the first six months after college. When I got hired at Time, my co-workers hated me for cozying up to the editor of the magazine. I talk to one of my parents every other day and depend on my dad for financial advice. It’s highly possible that I’m a particularly lame 41-year-old, but still, none of these traits are new to millennials; they’ve been around at least since the Reformation, when Martin Luther told Christians they didn’t need the church to talk to God, and became more pronounced at the end of the 18th century in the Romantic period, when artists stopped using their work to celebrate God and started using it to express themselves. In 1979, Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism, “The media give substance to, and thus intensify, narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage common people to identify themselves with the stars and to hate the ‘herd,’ and make it more and more difficult for them to accept the banality of everyday existence.” I checked my e-mail three times during that sentence.

So while the entire first half of this article is absolutely true (I had data!), millennials’ self-involvement is more a continuation of a trend than a revolutionary break from previous generations. They’re not a new species; they’ve just mutated to adapt to their environment.

For example, millennials’ perceived entitlement isn’t a result of overprotection but an adaptation to a world of abundance. “For almost all of human history, almost everyone was a small-scale farmer. And then people were farmers and factory workers. Nobody gets very much fulfillment from either of those things,” says Jeffrey Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University, who invented the phrase emerging adulthood, which people foolishly use instead of the catchy twixters. Twixters put off life choices because they can choose from a huge array of career options, some of which, like jobs in social media, didn’t exist 10 years ago. What idiot would try to work her way up at a company when she’s going to have an average of seven jobs before age 26? Because of online dating, Facebook circles and the ability to connect with people internationally, they no longer have to marry someone from their high school class or even their home country. Because life expectancy is increasing so rapidly and technology allows women to get pregnant in their 40s, they’re more free to postpone big decisions. The median age for an American woman’s first marriage went from 20.6 in 1967 to 26.9 in 2011.

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And while all that choice might end in disappointment, it’s a lottery worth playing. “I had one grandfather fight in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic theater. One became a pilot; one became a doctor. When you grow up during the Great Depression and fight off the Nazis, you want safety and stability,” says Tucker Max, 37, who set an example for millennials when instead of using his Duke law degree to practice law, he took his blog rants about his drunken, lecherous adventures and turned them into a mega-best-selling book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, that he got an independent publisher to print. “Everyone told you that everyone above you had to s— on you before you got to s— on people below you. And millennials didn’t want to do that.”

In fact, a lot of what counts as typical millennial behavior is how rich kids have always behaved. The Internet has democratized opportunity for many young people, giving them access and information that once belonged mostly to the wealthy. When I was growing up in the 1980s, I thought I would be a lawyer, since that was the best option I knew about for people who sucked at math in my middle-class suburb, but I saw a lot more options once I got to Stanford. “Previously if you wanted to be a writer but didn’t know anyone who is in publishing, it was just, Well, I won’t write. But now it’s, Wait, I know someone who knows someone,” says Jane Buckingham, who studies workplace changes as founder of Trendera, a consumer-insights firm. “I hear story after story of people high up in an organization saying, ‘Well, this person just e-mailed me and asked me for an hour of my time, and for whatever reason I gave it to them. ’ So the great thing is that they do feel entitled to all of this, so they’ll be more innovative and more willing to try new things and they’ll do all this cool stuff.”

Because millennials don’t respect authority, they also don’t resent it. That’s why they’re the first teens who aren’t rebelling. They’re not even sullen. “I grew up watching Peanuts, where you didn’t even see the parents. They were that ‘Wah-wah’ voice. And MTV was always a parent-free zone,” says MTV president Stephen Friedman, 43, who now includes parents in nearly all the channel’s reality shows. “One of our research studies early on said that a lot of this audience outsources their superego to their parents. The most simple decision of should I do this or should I do that–our audience will check in with their parents.” A 2012 Google Chrome ad shows a college student video-chatting all the details of her life to her dad. “I am very used to seeing things where the cliché is the parent doesn’t understand. Most of my friends, their parents are on social and they’re following them or sharing stuff with them,” says Jessica Brillhart, a filmmaker at Google’s Creative Lab, who worked on the commercial. It’s hard to hate your parents when they also listen to rap and watch Jon Stewart.

In fact, many parents of millennials would proudly call their child-rearing style peer-enting. “I negotiate daily with my son who is 13. Maybe all that coddling has paid off in these parent-child relationships,” says Jon Murray, who created The Real World and other reality shows, including Keeping Up With the Kardashians. He says that seeing regular people celebrated on TV gives millennials confidence: “They’re going after what they want. It can be a little irritating that they want to be on the next rung so quickly. Maybe I’m partly responsible for it. I like this generation, so I have no issues with that.”

Kim Kardashian, who represents to nonmillennials all that is wrong with her generation, readily admits that she has no particular talent. But she also knows why she appeals to her peers. “They like that I share a lot of myself and that I’ve always been honest about the way I live my life,” she says. “They want relationships with businesses and celebrities. Gen X was kept at arm’s length from businesses and celebrity.” When you’re no longer cowed by power, you are going to like what a friend tells you about far more than what an ad campaign does, even if that friend is a celebrity trying to make money and that friendship is just a reply to one tweet.

While every millennial might seem like an oversharing Kardashian, posting vacation photos on Facebook is actually less obnoxious than 1960s couples’ trapping friends in their houses to watch their terrible vacation slide shows. “Can you imagine if the boomers had YouTube, how narcissistic they would’ve seemed?” asks Scott Hess, senior vice president of human intelligence for SparkSMG, whose TedX speech, “Millennials: Who They Are and Why We Hate Them,” advised companies on marketing to youth. “Can you imagine how many frickin’ Instagrams of people playing in the mud during Woodstock we would’ve seen? I think in many ways you’re blaming millennials for the technology that happens to exist right now. ” Yes, they check their phones during class, but think about how long you can stand in line without looking at your phone. Now imagine being used to that technology your whole life and having to sit through algebra.

Companies are starting to adjust not just to millennials’ habits but also to their atmospheric expectations. Nearly a quarter of DreamWorks’ 2,200 employees are under 30, and the studio has a 96% retention rate. Dan Satterthwaite, who runs the studio’s human-relations department and has been in the field for about 23 years, says Maslow’s hierarchy of needs makes it clear that a company can’t just provide money anymore but also has to deliver self-actualization. During work hours at DreamWorks, you can take classes in photography, sculpting, painting, cinematography and karate. When one employee explained that jujitsu is totally different from karate, Satterthwaite was shocked at his boldness, then added a jujitsu class.

Millennials are able to use their leverage to negotiate much better contracts with the traditional institutions they do still join. Although the armed forces had to lower the physical standards for recruits and make boot camp less intensive, Gary Stiteler, who has been an Army recruiter for about 15 years, is otherwise more impressed with millennials than any other group he’s worked with. “The generation that we enlisted when I first started recruiting was sort of do, do, do. This generation is think, think about it before you do it,” he says. “This generation is three to four steps ahead. They’re coming in saying, ‘I want to do this, then when I’m done with this, I want to do this.'”

Here’s something even all the psychologists who fret over their narcissism studies agree about: millennials are nice. They have none of that David Letterman irony and Gen X ennui. “The positivism has surprised me. The Internet was always 50-50 positive and negative. And now it’s 90-10,” says Shane Smith, the 43-year-old CEO of Vice, which adjusted from being a Gen X company in print to a millennial company once it started posting videos online, which are viewed by a much younger audience. Millennials are more accepting of differences, not just among gays, women and minorities but in everyone. “There are many, many subcultures, and you can dip into them and search around. I prefer that to you’re either supermainstream or a riot grrrl,” says Tavi Gevinson, a 17-year-old who runs Rookie, an online fashion magazine, from her bedroom when she’s not at school. It’s hard, in other words, to join the counterculture when there’s no culture. “There’s not this us-vs.-them thing now. Maybe that’s why millennials don’t rebel,” she says.

There may even be the beginning of a reaction against all the constant self-promotion. Evan Spiegel, 22, co-founder of Snapchat, an app that allows people to send photos, video and text that are permanently erased after 10 seconds or less, argues that it’s become too exhausting for millennials to front a perfect life on social media. “We’re trying to create a place where you can be in sweatpants, sitting eating cereal on a Friday night, and that’s O. K.,” he says.

But if you need the ultimate proof that millennials could be a great force for positive change, know this: Tom Brokaw, champion of the Greatest Generation, loves millennials. He calls them the Wary Generation, and he thinks their cautiousness in life decisions is a smart response to their world. “Their great mantra has been: Challenge convention. Find new and better ways of doing things. And so that ethos transcends the wonky people who are inventing new apps and embraces the whole economy,” he says. The generation that experienced Monica Lewinsky’s dress, 9/11, the longest wars in U.S. history, the Great Recession and an Arab Spring that looks at best like a late winter is nevertheless optimistic about its own personal chances of success. Sure, that might be delusional, but it’s got to lead to better results than wearing flannel, complaining and making indie movies about it.

So here’s a more rounded picture of millennials than the one I started with. All of which I also have data for. They’re earnest and optimistic. They embrace the system. They are pragmatic idealists, tinkerers more than dreamers, life hackers. Their world is so flat that they have no leaders, which is why revolutions from Occupy Wall Street to Tahrir Square have even less chance than previous rebellions. They want constant approval–they post photos from the dressing room as they try on clothes. They have massive fear of missing out and have an acronym for everything (including FOMO). They’re celebrity obsessed but don’t respectfully idolize celebrities from a distance. (Thus Us magazine’s “They’re just like us!” which consists of paparazzi shots of famous people doing everyday things.) They’re not into going to church, even though they believe in God, because they don’t identify with big institutions; one-third of adults under 30, the highest percentage ever, are religiously unaffiliated. They want new experiences, which are more important to them than material goods. They are cool and reserved and not all that passionate. They are informed but inactive: they hate Joseph Kony but aren’t going to do anything about Joseph Kony. They are probusiness. They’re financially responsible; although student loans have hit record highs, they have less household and credit-card debt than any previous generation on record–which, admittedly, isn’t that hard when you’re living at home and using your parents’ credit card. They love their phones but hate talking on them.

They are not only the biggest generation we’ve ever known but maybe the last large birth grouping that will be easy to generalize about. There are already microgenerations within the millennial group, launching as often as new iPhones, depending on whether you learned to type before Facebook, Twitter, iPads or Snapchat. Those rising microgenerations are all horrifying the ones right above them, who are their siblings. And the group after millennials is likely to be even more empowered. They’re already so comfortable in front of the camera that the average American 1-year-old has more images of himself than a 17th century French king.

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.

The original version of this article said that Jean Twenge is a professor at the University of San Diego. Twenge is a professor at San Diego State University.

Contact us at [email protected].

Generation of Narcissists: where is the line between selfishness and self-love?

0:00 GMT+06 • September 10, 2020 30 minutes Denmark Ermekkyzy

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“The indifferent, narcissistic and superficial generation of egoists are the children of social networks and dead screens, for whom Instagram followers are more important than their own parents. They are ambitious, but absolutely empty inside.

American scientists have dubbed today's young people the "generation of narcissists" and claim that the situation is only getting worse from year to year. Is the evolution of narcissism really so terrible, and can the zoomers be blamed for the fact that they are not different?

If we turn to Google for a definition, we will see the following wording: narcissism is a phenomenon of mental life that can manifest itself in varying degrees - from healthy to pathological. There are three types of narcissism:

Narcissistic reactions - a defensive reaction of any person to a situation in which his pride is hurt. These reactions are temporary and quite healthy manifestation of feelings.
Narcissistic character is inherent in people whose personality is organized around the support of their own "I" by receiving confirmation from society. This is not a clinical diagnosis, but one of the aspects of a personality type that is characterized by a dismissive attitude towards others, an exaggerated sense of self-worth and a refusal to comply with social norms.
Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental illness that has several degrees of complexity, and people suffering from it are under the supervision of qualified specialists. This disorder is characterized by a person's belief in their own uniqueness, special position, superiority over other people, etc. Only 1% of humanity suffers from a serious form of narcissistic disorder: it is dangerous for others to be with patients, and such a pathology is almost never treated.

The topic of narcissism is more relevant than ever in modern society: this term has quietly leaked out of reference books on psychiatry into everyday life and has become a frequent accusation towards vain, selfish people with inflated conceit.

Initially, the word "narcissus" came to our culture from ancient Greek mythology, in which it denoted the name of a beautiful young man who treated with disdain everyone who loved him.

By the end of the myth, Narcissus falls in love with himself and dies of hunger and suffering, unable to leave his own reflection in the water surface of the river, and his name subsequently becomes the designation of a clinical diagnosis and a common noun in colloquial speech.

Psychologists have long believed that high self-esteem necessarily leads to narcissism as a consequence, but recent research has found that narcissistic behavior and self-esteem have little in common. They are related to each other by a single factor: in both cases, people tend to evaluate themselves positively. The difference lies in the fact that if people with high self-esteem are simply satisfied with themselves, then narcissists strive to be the best and, if they fail to do so, they show anger and aggression.

Self-esteem is about respect and love for the real self without comparison with others, and narcissism is about the urgent need for self-affirmation against the background of another person and the need for rivalry.

People are talking more and more about the epidemic of narcissism, the beginning of which falls just during the heyday of generation Y, or, as they are also called, millennials. Representatives of this generation, born in the period from 1985 to 2000, launched a whole period of perestroika, acquired new values, laid the foundation for love of freedom, individuality and tolerance. Together with them, digital screens, advanced technologies and the “boom” of social networks came into the world, in which today there is so much narcissism, protrusion and self-confidence.

“I am Gen Y. I was born between AIDS and 9/11. We are called the Next generation. We are egotistical and narcissistic. Perhaps because we are the first generation where every child receives an award simply for participating. And, perhaps, from the fact that social networks allow us to put our every step or sandwich on public display, " - the heroine of Emma Roberts reads her monologue in the TV series American Horror Story.

How has social media affected narcissism?

People use Facebook and Twitter pages to attract attention, and social networks themselves are clearly not against this format. Their users launch start-ups, turn their names into brands, launch global trends, build careers online and make money on personal social media accounts, selling their skills, knowledge and creativity to hundreds of thousands of people.

If earlier people could show their narcissism only in a narrow circle of relatives and friends, now they have the opportunity to become known to a much wider audience, and for this it is not necessary to be a Hollywood star or other famous person.

Practice shows that a million audience can be gathered during a three-month quarantine by filming funny dances on TikTok or sharing interesting recipes on Instagram. Today we see with our own eyes a huge number of examples when people fall in popularity in a matter of days literally from nowhere.

Social network users are attracted by the opportunity to observe other people's lives and talk about their own. At the same time, it is not necessary to be 100% truthful, it is enough to skillfully wrap your content in an interesting cover.

True, there is already a tendency on the Web to be “tough”, that is, the more natural and real you show yourself, the more people you attract. Previously, everyone wanted to look at the perfect picture in order to escape from reality, but now there is a fashion for sincerity, and it has become more interesting for people to follow live accounts.

Despite this, society still encourages efficiency, selfishness and financial solvency - factors by which we are judged by others and due to which, accordingly, the number of unprincipled and tough careerists is growing.

A highly competitive technological world forces people to develop such qualities in themselves if they do not want to get lost among the gray mass and be suppressed. Some experts even argue that this is the next step in the evolution of mankind.

How do we feed our narcissism through social media?

The most important function of social networks has become the ability to show their own lives to users of any of the existing platforms, and since the publication of personal information is always an occasion to attract attention, a great opportunity has opened up for egocentrists to focus society on their person.

According to a study by scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas, there are several types of social media user behavior:

Passive use of when a person views someone else's content, but does not publish their own;

Upward comparison , when a person thinks that those whose “ideal” lives he sees on the Web have a much better fate;

Downward comparison when a person feels better after stumbling upon someone's post about troubles or failures, i.

e. a person internally asserts himself when others feel bad;

Social exclusion , when a person, for example, looks at photos of acquaintances from an event and regrets that he was not invited there.

According to the results of the study, people who are prone to megalomania and narcissism mainly use the “top-down comparison” behavior model, and also publish more information about themselves on the Internet.

Such people are accustomed to believing that everyone around them has a worse life than they do, and the realization of this brings them pleasure. But it is impossible to consider the results categorically, because there are both exceptions and a host of other behaviors. For example, when a person suffering from a severe form of narcissistic personality disorder feels uncomfortable on social networks.

There is also a reverse side of the coin. Self-acceptance and love, healthy self-esteem and inner harmony, as well as the need for self-expression can push for the publication of personal content.

Social media is also great for introverts and introverted people for whom exposing themselves and their opinions to the public becomes less scary when it is anonymous or happens in the comfort zone in front of a phone screen.

"The more a person publishes personal content - selfies, videos, characteristic posts on various topics, conversational stories - the more he is narcissistic" - a common, but not the most correct opinion. It doesn't work like that.

The buzzer generation needs to be heard, seen and recognized. Compared to Generation X, they are more cosmopolitan, free from boundaries and stereotypes, and from birth want to be leaders and revolve in the center of everyone's attention.

The main distinguishing features of digital "natives" are multitasking, clip thinking and the influence of the Internet.

These guys are able to do five different things at the same time, combine several completely different areas of activity and are simply indispensable for working in the field of IT technologies and programming.

The Zoomers want everything, immediately and now, which is why generations Y and Z are so ambitious, purposeful and internally unrecognized of any obligations - they easily and often make romantic connections, but try to avoid both marriage certificates and mortgages, loans and all sorts of permanence that entails responsibility. Hence, for example, there are followers of the childfree ideology, which is characterized by a conscious reluctance to have and raise children.

Contrary to popular belief, not all members of the digital generation are insensitive empty shells, they just want a better life, and you can't blame them for that.

Of course, the limits of generations are arbitrary: no one beats the gong every 25 years and shouts that millennials are being replaced by the generation of zoomers, but scientists are trying to carefully monitor changes in the principles and behavior of growing children.

Recently, the boundaries of generations have noticeably narrowed. If earlier it was believed that one generation replaces another on average once every 25 years, now the difference between generations hardly reaches ten years.

My brother is 5 years younger than me, but I don't always understand the music he and his friends listen to, the jokes they laugh at and their new principles. This happens because the unconditional increase in the speed of changes taking place in the world is an integral part of our lives, which we cannot influence.

Despite the fact that the principles and views of different generations differ markedly, there are things that remain stable forever. For example, humanistic values that are laid down in the womb, natural instincts, stable age stages of personality maturation and crises that every person goes through. Let today's children grow up and go through the stages of personality formation earlier, it still happens and should happen in the future, if there is no large-scale biological revolution.

If not from social media, where do daffodils come from?

The first thing that comes to mind is as simple and predictable as possible - everything comes from the family.

During the Soviet Union, self-respect and self-confidence were a kind of sword and shield against the harsh realities of the outside world. People thought that these qualities would help protect against adverse consequences. For example, self-respect will save you from teenage sex or the desire to get hooked on a needle.

Subsequently, the belief that self-esteem will protect us from all sorts of troubles was dissolved against the background of the theory that by raising inflated self-esteem in children from birth, we, without knowing it, are raising inveterate narcissists.

Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and author of the study "What to do so that the child does not grow up to be a narcissist?" Eddie Brummelman found that narcissism and high self-esteem can be the consequences of two parenting patterns, and the key moment in the formation of a child's personality occurs at 7-8 years old - exactly at the age when the child begins to compare himself with others.

A child whose parents from childhood emphasize his uniqueness, peculiarity and selectivity will be prone to the manifestation of narcissistic traits in the future. Parents who accept children as they are from the outset and do not try to make them more “comfortable” for themselves and others help them develop a healthy self-esteem.

Brummelman argues that an important tool for increasing self-esteem, but not the development of self-centeredness and megalomania, is the creation of high-quality social bonds.

Until now, there is no consensus on why a child develops a narcissistic personality type. Narcissism is considered to be mainly a psychological phenomenon with little to no genetic or biological factors involved. Education is another matter - the development of narcissism, first of all, depends on family relations, in the conditions in which the child grows, and then on relations in society.

Experts in this field are divided into two camps: some argue that narcissism is a consequence of an “overpraised” child, and others that, on the contrary, people who are not loved in childhood grow up as narcissists. Let's consider both cases.

Let's imagine that a parent loves his baby and appears instantly to praise and satisfy his every need even before the child understands what he wants. Over time, the child gets used to this model of upbringing and does not experience any needs until it merges into adulthood, where mom and dad are not around.
An already formed narcissist simply does not understand why others do not run at the first call to satisfy his needs and make every effort to surpass the people around him in everything. Overpraised children have a bunch of psychological and personality disorders and are forced to constantly achieve something in order to receive praise and satisfaction.
Another case is if parents treat their child too indifferently and in a special period when the child needs admiration, they do not pay attention to him. At the moment of praise, the neural structure of his brain called the striatum should have been activated and produced one of the “hormones of happiness” dopamine, but since the expected praise was not heard, the whole process gets stuck at the initial stage.
The child does not understand what is wrong with him and continues to live with a sense of inner inferiority. Such a person will subsequently spend his whole life looking for that praise that could compensate for its absence in childhood.

Education is one of the possible factors influencing the development of narcissistic personality disorder and its beginnings.

In addition, there are other reasons - the way of life, the mentality of different nationalities, the field of activity and even the geographical location of a person. PlosOne magazine conducted a study of the lives of West and East Germans, after which experts found that people living to the west of the Berlin Wall have a higher level of self-conceit than those living to the east of it - in the territory of the former socialist half of Germany.

Perhaps, like me, you missed the moment when the world was divided into an "Eastern" with a traditional collective mindset and a more individualistic "Western". So, this was influenced by centuries of history, the peculiarities of the cultures and traditions of each nation, as well as small factors that affect the separation of people within one country.

For example, differences in the characters of the inhabitants of southern and northern China are due to the fact that people in different regions have been cultivating different crops since ancient times.

Wheat cultivation was an individual occupation of the northerners, who later raised a more narcissistic generation, while rice cultivation required collective work, so the southerners did not suffer a similar fate. A similar situation occurs among conservatives and liberals in the United States, and this indicates that even a civic position and a political situation can affect the human psyche and its healthy or unhealthy development.

Loving your body and speaking your mind = being an egocentric narcissist?

The older generations always call the younger generations unpromising, lazy and lacking in moral principles. This stereotype has become so entrenched in society that millennials themselves believe that there are a lot of narcissists among them - the realization of this causes anxiety and anxiety among them.

It is not clear where these stereotypes come from and who invents them? If you look at the studies on which prejudices about the narcissism of today's youth are based, you can see that some of them sound very unconvincing.

According to the results of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, developed in 1978, the more a person chooses statements in the test with which he agrees, the higher the score gets, which means that he is more prone to megalomania.

The problem with the test is that it evaluates not only narcissism, but also healthy self-esteem, and the survey statements sound like “I am happy with my body”, “I deserve a better life”, “I want to live for myself”, “I I think that I have developed leadership qualities, etc. How many of you recognized yourself in the statements? Welcome to the club of self-centered narcissists.

There are also studies that study how literature changes over time, what words and expressions people began to use.

They found that the pronoun “I” began to appear in the literature much more often than “we”, the word “receive” now people consume more than “give”, which certainly indicates the development of their egocentricity.

Other critics tend to think that every generation is a generation of "me" who want to be recognized and strive to provide themselves with the very best. Back at 1988 in the movie "On the Beach" Bette Midler says the world-famous phrase "But enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me? , which in translation means “Enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think about me?" .

And if we remember the hippie subculture with all their inherent thirst for freedom, craving for spirituality, the famous "Make love, not war" and the sexual revolution that followed? Of course, the view of certain things changes over time, but only in part, so we see both similarities and differences between representatives of different generations.

Today, we cannot yet judge generation Z objectively, since its oldest representatives are no more than twenty years old, and those traits that are attributed to them, such as impatience, thirst for power, career growth, material well-being, freedom and independence, can be characterized by one the simple word "youth". What will change in the future? Time will show.

Narcissistic generation: swamp_lynx — LiveJournal

The peculiarity of the current moment is that it is no longer necessary to impress other people, it is enough to impress yourself. Others are almost enemies who strive to take away our charm, that is, an insult to the whole cruel world. And communication is mostly built in the circle of those who understand the rules of the game. Others either die due to age, or are removed when they see the algorithmic nature of such interactions and, as a result, the inability to reach out. If a society consists for the most part of people for whom feedback is unknown, then such a society is doomed, there will definitely be something else.

30 years of development of "civil society" have led to a dead end of artificial life, artificial happiness and success. And the more progressive a person is, the more radically he is cut off from reality, the more heights he will have to fall in order to regain a foothold.

Andrey Ignatiev . The myth of Narcissus may well be seen as an exposition of a blocked transit, while narcissism is obviously evidence of a permanent identity crisis: at the same time dependence on someone else's judgment of oneself and distrust of it. The story of Dorian Gray, who did not want and was afraid to grow old, is obviously also an exposition of blocked transit, also evidence of an identity crisis, which this time plays out as an inversion of the relationship between a real individual and his portrait. A middle-aged man, who at every opportunity demonstrates “ageism”, is just such a case, only in a strong, so to speak, dilution: his “I-concept”, of course, is also aging, but not as rapidly as his appearance.

Generation of narcissists: where is the line between selfishness and self-love?

"According to the US National Institutes of Health, the likelihood of narcissistic personality disorder is now almost three times higher in 20- and 30-year-olds than in those over 65. In 2009, college students scored 58% on the narcissism rating scale than in 1982.

"The indifferent, narcissistic and superficial generation of egoists are the children of social networks and dead screens, for whom Instagram followers are more important than their own parents. They are ambitious, but completely empty inside."0005

Narcissistic reactions - a defensive reaction of any person to a situation in which his ego is hurt. These reactions are temporary and quite healthy manifestation of feelings.

The narcissistic character is inherent in people whose personality is organized around the support of their own "I" by receiving confirmation from society. This is not a clinical diagnosis, but one of the aspects of a personality type that is characterized by a dismissive attitude towards others, an exaggerated sense of self-worth and a refusal to comply with social norms.

Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental illness that has several degrees of complexity, and people suffering from it are under the supervision of qualified specialists. This disorder is characterized by a person's belief in their own uniqueness, special position, superiority over other people, etc. Only 1% of humanity suffers from a serious form of narcissistic disorder: it is dangerous for others to be with patients, and such a pathology is almost never treated.

The topic of narcissism is more relevant than ever in modern society: this term has quietly leaked out of psychiatric reference books into everyday life and has become a frequent accusation towards vain, selfish people with inflated conceit.

Initially, the word "narcissus" came to our culture from ancient Greek mythology, in which it denoted the name of a beautiful young man who treats with disdain everyone who loved him.

Psychologists have long believed that inflated self-esteem, as a consequence, necessarily leads to narcissism, but recent research has found that narcissistic behavior and self-esteem have little in common. They are related to each other by a single factor: in both cases, people tend to evaluate themselves positively. The difference lies in the fact that if people with high self-esteem are simply satisfied with themselves, then narcissists strive to be the best and, if they fail to do so, they show anger and aggression.

Self-esteem is about respect and love for the real self without comparison with others, and narcissism is about the urgent need for self-affirmation against the background of another person and the need for rivalry.

“I am Gen Y. I was born between AIDS and 9/11. We are called the next generation. We are selfish and narcissistic. Perhaps because we are the first generation where every child is rewarded simply for participating. And, perhaps, from the fact that social networks allow us to put our every step or sandwich on public display, ”the heroine of Emma Roberts reads her monologue in the TV series American Horror Story.

How has social media affected narcissism?

People use Facebook and Twitter pages to attract attention, and social networks themselves are clearly not against this format. Their users launch startups, turn their names into brands, launch global trends, build careers online and make money on personal social media accounts, selling their skills, knowledge and creativity to hundreds of thousands of people.

Practice shows that a million audience can be gathered during a three-month quarantine by filming funny dances on TikTok or sharing interesting recipes on Instagram. Today we see with our own eyes a huge number of examples when people fall in popularity in a matter of days literally from nowhere.

Users of social networks are attracted by the opportunity to observe other people's lives and talk about their own. At the same time, it is not necessary to be 100% truthful, it is enough to skillfully wrap your content in an interesting cover.

How do we feed our narcissism through social media?

According to a study by scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas, there are several types of social network user behavior:

Active use, when a person publishes his own content and focuses on his person;
Passive use, when a person views someone else's content, but does not publish their own;
An upward comparison, when a person thinks that those whose "ideal" lives he sees on the Web have a much better fate;
Downward comparison, when a person feels better after stumbling upon someone's post about troubles or failures, i. e. a person internally asserts himself when others feel bad;
Social exclusion, when a person, for example, looks at photos of acquaintances from an event and regrets that he was not invited there.

According to the results of the study, people who are prone to megalomania and narcissism mostly use the “top-down comparison” behavior model, and also post more information about themselves on the Internet.

Such people are accustomed to believing that everyone around them lives worse than they do, and the realization of this brings them pleasure. But it is impossible to consider the results categorically, because there are both exceptions and a host of other behaviors. For example, when a person suffering from a severe form of narcissistic personality disorder feels uncomfortable on social networks.

There is another side to the coin. Self-acceptance and love, healthy self-esteem and inner harmony, as well as the need for self-expression can push for the publication of personal content.

“The more a person publishes personal content — selfies, videos, characteristic posts on various topics, conversational stories — the more he is narcissistic” - a common, but not the most correct opinion. It doesn't work like that.

The buzzer generation has a need to be heard, seen and recognized. Compared to Gen Xers, they are more cosmopolitan, free from boundaries and stereotypes, and from birth want to be leaders and spin in the spotlight.

The main distinguishing features of digital "natives" are multitasking, clip thinking and the influence of the Internet.

Zoomers want everything, immediately and now, that's why generations Y and Z are so ambitious, purposeful and internally unrecognized of any obligations - they easily and often make romantic connections, but try to avoid both marriage certificates and mortgages, loans and all sorts of permanence that entails responsibility. Hence, for example, there are followers of the childfree ideology, which is characterized by a conscious reluctance to have and raise children.

Contrary to popular belief, not all members of the digital generation are insensitive empty shells, they just want a better life, and you can't blame them for that.

If not from social media, where do daffodils come from?

The first thing that comes to mind is as simple and predictable as possible – everything comes from the family.

A child whose parents from childhood emphasize his uniqueness, peculiarity and selectivity will be prone to the manifestation of narcissistic traits in the future. Parents who accept children as they are from the outset and do not try to make them more “comfortable” for themselves and others help them develop a healthy self-esteem.

Brummelman argues that an important tool for increasing self-esteem, but not the development of self-centeredness and megalomania, is the creation of high-quality social bonds.

Let's imagine that a parent loves his baby and appears instantly to praise and satisfy his every need even before the child understands what he wants. Over time, the child gets used to this model of upbringing and does not experience any needs until it merges into adulthood, where mom and dad are not around.

An already formed narcissist simply does not understand why others do not run at the first call to meet his needs and make every effort to surpass the people around him in everything. Overpraised children have a bunch of psychological and personality disorders and are forced to constantly achieve something in order to receive praise and satisfaction.
Another case is if parents treat their child too indifferently and in a special period when the child needs admiration, they do not pay attention to him. At the moment of praise, the neural structure of his brain called the striatum should have been activated and produced one of the “hormones of happiness” dopamine, but since the expected praise was not heard, the whole process gets stuck at the initial stage.

The child does not understand what is wrong with him and continues to live with a sense of inner inferiority. Such a person will subsequently spend his whole life in search of that praise that could compensate for its absence in childhood.

Education is one of the possible factors influencing the development of narcissistic personality disorder and its beginnings.

In addition, there are other reasons - the way of life, the mentality of different nationalities, the field of activity and even the geographical location of a person. PlosOne magazine conducted a study of the lives of West and East Germans, after which experts found that people living to the west of the Berlin Wall have a higher level of self-conceit than those who live to the east of it - in the territory of the former socialist half of Germany.

Loving your body and speaking your mind = being an egocentric narcissist?

According to the results of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, developed in 1978, the more a person chooses statements in the test with which he agrees, the higher the score, which means that he is more prone to megalomania.

The problem with the test is that it assesses not only narcissism, but also healthy self-esteem, and the survey statements sound something like “I am happy with my body”, “I deserve a better life”, “I want to live for myself”, “I think that I have developed leadership qualities, etc. How many of you recognized yourself in the statements? Welcome to the club of self-centered narcissists.

There are also studies that study how literature changes over time, what words and expressions people began to use.

They found out that the pronoun "I" began to appear in the literature much more often than "we", the word "receive" now people consume more than "give", which certainly indicates the development of their egocentricity.

Other critics tend to think that every generation is a generation of "me" who want to be recognized and strive to provide themselves with the very best. Back at 1988 in the movie "On the Beach" Bette Midler says the phrase that has become famous all over the world "But enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?", which means "Enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think about me?".

Narcissistic demons: is it true that we live in an age of narcissism

"I believe that I am a special person." "I can live the way I want." "If I ruled the world, he would have been better.” “If I was on the Titanic, I should have been put on the boat first.”

These are statements from various psychological tests to determine the level of narcissism.

According to research by social psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, between 1982 and 2009, this figure increased for half of American college students.
They are more likely than previous generations to believe that they are unique and deserve special treatment. They experience less interest in others, set themselves inflated goals and do not cope well with failures.

In the best-selling book The Narcissistic Epidemic, Twenge and Campbell conclude that we are in the midst of a massive cultural pandemic. In their opinion, Western individualism has gone too far: it "can be a source of such positive things as equality and tolerance, but it becomes a disadvantage when it develops into narcissism and arrogance."

The idea that the most important thing in life is self-love has become an obsessive cultural mantra. Millions of parents have taught their children over the years how special and wonderful they are. The children grew up and came to the conclusion that everyone around them owed them something. As writer Bret Easton Ellis said, “We have raised a generation of self-confident and optimistic people who are simply paralyzed when even a drop of negativity enters their lives.”

The authors draw their conclusions, among other things, from the results of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), developed in 1978. By the way, researchers record the highest growth in NPI results among women.

Pathological narcissists, apparently, are not born, but become as a result of a lack of parental warmth at an early age, psychological abuse or overprotection, when they try to protect the child from any negative emotions. Psychologists distinguish several forms of this disorder. Some narcissists are bossy extroverts who love to flaunt themselves and bask in praise and applause. Others are more self-absorbed and very sensitive to criticism.

Some psychiatrists even distinguish a separate disorder - Narcissistic Victim Syndrome. People who are in a close relationship with a narcissist experience fear and anger because of their helplessness, feel deceived and doubt their own adequacy.

Narcissism can manifest itself in completely different ways, and narcissism is far from being its main component. Diagnosing someone on the basis of superficial observations would be wrong - only a psychiatrist can do this after careful observation.

According to modern psychotherapists, the basis of narcissistic disorder is not excessive vanity, but the split of the psyche into two elements: a grandiose "I" and an insignificant "I". The source of the problem is not an excess of pride, but its lack.

As psychoanalyst Sandy Hotchkis writes, "When you encounter the arrogance of the narcissistic personality, what you see is not true pride, but a deep and irrational fear of your worthlessness." The main goal and need of a true narcissist is to assert himself at the expense of others.

“They are looking for someone who can mirror their sense of worth and who can take on the unbearable burden of their shame and envy. For the narcissistic personality, the partner is just a means to bring together parts of his personality, replenish his resources and help him hide the defects of his personality.
From the book Infernal Web. How to Survive in a World of Narcissism

If you're worried about the idea that you might be a narcissist, you're probably fine. If it seems to you that everyone around you is a narcissist, except for you, then you should worry.

“Narcissism is cultivated by modern society, encouraged in the media and the Internet space. In connection with the epidemic of narcissism, contact with the "infected" is almost inevitable...

If narcissists were just klutzes or ordinary crooks, interaction could be easily avoided. But the power of their attractiveness, charm, charm acts like a magnet, and we are more and more drawn to them.”

Linguists record an important change in the Russian language: a new vocabulary associated with building personal boundaries, psychotrauma and psychological defenses has been fixed in it: toxic relationships, gaslight, trigger, hate, devalue.
Physical and psychological violence, which used to be considered the norm, is becoming the object of close attention and criticism. Despite all the benefits, this process also has a dark side - the desire to hang diagnoses on other people and condemn them for qualities that we ourselves do not want to admit.

Back in the 1970s, cultural critics lamented a culture of narcissism that encouraged superficial pleasures and inflated self-esteem. Their accusations sound very familiar: the work ethic has died, hedonism and self-indulgence have become the main value; religion gave way to "narcissistic self-improvement cults"; society has lost its moral compass."

Christopher Lash "The Culture of Narcissism"

"K. Lash became widely known primarily as the author of the concept of "narcissistic culture", within which he tried to identify and analyze a single trend of fundamental changes in the nature and mechanisms of functioning of modern Western culture, seeing her coming to replace the classic Western "culture of competitive individualism" with a new all-encompassing "narcissistic culture" with its inherent diverse socio-pathological phenomena. According to Lash, the etiology of modern narcissism is of particular interest, since it has a two-dimensional nature: individual-personal (the subject of psychoanalysis) and socio-cultural (subject of culture criticism).

According to the concept of K. Lash, the current evolution of Western consciousness from "economism" to "psychologism", accompanied by a crisis of traditional values, causes a change in the type of culture, sanctioned by the sophisticated ideology of "new paternalism", using the rhetoric of social liberalism to cover up the total dependence of the individual on the all-pervading bureaucratic power of social institutions, state and corporations. The introduction within the framework of the "new paternalism" of indirect forms of social control based not so much on coercion and violence as on the internal manipulation of the individual, determined the socio-psychological coloring of the new culture - a narcissistic culture that affirms not so much individualism as solipsism, justifying self-immersion as authenticity and comprehension. To justify the vigilant quasi-guardianship of the individual by the ruling bureaucracy, which actually deprives the freedom and responsibility of an adult, a therapeutic ethics is put forward, replacing the utilitarian ethics of the bourgeois state of the 19th century. Thus, according to Lash, the traditional “bourgeois culture, which now exists only in the backyards of industrial society”, is being replaced by “a new therapeutic culture of narcissism”. He sees the essence of the modification that has taken place in the fact that state and social institutions, under the pretext of caring for the welfare of citizens, destroy the autonomy of the individual, contribute to a deeper and more sophisticated penetration of alienation into the human psyche. The transformation of an ordinary individual of modern society from a citizen into a client, from an employee into a consumer is sanctioned by the irrationally inaccessible authority of various experts and specialists (doctors, psychiatrists, sociologists, and others), who persistently inspire people with the idea that personal self-preservation and development are the only goals worthy of a human being. existence.

According to K. Lash, the emergence of a narcissistic personality as a social type is a natural consequence of the evolution of mass society, where the growth of social control systems (both in direct and indirect forms) is inevitably accompanied by the abolition of the autonomy of the individual, the progressive infantilization of the individual. The narcissistic regression of the individual into the world of fantasies, fears and dreams as a dangerous disease of culture is provoked and reproduced on an extended scale by the entire system of modern Western-type civilization, which has gradually turned into a complex interconnected system of technologies based on mass production, mass consumption, mass communications, mass culture. The moral legalization of mindless consumerism changes not only the appearance of culture, but also the nature of the individual's involvement in it. Instead of the pathos of self-education with a gradual ascent to the values of high culture, characteristic of the New European consciousness of the 17th–19th centuries, a model of utilitarian consumption of those cultural benefits is put forward, the marketability of which (novelty, sensationalism, etc.) is strongly emphasized. The gradual realization that a person can be successfully exploited not only at an enterprise as an employee, but also in his spare time as a consumer of goods and services, led to a radical restructuring of the sphere of creation and dissemination of culture, its commercialization and direct subordination to the commodity-economic laws of the capitalist market. The growth of reification and standardization of the subject of modern mass culture turns the individual from the creator (or co-creator) of cultural values into their consumer. The resulting deep deformation of the subject and object of culture leads to the disappearance of the individual's freedom to choose culture samples, his own strategy of familiarization with culture, what Lash calls "self-culture" - "self-cultivation", that is, self-development through culture.

A hedonistic consumer of mass culture surrogates is certainly a socio-pathological phenomenon, but there are also much more subtle and indirect ways of forming the artificial needs of the masses. They are connected, first of all, with the promotion of consumer behavioral attitudes in society, the planting of the cult of "a person who lives for himself", the introduction into the masses of values and ideals that were previously the privilege of an elite culture: sensationalism, ideas about one's own chosenness and superiority over the crowd, aestheticism , ethical unscrupulousness and the like. The temptation of the layman by the individualistic values of pseudo-elite culture reflects the actual disappearance of differences between mass and elite cultures, uniting in a single, consumer-oriented narcissistic culture, mass in form of distribution and allegedly elitist in content, as well as the sophistication of the strategy of ideological taming of the masses, turning them into infantile "slaves of the status -quo. The deformation of the family under the influence of narcissistic culture and its institutions also contributes to the total infantilization of the personality: the growth of economic, political, social and psychological pressure on the family, causing not only the erosion of parental authority, but also its actual transfer to a network of various state, public and private institutions, the destruction of the traditional family way of life, every possible encouragement of the accelerated intellectual and sexual development of children, provoking early and devastating for the child's psyche contact with the world of adults, against the background of complete neglect of the real needs of their spiritual and mental development, the crisis of family relations and the weakening of family ties between spouses, parents and children - all this leads to the abolition of the socio-cultural role of the family in modern society, and, as a result, its degradation and transformation into a "product of egalitarian ideology, consumer capitalism and therapeutic thinking. "

Thus, K. Lash sees the meaning of “narcissism” of modern Western culture in the fact that certain socio-psychological mechanisms have developed in it that encourage the development of not evolutionary, but “regressive” capabilities of human consciousness and psyche, as evidenced by general changes in the structure of Western society: a shift in the emphasis in the economy to consumption; the development of giant transnational corporations, pushing the principle of impersonal bureaucratic power to the limit; the prevailing atmosphere of anonymity, alienation, fear and uncertainty in society, diverting all the forces of the individual to mastering the art of social survival; intrusive stimulation of various kinds of subjectivist pseudo-needs as a prestigious model of behavior, their complete immediate satisfaction through an extensive system of services, and along with this, experiencing the obvious ephemerality of consumed material, aesthetic and other values turned into a commodity; the hypertrophied development of mass culture and media with their fundamental orientation towards blurring the line between reality and illusion, constructing and broadcasting a dream-like reality created in line with the selfish needs and infantile aspirations of the mass of consumers. All this replicates the image of a narcissistic "mirror man" who perceives the world around him as a projection of himself. However, at the bottom of the narcissistic dream of self-sufficiency - helplessness and fear as the impossibility of realizing how illusory the foundation of absolute, total, anonymous dependence is based on.

A breakthrough to a “new culture”, according to K. Lash, is impossible without recognizing the immutable value of the “authentic, adult, integral Self”, that is, without overcoming “narcissism” - whether in the form of the currently dominant technocratic imperative with its illusion of achieving omnipotence, or in the form of pseudo-humanistic illusions cultivated by radical left thinkers (“new left”, “Freudo-Marxists”, “pacifists”, “ecologists”, “naturalists”, “radical feminists” and so on) within the framework of numerous projects calling for the rejection of “cultural orthodoxy", "repressive rationalism" and "totalitarian technocracy" of the consumer society, but in essence aimed at eradicating the self in a person as an imaginary source of all kinds of social evils, and thereby demonstrating the inability to understand the true nature of the individual with its complex, sometimes painful dialectics of becoming.

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