Young celebrities seem to love the overshare just as much as GenMe’s less famous members. “When I’m alone, I do masturbate a lot,” notes James Franco. “We have sex like Kenyan marathon runners,” boasts Olivia Wilde.
Oversharing is also the name of the game on Facebook and Twitter. Although people eventually learned that posting everything on Facebook was not the best idea (pictures of you drunk at a party = no job offer), social media still provides a much more public forum for our lives than previous generations had. A survey by babycenter.com found that half of new mothers sent text messages or updated their Facebook profiles while they were in labor—once among the most private of moments. Cell phones, with their ability to take pictures and instantly send them, provide another way to overshare: snap a nude picture of yourself to entice your crush. A recent survey found that 28% of 15- and 16-year-olds had sent a nude picture of themselves by e-mail or text—and 57% had been asked to. It’s so common it even has a clever name: sexting.
GENERATION DIRECT
GenMe’s openness extends to all kinds of communications at work and at home. Some older business managers complain that young people today are too blunt. These managers say that young employees ask for instant feedback that’s straightforward and unapologetic, and give it in return. Some managers are surprised at young people’s willingness to critique the performance of older people—it’s a combination of the eroding respect for authority and the compulsive honesty of the younger generation. In a 2009 survey, GenMe’ers were much more likely than other generations to tell their manager they were looking for another job.
Young people see their directness as an asset. In one episode of the teen soap The O.C., 16-year-old Seth makes a sarcastic comment, after which his father tells him, “Watch your mouth—I was trying to be polite. You might want to give it a try.” Seth replies, “No, thanks, I’d rather be honest.” So, to some GenMe’ers, if you’re not true to yourself, and you conform to someone else’s rules, you might be seen as dishonest or a victim of peer pressure—and avoiding that is more important than being polite. For GenMe “not being yourself” equates to being somehow unwhole and false. Kim, 21, says her mother worries too much about other people’s opinions; her mother says Kim should be ashamed when she doesn’t take care with her appearance. Kim disagrees: “She should be ashamed of herself for being fake.”
One student of mine took this principle a little too far. Aaron, 22, was the kind of student a teacher dreads—well intentioned and even sweet, but unable to keep his unorthodox opinions to himself. By the end of the term, the other students were openly hostile toward him because he interrupted the class so many times. He didn’t see things this way, however. “You might view me as a ‘rebel without a cause,’ ” he wrote. “But I do have a cause. It is being true to me. When I am true to myself I feel confident and content. When I am untrue to myself I feel uneasy and fake. I have to be honest with myself as well as others.” In other words, it’s more important to be true to yourself than to be liked.
Overall, GenMe appreciates directness. “The older generations are so cautious and political in the way they phrase everything that half the time I don’t know what they mean,” said one young employee. The prevalence of texting might have something to do with this: when you’re typing quickly, being blunt is easier. You also aren’t there to see the immediate reaction on the other person’s face. Smartphones are also one of the main offenders when bluntness gives way to rudeness—as you know if you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with someone who keeps looking down to text on his phone.
Even this pales in comparison to what’s done anonymously online. There, comments sections are filled with statements that often cross the line from blunt to incredibly rude. Sitting in front of their computers, commenters seem to forget that they are communicating with other people, and about other people, treating others with a complete lack of respect. For example, the new term fat-shaming describes what happens when a celebrity is photographed showing even a little too much belly or thigh—the Internet promptly lights up with overly direct statements about how she might want to lose a few pounds.
Some don’t even have to be anonymous to be cruel. Julia, 20, says, “I hate Facebook and other social networks. They have shaped my generation by making it easy to attack people and get away with it.” Jimmy Kimmel now has celebrities read “mean tweets” users have posted about them, a sign of just how widespread the phenomenon has become. Others hide behind e-mail. When psychologist Bella DePaulo was publicizing her book Singled Out, someone e-mailed her, “I love your ideas, but with a mug like that I beg of you not to reproduce. Please remain single and consider a tubal ligation just to be safe.” I don’t know if this deplorable hater was GenMe—but I do think it’s unlikely she would have said such a thing to DePaulo in person. Technology has in some ways made us meaner—or at least given us an anonymous venue for being so.
#$@%&*%$!
These days, saying anything you want often includes words you might not want to say in front of your grandmother. Whether you’re for or against this trend, swearing is clearly just not the shocker it used to be. The relaxation of the rules against swearing mirrors the same social trend as all of the other examples here—we swear because we don’t care as much about what other people think.
Sixties radicals threw around words like motherfucker because they knew it would shock the older generation. They were declaring their independence and showing that they didn’t care if people disapproved of them. Some shock value still exists, but many young people swear now just because that’s the way they talk. It proves the adage that fuck is the most versatile word in the English language, since it can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective. (Or even an adverb, as in Mr. Big’s famous line in Sex and the City: “Absofuckinglutely.”) The Google Books database proves the point: the word fuck was eight times more frequent in American books in 2008 (versus 1960), shit three times as frequent, and ass four times as frequent.
The number of four-letter words now heard regularly in movies and on television—or, actually, five- and three-letter words—has caused much public hand-wringing. Network TV began allowing bitch in the 1980s, and the 1990s brought the best gift late-night comedians ever got: the ability to say ass on TV. David Letterman liked this so much he started a segment called “big-ass ham” just so he could say ass over and over. Characters on HBO and in R-rated movies utter four-letter words as if they were being paid for each usage. In December 2013, the movie The Wolf of Wall Street set a new record for uses of f-bombs in a major motion picture: 544. People against this trend toward vulgar language often use an argument that should now sound familiar. American culture has become crude, rude, and socially unacceptable. Whatever happened to politeness and manners? Nobody cares what anyone thinks anymore. (I say @$#% them. Just kidding.)
CONFORMITY AND THE NEED FOR SOCIAL APPROVAL
Do you like to gossip sometimes? Have you ever pretended to be sick to get out of doing something? Have you ever insisted on having your own way? Before you vote, do you carefully check the qualifications of each candidate? Are you always polite? Are you always willing to admit it when you’ve made a mistake?
If you answered no to the first three questions and yes to the next three, you have a high need for social approval. You want other people to see you as a good person, and you place high value on conventional behavior. What other people think matters a lot to you.
You are also probably not a member of Generation Me. These questions are from a measure called the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. The scale measures a person’s need for social approval, and people who score high on it, according to the scale authors, display “polite, acceptable behavior” and follow “conventional, even stereotyped, cultural norms.” My student Charles Im and I analyzed 241 studies that gave this questionnaire to college students and children, 40,745 individuals in all.
Not surprisingly, scores on the need for social approval have slid downwa
rd since the 1950s. The average college student in 2001 scored lower than 62% of college students in 1958. Put another way, the 2001 student scored at the 38th percentile compared to his or her 1958 peers. These percentiles work just like those on standardized tests—imagine your child taking a test and scoring at the 50th percentile one time and the 38th percentile another time. You would consider her average the first time, but be fairly concerned about her slipping performance the next.
Similar results appeared on two other measures of social approval—the L and K scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. In a cross-temporal meta-analysis of 117 samples including 63,706 college students, GenMe scored lower on both scales, suggesting they were less concerned with the impression they were making and less defensive about how they would be seen. The average college student in 2007 scored lower than 79% of 1940s college students on the K scale (the 21st percentile), and 62% lower on the L scale (the 38th percentile).
I also wondered if children would show the same results—was it only college students who changed, or were kids also seeking social approval less? Sure enough, the results were similar. Children ages 9 to 12 showed rapidly decreasing needs for social approval. For example, the average 1999 GenMe fifth- or sixth-grader scored at the 24th percentile, or lower than 76% of kids in the 1960s. This is an even larger change than for the college students—you would be pretty upset if your child came home with a standardized-test score in the 24th percentile. These results suggested that the decline in social approval was pervasive: even children as young as nine showed the generational trend, with kids from GenMe scoring lower than kids from earlier generations.
The Baby Boomers began this trend. The data show that the need for social approval reached an all-time low in the late 1970s to the early 1980s. This is not that surprising—the Boomers practically invented youth rebellion in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the rebellion was mainstream, and the defiance of authority an accepted social value. Take the line yippie radical Jerry Rubin used in the late 1970s—if someone called him on the phone when he was, umm, otherwise occupied, he would say honestly, “Can’t talk to you now—I’m masturbating.”
The 1980s returned society to a somewhat more conventional existence. Slowly, men cut their hair (except for Ponch and Jon on CHiPs), pant legs went from flagrantly bell-bottom to normal (at least until bell-bottoms’ resurgence around 1996), and pot smoking declined. It was not quite as necessary to rebel to fit in—which was always a rather ironic notion. GenMe turned this trend around to an extent, no longer thinking of social approval as something to be completely disdained. But the need for social approval did not even come close to the levels of the 1950s and 1960s—those days were gone forever.
A new movement dawned during the 1980s, however, a trend that GenMe would take to new heights, leaving Boomers in the dust. Generation Me believes, with a conviction that approaches boredom because it is so undisputed, that the individual comes first. It’s the trend that gives the generation its name, and I explore it in the next two chapters.
2
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An Army of One: Me
One day when my mother was driving me to school in 1986, Whitney Houston’s hit song “Greatest Love of All” was warbling out of the weak speakers of our Buick station wagon with wood trim. I asked my mother what she thought the song was about. “The greatest love of all—it has to be about children,” she said.
My mother was sweet, but wrong. The song does say that children are the future (always good to begin with a strikingly original thought) and that we should teach them well. About world peace, maybe? Or great literature? Nope. Children should be educated about the beauty “inside,” the song declares. We all need heroes, Whitney sings, but she never found “anyone who fulfilled my needs,” so she learned to depend on (wait for it) “me.” The chorus then declares, “learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.”
This is a stunning reversal in attitude from previous generations. Back then, respect for others was more important than respect for yourself. The term self-esteem wasn’t widely used until the late 1960s and didn’t become talk-show and dinner-table conversation until the 1980s. By the 1990s, it was everywhere.
Take, for example, the band Offspring’s rockingly irreverent 1994 riff “Self-Esteem.” The song describes a guy whose girlfriend “says she wants only me . . . Then I wonder why she sleeps with my friends.” (Hmmm.) But he’s blasé about it—it’s okay, really, since he’s “just a sucker with no self-esteem.”
By the mid-1990s—thus before most of today’s college students were born—Offspring could take it for granted that most people knew the term self-esteem and knew they were supposed to have it. They also knew how to diagnose themselves when they didn’t have it.
Offspring’s ironic self-parody demonstrates a high level of understanding of the concept, the satire suggesting that this psychological self-examination is rote and can thus be performed with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
In the years since, attention to the topic of self-esteem has rapidly expanded. Researcher Sara Konrath found that the number of books mentioning self-esteem more than doubled between the 1940s and the 1990s. A search for self-esteem in the books section of amazon.com yielded 108,426 entries (sample titles: Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem, The Self-Esteem Work Book for Teens, Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem, Ten Days to Self-Esteem, 200 Ways to Raise a Girl’s Self-Esteem). O Magazine published “Why Women Have Low Self-Esteem—How to Feel More Confident” in 2008, while Parenting offered “Proud to Be Me!” in April 2005, listing “5 simple ways to help your child love who he is.” October 2011 saw the premier issue of a “self-esteem magazine for girls” called BYOU (Be Your Own You), telling readers of its purple and fuchsia cover to “be awesome!” and “discover your inner beauty” and find “fun ways to build self-esteem.” TV and radio talk shows would immediately be shut down by the FCC if self-esteem were on the list of banned words. The 1998 edition of the American Academy of Pediatrics guide to caring for babies and young children used the word self-esteem ten times in seven pages in the first chapter, and that doesn’t even count the numerous mentions of self-respect, confidence, and belief in oneself.
How did self-esteem transform from an obscure academic term to a familiar phrase that pops up in everything from women’s magazines to song lyrics to celebrity interviews? The story begins centuries ago, when humans barely had a concept of a self at all: your marriage was arranged, your profession determined by your parents, your actions dictated by strict religious standards. Slowly over the centuries, social strictures began to loosen and people started to make more choices for themselves. Eventually, we arrived at the modern concept of the individual as an autonomous, free person.
Then came the 1970s, when the ascendance of the self exploded into the American consciousness. In contrast to previous ethics of honor and duty, Baby Boomer ideals focused instead on meaning and self-fulfillment. In his 1976 bestseller, Your Erroneous Zones, Wayne Dyer suggests that the popular song “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” be retitled “I Am the Sunshine of My Life.” Your love for yourself, he says, should be your “first love.” The 1970 allegory Jonathan Livingston Seagull describes a bird bored with going “from shore to food and back again.” Instead, he wants to enjoy flying, swooping through the air to follow “a higher meaning, a higher purpose for life,” even though his actions get him exiled from his flock. The book, originally rejected by nearly every major publishing house, became a runaway bestseller as Americans came to agree that life should be fulfilling and focused on the needs of the self. The seagulls in the animated movie Finding Nemo were still on message almost 35 years later: all that comes out of their beaks is the word mine.
BOOMERS AND THEIR “JOURNEY” INTO THE SELF
This book is not about Baby Boomers, and it’s not about the 1970s. But because the Boomers pioneered the modern brand of s
elf-focus, we have to understand them first so we can see how they differ from the younger Generation Me. Why aren’t the Boomers—the Me Generation in the 1970s—the real Generation Me? It’s about what you explore as a young adult versus what you’re born to and take for granted.
For the Boomers, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, self-focus was a new concept, individualism an uncharted territory. In his 1981 book New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down, Daniel Yankelovich describes young Boomers struggling with new questions: How do you make decisions in a marriage with two equal partners? How do you focus on yourself when your parents don’t even know what that means? The Boomers in the book sound like people driving around in circles in the dark, desperately searching for something. The world was so new that no road signs and no maps pointed the way to this new fulfillment and individuality.
That’s probably why many Boomers talk about the self using abstract language full of introspection and “growth.” New things call for this kind of meticulous thought and require time to process. Thus Boomers talk about “my journey,” “my need to keep growing,” or “my unfulfilled potentials.” Sixties activist Todd Gitlin called the Boomer quest the “voyage to the interior.” Icky as they are to today’s young people, these phrases thrum with motion and time, portraying self-focus as a continuous project that keeps evolving as Boomers look around for true meaning. As P. J. O’Rourke puts it in The Baby Boom, “We’re the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the self, and said let there be self. . . . Before us, self was without form and void, like our parents in their dumpy clothes and vague ideas.” In a 1976 New York magazine article, Tom Wolfe described the “new dream” as “remaking, remodeling, elevating and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it.” Sixties radical Jerry Rubin wrote that he tried just about every fad of the 1970s (Rolfing, est, yoga, sex therapy, finding his inner child); one of the chapters in his book Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven is called “Searching for Myself.”
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