The latest cover story of Time magazine called “The Me Me Me Generation”, carries this bold subtitle: “Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.” Not surprisingly, the article by Joel Stein has drummed up a lot of controversy and criticism. Though the validity of a study cited in the story that shows the high number of narcissistic personality disorder diagnoses among twentysomethings has been debated, as The Atlantic points out, the overall criticism of young adults is nothing new to newsmagazines. In 1990, Time ran a cover line that read “Twentysomethings … late blooming or just lost?”; the 1976 cover of New York magazine was about “The ‘Me’ Decade”; and, before social media, Newsweek ran a cover story in 1985 about the narcissists being created by “The Video Generation”. The moral of the story: Stein’s piece may have some interesting stats about unemployment, lifestyle choices and mental health in the generation, but his criticism of twentysomethings has been used many times before in the last four decades …
