I am about to do what older generations have done throughout history: criticize the younger generation as lazy, entitled, selfish, and shallow. But this time, I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected scholars! Unlike my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, I have proof.
Here’s the undeniable data: The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as it is for those 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health. In 2009, 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale compared to 1982. Millennials received so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance. They are obsessed with fame: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a celebrity rather than a senator, according to a 2007 survey. Four times as many would prefer being an assistant over becoming the CEO of a major corporation. They’re so confident in their greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found that 60% of millennials believe their gut feelings are a reliable moral guide. Their growth seems stunted: more people aged 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 aspired to have a job with greater responsibility someday; 10 years later, only 60% did.
Millennials, depending on who you ask, include people born from 1980 to 2000. To put it simply, this group mostly consists of teenagers and young adults in their 20s. With a population of 80 million, they are the largest age group in American history. Each country’s millennials are different, but due to globalization, social media, the spread of Western culture, and the fast pace of change, millennials worldwide are more similar to each other than to the older generations within their nations. Even in China, where family history is traditionally more important than individual identity, the internet, urbanization, and the one-child policy have created a generation just as overconfident and self-involved as their Western counterparts. And these issues aren’t just for the wealthy: poor millennials often show even higher levels of narcissism, materialism, and technology addiction in their lives.
They are the most disruptive and exciting generation since the baby boomers sparked a social revolution, not because they’re trying to overthrow the establishment, but because they’re growing up without one. The Industrial Revolution made individuals much more powerful—they could move to a city, start a business, read, and form organizations. The information revolution has further empowered individuals by giving them the technology to compete with large organizations: hackers vs. corporations, bloggers vs. newspapers, terrorists vs. nation-states, YouTube creators vs. studios, app developers vs. entire industries. Millennials don’t need us. That’s why we’re afraid of them.
In the U.S., millennials are the children of baby boomers, also known as the Me Generation, who then produced the Me Me Me Generation, whose selfishness has been amplified by technology. While 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 lives among 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. Millennials have come of age in the era of the quantified self, tracking their daily steps on FitBit, their location every hour on PlaceMe, and their genetic data on 23andMe. They are less civically engaged and participate less in politics than any previous group. This is a generation that would make Walt Whitman wonder if they should try singing a song of someone else.
They became this way partly because, in the 1970s, people wanted to improve children’s chances of success by boosting their self-esteem. It turns out that self-esteem is great for getting a job or meeting someone 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 editor of *Self-Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard*. “The early findings showed that kids with high self-esteem did better in school and were less likely to get into trouble. It’s just that we later learned 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 doesn’t affirm how great they believe they are. “This generation has the highest likelihood of having unmet expectations regarding their careers and the lowest levels of satisfaction with their careers at the stage 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.”
What millennials are most known for, aside from narcissism, is the effect of entitlement. If you want to sell seminars to middle managers, focus on how to deal with young employees who email the CEO directly and avoid projects they find boring. English teacher David McCullough Jr.’s 2012 address 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 responses to the video have been positive, especially from millennials themselves; the video has 57 likes for every dislike.
Though they’re confident in their place in the world, millennials are also delayed in their development, prolonging a life stage between adolescence and adulthood that this magazine once called “twixters,” a term we will now use again in an attempt to make it popular. 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 workplace. Now that cell phones allow kids to socialize at all hours—they send and receive an average of 88 texts a day, according to Pew—they live 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 University 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 reach age 23 so dominated by their peers. To develop intellectually, you’ve got to relate to older people and older things: 17-year-olds never grow up if they’re just hanging around other 17-year-olds.” Among all the objections to Obamacare, not many people argued against parents’ need to cover their kids’ health insurance until they’re 26.
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 engaging in a behavior to reduce their anxiety,” says Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and 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 also fell sharply, starting in 2000, likely because of both a lack of face-to-face time and higher levels 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” counts serving 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’ve 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. “It’s a level of self-awareness that I don’t think has ever hit any generation in such a global way.” Reality TV encourages people to view themselves as characters to be promoted to the world, which is probably why 30% of them agree with the statement “I’m not going to have a lot of people at my funeral” (16% strongly agree).
Millennials may be self-centered, but that doesn’t make them selfish. They might not help others through political organizations, but they will support brands. Ninety-one percent of millennials, according to a 2011 survey by a public-relations company, would consider switching brands to one associated with a cause (compared with 85% of all consumers). They don’t mind working hard, but they’d rather do it at a place and time of their choosing. More than previous generations, they want flexible jobs and hours. As for their relationships with their elders, millennials get along with their parents—80% of them say they have no problem with their moms and dads—because, at this point, what boomer parent wouldn’t want to be friends with a child who still lives at home? Even if they can’t afford to get married yet, 69% of millennials want to be married, more than the 61% of Generation X, according to a survey by the Knot, a wedding planning website. The ideas for how to get there are just as different: 71% of millennials say they would like to live with a partner before getting married.
But in the end, the biggest problem for this generation is how much they’re struggling. In the U.S., the main problem is their future financial state. Millennials are graduating in a recession, and they’re unemployed or underemployed. That could be why 37% of them, according to a Pew study, have told their friends they don’t want to have kids. And they know their financial status is concerning: 75% say America is on the wrong track. They think they might not have a bright future. At this point, if millennials are entitled, it’s because the world they’re inheriting has made them that way.
This article discusses the characteristics and challenges of the millennial generation. It presents various studies and expert opinions to explore the traits commonly associated with millennials, such as narcissism, entitlement, and delayed development. The article also delves into the economic and social factors that have shaped this generation, emphasizing how they are navigating a world vastly different from that of previous generations.
