Contemporary psychic misery is structural, not a narcissism epidemic

Evidence

The psychic peculiarity of contemporary life, according to a certain trendy leitmotif, is an abundance of narcissism—“Generation Me” aggrandizement, measured definitively on the Narcissist Personality Index and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. But, just as the most essential aspect of its pathology is false self-centering, our era of narcissism does not perceive its own structural causes. Nor does the narcissism hypothesis adequately comprehend the irrepressible crisis in mental experience at present. Ours is a miserable society (though the very palpability of this misery can prioritize psychological categories as somehow more primary or immediate than structural ones). For three years in a row and counting, the US has been the only developed country to experience a decline in average life expectancy, which the American Medical Association attributes to suicide, opioid addiction, alcoholism, and obesity, explicitly connecting these factors to wealth inequality. Group traumas like mass shootings and racist extrajudicial killing are escalating. Viral losses exacerbate all this distress: governmental abandon in the pandemic has made the US the world leader in excess death and suspended millions in protracted isolation. The teenage suicide rate increased 70 percent from 2006 to 2019, while overall suicide rates increased 2 percent per year over the same period. Significant majorities of young people in wealthy countries are repeatedly rated “extremely pessimistic about their economic futures.” Too-lateness also looms: according to the Pew Research Center, fully two-thirds of Americans say the federal government is doing too little to mitigate climate change, and one in five college students pursues treatment for climate grief. Recent studies estimate that over 40 percent of Americans are suffering from anxiety and depression. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 81

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s ‘fight with her Antitheory chapter’ — the demand to read psychological categories as masked structural ones is her recurring theoretical move. — connects to: Psychoanalysis normalizes patients into a sick society rather than curing it — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 674
• QUESTION: The teen-suicide 70 percent figure and the 40 percent anxiety estimate deserve verification against source studies before building a claim on them.