Generation Misunderstood As Usual

We’ve been called apathetic. We’ve been called selfish. We’ve been called cheaters. We’ve been called petty. We’ve been called appearance obsessed. We’ve been called Generation Y, Millenials, Echo Boomers, the Look at Me Generation, and now, well, it’s all been boiled down to simply Generation Me.
I’m, frankly, a little sick of the whole thing. The New York Times just ran a story about a new study that puts into question the previous wisdom on our generation–namely that MySpace, Oprah, and Free To Be You and Me has made us all narcissistic. The article explains:

Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario…along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.

The study was done, in part, as a response to the work of Jean M. Twenge who wrote Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Twenge is already at work on another book, this one with an even more damning title, The Narcissism Epidemic (by the by, could we all agree on a definition for what constitutes an epidemic? It’s getting a little ridiculous).
I appreciate this Yale fella’s response:

Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,� Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.�

Is it really us, people, or might it just be a little bit about you? Are older folks projecting their own unmet needs on an entire generation? Now that’s narcissism.