Look at their profiles on social networks at where you can find a photo album called "A little bit me" containing about 300 photos. Read the a Twitter of a person who writes as well as uploading photos on Instagram — it's shallow , no meaning, no ideas , nothing there. And then you will understand that the issue brought up by a journalist Joel Stein is urgent more than ever.
We suggest you to read the article which will force to take a fresh approach to the usual things.
“I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes fr om respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof”.
By the way, if you belong to the “Me Me Me Generation”, you were born between 1980 and 2000, your opinion will be especially interesting.
• The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that's now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982;
• They are fame-obsessed: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a famous person as want to be a Senator, according to a 2007 survey; four times as many would pick the assistant job over CEO of a major corporation;
• They're so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60% of millennials in any situation is that they'll just be able to feel what's right. Yet more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse;
• They are lazy. In 1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80% of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60% did;
• Each country's millennials are different, but because of globalization, social media, the exporting of Western culture and the speed of change, millennials worldwide are more similar to one another than to older generations within their nations. Even in China, wh ere family history is more important than any individual, the Internet, urbanization and the one-child policy have created a generation as overconfident and self-involved as the Western one.
‘The Industrial Revolutions made individuals far more powerful – they could move to a city, start a business, read and form organizations. The information revolution just further empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge organizations: hackers vs. corporations, bloggers vs. newspapers, terrorists vs. nation-states, YouTube directors vs. studios, app-makers vs. entire industries. ...
… the Me Generation then produced the Me Me Me Generation, whose selfishness technology has only exacerbated. Whereas 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 walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets.
… Millennials are interacting all day but almost entirely through a screen. You’ve seen them in bars sitting next to one another and texting. … Seventy percent of them check their phone every hour, and many experience phantom pocket-vibration syndrome.
…That constant search for a hit of dopamine (‘Someone liked my status update!”) reduces creativity. From 1966, when 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 similarly fell sharply, starting in 2000, likely because of both a lack of face-to-face time and higher degrees of narcissism.
…What they do understand is how to turn themselves into brands, with “friends” and “followers” tallies that serve as sales figures. As with most sales, positivity and confidence work best.
…So yes, we have all that data about narcissism and laziness and entitlement. But a generation’s greatness isn’t determined by data; it’s determined by how they react to the challenges that befall them. …”
To read the full article visit: http://michaelrcharles.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/millennials-joel-stein.pdf