Courtesy Free Press
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable—Than Ever Before
By Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. (Free Press, 2006)
Review by Aaron Shulman, January 2006
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As a 23-year-old American who considers himself mildly confident and assertive but neither miserable nor entitled, I was curious to see what Jean M. Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor in her mid-30s, had to say in her new book, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable—Than Ever Before.
Twenge saddles herself with the task of describing the defining characteristics of the children of Baby Boomers born from 1970 to the end of the 20th century, a group she terms Generation Me. The members of this generation, while remarkably diverse in many respects, share a unifying aspect: we are "unapologetically focused on the individual," a trait inherited from our Boomer parents and fanned to extremes by the culture they engendered.
 
While no one—especially a generation raised to worship individualism—likes to have their sameness within a group pointed out to them, I was struck by how consistently Twenge's generalizations about GenMe rang true about me and most of my friends. We think of work more as a path toward self-fulfillment than as a means to a stable livelihood; we feel we can have it all and believe in "following our dreams" and doing things our own way; we heed social rules and figures of authority only insofar as they don't get in our way; and we view our 20s as a period to bounce around and "find ourselves" because otherwise we won't be ready for married family life in our late 20s and early 30s. As to whether these trends are good or bad, Twenge only occasionally makes an outright judgment, letting her research instead speak for itself. And most of the time her research convincingly shows—though it never hurts to be reminded that her data and sources are selectively mediated by her— that these developments have no small hand in creating the doldrums of the book's subtitle.
In sketching out how these conditions came to be, Twenge tells an engaging story, fueled and supported by a solid base of data, illustrative quotes from her and others' research, and barometric examples from TV shows, movies, comics, and advertisements. She explains how the defiance of authority and shirking of social approval pioneered by Boomers in the '60s and '70s was subsumed by the mainstream and incorporated into the status quo, informing GenMe's Weltanschauung. Twenge also serves up a well argued critique of the self-esteem industry in the United States, which she says has a narcissistic-tinged ethos that is harming America's youth vastly more than it helps. Throughout the book, her analyses of myriad topics articulated a number of ideas on the tip of my mind's tongue, getting me to think about myself and my parents, as well the culture we come from and help create.
Generation Me is cogent, thoughtful, and fun to read, but over the course of the book I couldn't shake my discomfort with the sensationalistic use of the word miserable to describe my generation. In spite of all the dispiriting trends that dog GenMe—depression, crushing disappointment when the real world doesn't deliver on the things we've been taught to expect, credit card debt, mountainous student loans, divorce-like breakups, rising health-insurance premiums and real estate prices, estrangement from the community—to say we're miserable seems to preclude resilience. Yes, GenMe must confront some bleak obstacles, but doesn't every generation? Thinking of ourselves as miserable doesn't seem to be a move in the right direction. Twenge does realize this, in a sense, and closes her book with prescriptive optimism: "Generation Me needs realistic expectations, careful career guidance, and assistance when we become parents. In return, we will gladly lend our energy and ambition toward our work and toward helping others."
Aaron Shulman recently left his job at AARP to work on a novel, while freelancing on the side.
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