Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  Simon Cowell, the British former American Idol judge who first gave Hung this advice, sees unflinching criticism as his personal mission. TV critic James Poniewozik noted that Cowell “has led a rebellion against the tyranny of self-esteem that is promoted on talk shows and in self-help books—the notion that everyone who tries deserves to win.” Although Cowell admittedly takes things a little far, Americans think he’s mean mostly because he bursts contestants’ bubbles of unsubstantiated self-esteem. Even the nicer American Idol judges are surprised by the hubris of many of the hopefuls. “It’s mind-boggling how horrific some of them are, [especially those] with unbelievably healthy egos [thinking] they are all that,” said Paula Abdul. “Kenny [Loggins] said, ‘Is it sick or healthy to walk around believing in yourself so much?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s delusional.’ ” It sure is, but it’s also young people doing precisely what they have been taught.

  WE WILL ALL BE FAMOUS

  Hung is not unusual: many GenMe’ers expect to be famous. Many kids today grow up thinking that they will eventually be movie stars, sports figures, or at least rich. These are the adults they see on television; hardly anybody on TV works in a white-collar job in an office as most kids will someday. A lot of young people also assume that success will come quickly. One of my students, who wasn’t more than 22, noted during a class presentation, “There are lots of people our age who are CEOs of their own companies.” He probably read a profile or two of one of these rare beasts in a magazine and, fueled by the “you can be anything” mythos, decided that this was commonplace.

  These attitudes are pervasive and have been for a while. When I was in high school, one of my friends decided to collect items from each of the talented people in our class—a tape of one student playing the piano, a mathematical proof from another, a set of handwritten poems from me. He was sure we would all become famous one day and these would then be worth money (and this was before eBay). The three of us have done fine, but none of us is famous. Somehow no one ever told us that this was unlikely to happen. In a 2007 survey, 51% of 18-to-25-year-olds said that the most important goal of their generation was “becoming famous”—which was trumped only by “getting rich,” at 81%. Use of the phrase want to be famous was six times more common in 2008 than in 1960 in American books in the Google Books database. The phrase famous for being famous did not exist in American books until 1970, and its use has doubled since the late 1980s.

  Many reality TV shows feed on this obsession with celebrity and fame. Flip channels for a few minutes during prime time, and you’ll see Survivor contestants barely getting enough food, Fear Factor participants with bugs crawling all over them, and Rebel Billionaire CEO wannabes falling off cliffs. Why do people do these crazy things? Ostensibly, it’s for the challenge and the money, but everyone knows the real attraction: you get on TV. For many people—particularly GenMe—instant fame is worth eating bugs. At least these contestants actually do something to gain fame—most recent reality TV shows instead feature those famous for being famous, such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the Real Housewives, The Real World, and Jersey Shore. As a New York Times article put it, “Reality television has spawned a generation of viewers who feel entitled to be on camera.”

  When musician Nellie McKay was 19, she said, “I’ve been telling [my friends] for years that I’m going to be famous. When I look at me in the mirror, I see someone on the front cover of Us Weekly.” Even with a first album that sold moderately well, this is the quest for fame at its most bald and unrealistic. “Apparently everyone else sees a regular girl. I’m very disappointed in that,” McKay continues. “I want them to see me as Frank Sinatra or Bill Clinton.” Apparently, this fame is also supposed to happen overnight. “It tends to get on my nerves when people say, ‘Wow, can you believe this is happening to you?’ ” says McKay. “I say, ‘Yeah, I’ve worked hard for this.’ ” Perhaps, but how hard, for how many years, can you have possibly worked when you are nineteen years old?

  In What Really Happened to the Class of ’93, Chris Colin relates the story of his most accomplished classmate, Alo Basu, who went to Harvard and MIT and was a science prodigy in high school. Their senior year, she was voted most likely to appear on the cover of Time magazine. “Ten years after leaving high school, Alo has yet to grace Time,” he notes, with no sarcasm that I could detect. Um, yes: most people—even most geniuses—won’t ever be on the cover of Time magazine, much less before the age of 28. Basu has done well—she’s now a professor of neuroscience. Her accomplishments led to a great career, just not to outsize fame and fortune.

  Of course, the Internet has made fame seem as if it’s just out of reach. And in a way it is—Justin Bieber parlayed his YouTube views into rock-star fame, and comedians such as Kevin Wu (KevJumba) and Ryan Higa (Nigahiga) built successful acting careers after the videos they made in their teenage bedrooms garnered millions of views. E L James became a bestselling author after her initially self-published book Fifty Shades of Grey became popular. This is the upside of the modern age: talent can be found by the masses instead of by record executives and casting directors. The downside: these success stories make it seem that fame is easy and common, when it is not.

  In the Internet age, fame is also relative. Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, and some have quipped that on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people. Or a lot more. Many people with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have hundreds of “friends” to read their every thought. Teens are now more drawn to Instagram, where they can share the large numbers of pictures they take every day with their cell phones, and Snapchat, which lets them send pictures that disappear after a few seconds.

  The quest for fame may explain the recent fascination with over-the-top weddings, and why, in general, Americans still have weddings when living together is so popular. Having a dress fit specifically for you, having someone else apply your makeup, having everyone admire your beauty—as author Carol Wallace points out, these experiences are usually shared by only two groups of women: celebrities and brides. Wedding vendors often emphasize that this is your one chance to be a “princess for a day,” and we believe it. One bride said, “Finally, I got center stage in something.” Finally. As Wallace writes, “Having ‘center stage,’ being the focus of all eyes, is so highly prized in today’s culture that many of us, relegated to the background, feel diminished until we get our turn in the spotlight.” Gwyneth Paltrow said that for many women “the whole wedding fantasy [is] their day at the Oscars.”

  Perhaps because of GenMe’s comfort with the spotlight, today’s young people are more confident in their social interactions. As part of my dissertation, I gathered data on 16,846 college students who completed a questionnaire measuring extroversion, or being outgoing and talkative. This trait rose markedly, with the average 1990s college student scoring as more extroverted than 83% of students in the 1960s. My former student Brittany Gentile found that this trend continued, with 2000s college students scoring still higher on extroversion. Compared to Boomers, GenMe is more comfortable talking to people at parties and social occasions, more confident when meeting new people, and accustomed to being surrounded by bustle and excitement. This makes sense: GenMe is more likely to have gone to day care, to have worked in a service job, or to meet new people regularly. High levels of extroversion have been GenMe’s adaptation: they are a generation with few shrinking violets.

  EXPRESS YOURSELF

  Between 2005 and 2014, the SAT included an essay portion designed to measure students’ writing ability. Instead of asking for a balanced treatment of a topic, however, the test instructed students to “develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, and observations.” This meant that to get a high score, it was necessary to argue only one side of the question: yours. As the test-prep book Kaplan New SAT advised, “What’s important is that you take a position and state how you f
eel. It is not important what other people might think, just what you think.”

  Generation Me has always been taught that their thoughts and feelings are important. It’s no surprise that students were tested on it. Even when schools, parents, and the media are not specifically targeting self-esteem, they promote the equally powerful concepts of socially sanctioned self-focus, the unquestioned importance of the individual, and an unfettered optimism about young people’s prospects. High school senior Scot, a contestant on the reality show The Scholar, captured this notion when he said, “I feel it’s very important to be your own hero.” So forget presidents, community leaders, even sports figures—it’s more important to look up to yourself.

  Like self-esteem, self-focus and individuality have been actively promoted in schools. When I was in sixth grade in Irving, Texas, our fall assignment in Reading was the project “All About Me.” We finished sentences like “I feel angry when . . .” and “Something special I want you to know about me is . . .” We were also asked to include pictures of ourselves. Many of my classmates spent hours on this project, mulling over their answers and making elaborate albums with their best photographic self-portraits. In effect, we were graded on how well we could present our opinions and images of ourselves. Later that year, our assignment was to make a personal “coat of arms” that illustrated our interests and hobbies. In the past, a coat of arms was the symbol of an entire extended family, so an individual coat of arms—particularly one created by an 11-year-old—is an interesting cultural construct.

  A page from my “All About Me” project in sixth-grade Reading class, fetchingly illustrated with cutouts from magazine ads. The project promoted the idea that thinking about yourself is important—apparently more important than reading and writing, given the uncorrected spelling mistake.

  My school was not the only one to value and promote children’s individual feelings and thoughts. The popular school program called Quest has students keep track of their feelings for a day on an Emotion Clock or a Mood Continuum. Andrea, 22, told me that her junior high and high school English classes included weekly “free writing.” She notes, “This not only encouraged writing but pushed expressing yourself.” Even employers are getting in on the game: Xerox’s recruiting slogan in the mid-2000s was “Express Yourself.” Glee coach Mr. Schuester opines, “Glee club is not just about expressing yourself to anyone else. It’s about expressing yourself to yourself.” Or as Hannah puts it on Girls, “I’m an individual. And I feel how I feel when I feel it.”

  The growing primacy of the individual appears in data I gathered on 81,384 high school and college students. These young people completed questionnaires measuring what psychologists call agency—a personality trait involving assertiveness, dominance, independence, and self-promotion. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, both young men’s and women’s agency increased markedly, with the average 1990s college student scoring higher than 75% of college Boomers from the 1970s. I had expected women’s agency to increase over this time, but men’s feelings of agency also rose, suggesting that the trend went beyond gender roles. As the Boomers gave way to GenX, more and more young people were saying that they stood up for their individual rights, had a “strong personality,” and were “self-sufficient” and “individualistic.” This trend appears in more recent data as well. In the study of college students’ beliefs about their abilities, the percentage who believed they were above average increased between 1966 and 2012 only for agentic traits such as leadership, drive to achieve, and intellectual self-confidence. However, GenMe college students were not any more likely than previous generations to believe they were above average in more communal traits such as cooperativeness or understanding others. So GenMe not only has high self-esteem, but they take pride in being independent actors who express their needs and wants.

  The focus on the needs of the individual self begins when children are very young, sometimes before they are born or even conceived. Advertising convinces parents to spend lots of money on the perfect nursery, since the room should “reflect” the child’s personality and individuality. (Yet, as The Mommy Myth by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels points out, “Remember, kid not born yet, personality unknown.”) One of the most popular nursery decorations right now is 12-inch-tall letters spelling out the child’s name, an obvious bow to individualism. Douglas and Michaels refer to the trends toward perfection and individuality in nurseries as our “narcissism around our kids . . . a hyperindividualized emphasis on how truly, exquisitely unique and precious our child is, the Hope diamond, more special than the others.”

  We also promote individuality and self-importance by giving our children choices. One of my psychology colleagues called me one day and said, “You know, I just realized how kids learn this self stuff so quickly. I just asked my one-year-old if she wanted apple juice or milk. Earlier today I asked her if she wanted to wear her red dress or her blue one. She can’t even talk and I’m asking her what she wants!” My friend is not alone in asking his daughter such questions; most American parents begin asking their children their preferences before they can answer. When kids get a little older, many parents think it’s important to let their children pick out the clothes they wear in the morning—the kid might end up wearing red polka dots with green and blue stripes, but it’s okay because they are “expressing themselves” and learning to make their own choices.

  Culture Shock! USA, a guidebook to American culture for foreigners, explains, “Often one sees an American engaged in a dialogue with a tiny child. ‘Do you want to go home now?’ says the parent. ‘No,’ says an obviously tired, crying child. And so parent and child continue to sit discontentedly in a chilly park. ‘What is the matter with these people?’ says the foreigner to himself, who can see the child is too young to make such decisions.” It’s just part of American culture, the book says: “The child is acquiring both a sense of responsibility for himself and a sense of his own importance.” We expect our kids to have individual preferences and would never dream, as earlier generations did, of making every single decision for our children and asking them to be seen and not heard. Not coincidentally, this also teaches children that their wants are the most important.

  This can sometimes cause problems when children get older. One mother says she treated her daughter “as if she had a mind of her own ever since she was a baby,” asking her what she wanted to do next and what she wanted to wear. “But now that’s she’s four, sometimes I really want her to mind me. The other day I told her, ‘Alexis, you’re going to do this right now because I say so!’ She looked up at me astounded, as if to say, ‘What’s going on here? You’re changing the rules on me!’ ” And just wait until she’s 14.

  Some experts maintain that perhaps as a result more kids these days are behaving badly. Psychologist Bonnie Zucker, interviewed for the People magazine article “Kids out of Control,” saw a 10-year-old whose parents let him decide whether to go to school—if he didn’t want to go, he didn’t go. Another mother didn’t make her son do homework because it made him “unhappy.”

  Writer Martin Booe recently devoted an entire column to overindulgent parents who “let their kids run roughshod over themselves and other adults . . . they’re rampant.” Says educational psychologist Michele Borba, “Too many parents subscribe to the myth that if you discipline children, you’re going to break their spirit. . . . The ‘Me Generation’ is raising the ‘Me-Me-Me Generation.’ ” (By May 2013, Time magazine would agree, using “The Me Me Me Generation” as its headline for Joel Stein’s cover story on the Millennials.)

  Douglas and Michaels argue that because mothers are now expected to understand their child’s inner feelings and wants, the child comes to believe “that he’s the center of the universe, his thoughts and feelings the only ones worth considering, the ones that cut in line before everyone else’s.” Gone are the days, they say, when parents were told to “disabuse [their child] of the notion that he or she is the Sun King.”

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nbsp; Paula Peterson’s two kids, Abby and Joey, throw temper tantrums when they don’t get the toys they want. And why does she put up with such behavior? Well, as the People article explains, “The same spark that sets off the kicking and screaming may also give Abby and Joey what they need to excel in a culture that rewards outspokenness and confidence.” As Culture Shock! USA explains, “In most of the countries of the world, parents feel that their obligation is to raise an obedient child who will fit into society. The little ego must be molded into that of a well-behaved citizen. Not so here [in the United States] . . . the top priority is to raise an individual capable of taking advantage of opportunity.”

  YOU MUST LOVE YOURSELF BEFORE YOU CAN LOVE OTHERS

  This is one of the most widely accepted of our cultural aphorisms. After 20/20 aired a segment on self-esteem programs in schools, anchor Hugh Downs asked, “Could it be that self-esteem, real self-esteem, comes from esteeming other people and not thinking so much about yourself, to begin with?” Barbara Walters clearly thought he was deluded. “Oh, Hugh!” she exclaimed, as if he had just said the silliest thing in the world. “First of all, you have to like yourself before you can like others.”

  The 7th Heaven episode mentioned previously also promoted the “love yourself first” message. Lucy, 21 and just named associate pastor, uses the example of the woman from the Song of Solomon. “She loves who she is and she doesn’t care what anybody thinks of her,” she preaches. “She has self-love and self-esteem.” So many of us, she goes on to say, make “loving ourselves dependent on something outside of ourselves. But it’s not someone else’s job to make us happy. It’s your job to make yourself happy. And to know who you are. And if you don’t know yourself, or love yourself, how can you expect someone else to?”