Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2009–2017years
67% recommend33% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Quillette had a good essay on this recently [1]
Excerpt:
The Kids Are All Right written by Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard
Loudly chomping on a stick of gum, Emily finished the last few words of her barely comprehensible text message: “BTW..that shit was cray. WTF!! : )” She laughed, and slid back into her seat to listen. The professor droned on about some dead playwright named Shakespeare. Who cares? The monotone began to recede as she opened her laptop and checked her Instagram, eagerly eyeing the number of “likes” her latest selfie had obtained. One thousand and twenty two! This thrilled her. However, her cheer temporarily soured as she remembered that her BMW was in the shop. How unfair. Now she had to ride home with her roommate Rebecca, a nerd who would force her to listen to pretentious “indie” bands on the drive home. Ugh. Her aged, out of touch, and pedantic professor finally ceased speaking of something called Hamlet and dismissed the class. Excitedly, Emily stood up, pulled down her pink “I love me” shirt, and walked out of the classroom. As she entered the hall, she quickly turned up the volume of her iPod, humming along to the lyrics of her favorite pop song: “I’m so fancy/can’t you taste this gold/Remember my name/bout to blow.”
If you believe that society is deteriorating as traditional values and moral verities decay, Emily is your worst nightmare: vain, selfish, impulsive, and dismissive of anything of transcendent value. You are also not alone. Many moral theorists, from Hesiod to Russell Kirk, have warned about the selfishness and moral vacuousness of the next generation. Recently, researchers have put forward data that seem to at least partially support such pessimism about Millennials. In fact, Jean Twenge’s excellent and entertaining book about these Millennials is tellingly entitled Generation Me.¹ She and W. Keith Campbell followed this book with the more ominously titled, The Narcissism Epidemic.²
Yet in this essay, we will forward a more optimistic perspective, arguing that although some of the data Twenge and her colleagues have advanced are correct, their interpretation of them is not. Some indicators of self-regard and even narcissism have increased from the 70s through to the 2000s, but these increases don’t reflect increasing narcissism; rather they reflect increasing humanism–a general emphasis on the value of all individuals, including the self.³
The kids are not only all right; in many ways, they are better than we are.
[1] http://quillette.com/2016/01/05/the-kids-are-all-right-2/
- One of the top researchers on the topic of self-esteem being snake oil, along with Roy Baumeister, is Jean Twenge. She has a couple books: Generation Me [1] and The Narcissism Epidemic [2]. The online presence for both is strong:
- First it was Generation Me in 2006 [1], then The Narcissism Epidemic in 2010 [2], and now iGen in 2017 [3]. All three books follow exactly the same pattern: stick a vapid and insulting nickname onto the latest generation, call that generation lonely and narcissistic, and blame it all on the latest technological innovations while completely ignoring the broader economic and social context. Each book directly contradicts the previous one and directly contracts her own previous studies [4], while simply reusing the same arguments and switching the target from generation to generation.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Americans-Confident-Assert...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Narcissism-Epidemic-Living-Age-Entitl...
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy...
[4] https://www.livescience.com/52771-why-teens-are-happy-adults... "Very quickly, Twenge said, a pattern emerged: The eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders of today are happier than the eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders of previous decades."
