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I, for one, am finding this to be true with a lot of the younger folk coming out of college and into my field of work. They care more about their personal success than anything else, including the "community" at large, IMO. I've even had plant managers comment on the arrogance and self-centeredness of the younger crowd, which is only further complicated by their ignorance.
Still, who is to blame? Gen Xers grew up with parents, and not only just parents, but parents who punished and made sure we knew our place. They also had steady jobs, and it was likely that they would hold the same job with the same company for their entire career. Not anymore.
The generation coming out today was more likely to be raised by 2 parents who worked full-time or 1 parent who worked all the time, and in some cases were raised by a relative. In addition to being ignored, when they were give attention it was always positive, the last thing a parent who worked all day would want to do is come home and punish their children. In addition, they say these parents routinely pushed around and screwed over by the employer that took all their precious "me time" from them. So not only were they ignored, but they were ignored by a job that didn't honor their parents the same way they may have had they been given the chance.
Self-centered and narcissistic? Yes. But that's because they never got spanked or loved.
The Culture of Narcissism
Any study that tries to quantify empathy needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but you can take this particular survey yourself — and if you do, you’ll probably find its empathy-measuring questions credible enough to be at least disquieted by these findings:
Today’s college students are not as empathetic as college students of the 1980s and ’90s, a University of Michigan study shows.
The study, presented in Boston at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, analyzes data on empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.
“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”
The fact that the tipping point seems to coincide with the rise of the internet should send everyone rushing off to read Christine Rosen’s 2007 essay on social networking, “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism,” which could have been written with just these findings in mind. But it’s also interesting to consider this trend in light of the oft-heard claim that the millennial generation is more idealistic, more civic-minded, and more engaged with the world than its cynical Gen X predecessors.
On the face of it, these seem like contradictory portraits — how can the same generation be more solipsistic and more interested in human betterment and ambitious social activism? But maybe they actually go hand in hand. There’s a kind of humanitarianism that’s more interested in an abstract “humanity” than in actual people, and a kind of idealism that’s hard to distinguish from moral vanity. Perhaps this is the spirit that’s at work among the empathy-deficient world-changers of Generation Y — visible, for instance, in the way that community service has become a self-interested resume-padding exercise for ambitious young climbers, or in the way that Barack Obama’s rhetoric (“we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” etc.) managed to appeal to younger voters’ idealism and flatter their egos all at once.
On the other hand, this could also be grounds for a defense of narcissism, at least up to a point. Maybe too much empathy is crippling, and a little solipsism is a necessary spur to action. If a little “look out world, here I come” self-centeredness is what it takes to get young people involved in charity work or political campaigning, the theory might go, then so much the better for self-centeredness!
Certainly there’s some truth to the idea that high achievement, humanitarian or otherwise, often goes hand in hand with a certain arrogance and self-involvement, and that the kind of people who change the world in dramatic ways aren’t always the kind of people you’d want as next-door neighbors. (Orwell’s famous line about saints being judged guilty till proven innocent may have some relevance here.) But then again, most of the college students being surveyed in this study aren’t going to grow up to be Charles De Gaulle or Winston Churchill — or Barack Obama, for that matter. The solipsism of great men may be forgivable and even necessary in some cases. But I’m more skeptical of the idea that mass narcissism is the key to a better world.
Any study that tries to quantify empathy needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but you can take this particular survey yourself — and if you do, you’ll probably find its empathy-measuring questions credible enough to be at least disquieted by these findings:
Today’s college students are not as empathetic as college students of the 1980s and ’90s, a University of Michigan study shows.
The study, presented in Boston at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, analyzes data on empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.
“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”
The fact that the tipping point seems to coincide with the rise of the internet should send everyone rushing off to read Christine Rosen’s 2007 essay on social networking, “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism,” which could have been written with just these findings in mind. But it’s also interesting to consider this trend in light of the oft-heard claim that the millennial generation is more idealistic, more civic-minded, and more engaged with the world than its cynical Gen X predecessors.
On the face of it, these seem like contradictory portraits — how can the same generation be more solipsistic and more interested in human betterment and ambitious social activism? But maybe they actually go hand in hand. There’s a kind of humanitarianism that’s more interested in an abstract “humanity” than in actual people, and a kind of idealism that’s hard to distinguish from moral vanity. Perhaps this is the spirit that’s at work among the empathy-deficient world-changers of Generation Y — visible, for instance, in the way that community service has become a self-interested resume-padding exercise for ambitious young climbers, or in the way that Barack Obama’s rhetoric (“we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” etc.) managed to appeal to younger voters’ idealism and flatter their egos all at once.
On the other hand, this could also be grounds for a defense of narcissism, at least up to a point. Maybe too much empathy is crippling, and a little solipsism is a necessary spur to action. If a little “look out world, here I come” self-centeredness is what it takes to get young people involved in charity work or political campaigning, the theory might go, then so much the better for self-centeredness!
Certainly there’s some truth to the idea that high achievement, humanitarian or otherwise, often goes hand in hand with a certain arrogance and self-involvement, and that the kind of people who change the world in dramatic ways aren’t always the kind of people you’d want as next-door neighbors. (Orwell’s famous line about saints being judged guilty till proven innocent may have some relevance here.) But then again, most of the college students being surveyed in this study aren’t going to grow up to be Charles De Gaulle or Winston Churchill — or Barack Obama, for that matter. The solipsism of great men may be forgivable and even necessary in some cases. But I’m more skeptical of the idea that mass narcissism is the key to a better world.
Still, who is to blame? Gen Xers grew up with parents, and not only just parents, but parents who punished and made sure we knew our place. They also had steady jobs, and it was likely that they would hold the same job with the same company for their entire career. Not anymore.
The generation coming out today was more likely to be raised by 2 parents who worked full-time or 1 parent who worked all the time, and in some cases were raised by a relative. In addition to being ignored, when they were give attention it was always positive, the last thing a parent who worked all day would want to do is come home and punish their children. In addition, they say these parents routinely pushed around and screwed over by the employer that took all their precious "me time" from them. So not only were they ignored, but they were ignored by a job that didn't honor their parents the same way they may have had they been given the chance.
Self-centered and narcissistic? Yes. But that's because they never got spanked or loved.
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