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“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. 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. “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. It’s a better message,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, who wrote Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic. 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.
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“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 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. 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. They got this way partly because, in the 1970s, people wanted to improve kids’ chances of success by instilling self-esteem. This is a generation that would have made Walt Whitman wonder if maybe they should try singing a song of someone else. They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group. 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. 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. 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.
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The information revolution has further empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge organizations: hackers vs. The Industrial Revolution made individuals far more powerful–they could move to a city, start a business, read and form organizations. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow.