Millennial narcissism accusations were debunked but reflected real era pressures

Evidence

The 2013 Time cover story on millennials had declared, “The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older.” Critics like Jeffrey Kluger lamented that millennials were displaying narcissism “on a pandemic level,” with the selfie becoming the definitive emblem of their self-obsession. … Scientific studies have debunked the idea that millennials are more narcissistic than Gen Xers or boomers, but the frequency of the accusation revealed how deeply this narrative was etched into millennial lore. This was an unfair aspersion: In an age where personhood was reduced to résumés or bank balances, millennials simply adapted to the demands of the era faster than their elders. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 334

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School tradition of reading a generation’s ‘pathology’ as adaptive response to prevailing social conditions — Horkheimer and Adorno’s insight that social character forms under the demands of the economic system.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Marx later use this ‘adaptation faster than elders’ framing as the mechanism for omnivore monoculture — with millennials as the vanguard who internalized a flattened status game first?