Summary: Earlier this spring I finished a fantastic and depressing book by psychologist Jean Twenge called "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are more Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable than Ever Before." Twenge investigates the assumptions that many of us have about us--it's my generation, too--taking data from personality inventories given across the last 60 years. Any of us who recruit volunteers or run teams sense things are changing--the way this generation relates--or doesn't relate--to institutions, their lessening sense of commitment, their anxiety and perpetual frantic busyness. We are harried and confused and feel so out of control. In her introduction, she writes: Today's under-35 young people are called the Me Generation or, as I call them, Generation Me. Born after self-focus entered the cultural mainstream, this generation has never known a world that put duty before self. [She points to a friend's daughter, Jessica, born in 1985.] When Jessica was a toddler, Whitney Houston's No. 1 hit song declared that "The Greatest Love of All" was loving yourself. Jessica's elementary school teachers believed that their most important job was helping Jessica feel good about herself. Jessica scribbled in a coloring book called We are All Special, got a sticker on her worksheet just for filling it out, and did a sixth-grade project called "All About Me." When she wondered how to act on her first date, her mother told her, "Just be yourself." "You have to love yourself before you can love someone else," she proudly proclaims.
