Generation Self ish? By Chiara Christian
I
t is a truth universally acknowledged, that every older generation must find ways to hate on those who come after them. It’s Millennials and Gen Z’s turn to bear the brunt of disapproval. We’re a generation of selfies, of spending exorbitant amounts on avo-smashes and oat-milk lattes, of living at home until we’re 25 in our parent’s basement (and that estimate is modest). We’re impatient and entitled. We don’t want to “pay our dues” in entry-level jobs with mediocre pay; we don’t save for house deposits. We’re a generation of instant gratification and dopamine hits from likes on our social media. We’d rather spend our money traveling to exotic locations than saving for some notion of “retirement.” If the future ecological state of the earth is questionable anyway, why should we bother? In this generational war, we have been collectively branded as a bunch of selfish narcissists. And researchers seem determined to prove it—the debate has been going on for over ten years, yet conclusions based on actual data remain murky and undetermined. A meta-analysis conducted in 2008 collectively surveying 16,000 college students over a 30-year time frame found narcissistic personality traits had risen by 30 per cent. The same year, another group of researchers came back with a meta-analysis surveying over 27,000 college kids and found no evidence of it rising. The research continues in this back and forth ping-pong manner, with a recent study in 2017 in Psychological Science finding a small decline; “the narcissism epidemic is dead,” the researchers claim. The debate, in my humble opinion, is made redundant—the finger
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Celestial