Last weekend, our local best-friend Cynthia starred in a wonderfully fun theater production of Moss Hart and George Kaufman's 1938 play You Can't Take It With You. Cynthia played Mrs. Sycamore, an eccentric housewife who'd been devoted to painting bad portraits until a typewriter was delivered to her home by mistake eight years ago, at which point her life was taken over by writing bad plays. (Cindy and I are proud for Cynthia that her 1938-bizarro-woman outfit looks just like her usual street clothes.) Mr. Sycamore builds and sells firecrackers at a small profit, aided by Mr. Depina, who just showed up one day and never left; the rest of the time they play with other toys they can't sell. Daughter Essie, who makes and sells candies at what we imagine is some sort of small profit, conducts her entire life while stretching and practicing dance steps. Essie's husband Ed, who also just sort of moved in, is a "printer", which means he prints random book quotes to put in the candy boxes. Daughter Rheba isn't married, but her boyfriend Donald is another straggler. No one suggests they're "living in sin"; it's just that everyone is welcome here, including Essie's irascible Russian dance teacher, who stomps in and out at will.

It's Grandpa Vanderhoff who earns the real money, from investments, having worked on Wall Street until 36 years prior (half his life ago). But since then he's just amused himself by collecting snakes. When third daughter Alice creates the story's conflict – by falling in love with her handsome young boss on Wall Street – it is Grandpa who defends the family's honor. "What would happen if everyone was like you, just doing what they wanted?", demands the father of Alice's love; Grandpa explains that that will never happen. He says there's always plenty of people who are happy to make themselves useful, who feel best when they're productive (as Rheba and Donald seem happy cooking and running errands for the clan). Let them be useful and happy, let the Sycamore clan be useless and happy, and everything will work out.

As Marxism goes, it's more Groucho than Karl: from each according to their sense of responsibility, to each according to their whim. Certainly I don't find Grandpa's refusal to pay taxes charming like I'm supposed to – perhaps this sixth consecutive year of Bush-driven tax-cutting applied only to investors and corporations, because we working types just enjoy paying taxes more, has made me grumpy. But the overall philosophy, be it right or wrong, does make a certain sense. Or rather, suggests the data in Jean Twenge's Generation Me, it used to. Once upon a time.

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Let me back up a moment to approach from a different angle. If you'd asked me, two weeks ago, what I thought of the "self-esteem" movement that has shaped school policy, therapist talk, and daytime talk shows since the beginning of the 1970s, I'd probably have given you the following two opinions:

1. It's a moronic diversion from actually learning and accomplishing stuff.

2. It's condescending happy-talk bullbleep that couldn't possibly work: if your message of "You are special"/ "Love yourself" is broadcast to an audience of tens of millions, no one is going to come out feeling special and self-loved.

From this we learn that I'm happy to have opinions about the world even in the absence of data. What Jean Twenge (now a PhD) realized in 1992, while working on a B.A. thesis in Psychology, was that psychologists had been collecting systematic data on the minds of college students – their self-esteem, their attitudes and beliefs, their charity work, their politics, etc etc – since the early 1950s. And that no one had pored over the hundreds of studies to find out how all this data had changed over time.

Until now, hardly anything you've ever read or been told about the minds of "Generation X" or "Generation Y" or "kids today" has made any use of this hard information. It took Twenge and two assistants 13 years to collect all those studies and turn it into a book's worth of findings. The book is about her generation and mine – born early 1970s – and even more about the generations after us. We are the first generation to grow, from birth, in this brave new world of self-esteem and self-fulfillment. Given the data, I can stick with calling the self-esteem lessons a "moronic diversion" ... but as for part two of my critique? Wrongo. Because, boy oh boy, do the lessons work.

The subtitle of Twenge's Generation Me is Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable than Ever Before. It's a book about our brave new world Grandpa Vanderhoff never imagined: a Free to Be You and Me world where more 20-year-olds expect – not hope, expect – to make a living as musicians, actors, or artists than as lawyers, nurses, accountants, business owners, journalists, teachers, or (god forbid) clerks or unionized factory workers. Which would be lovely, if the world was ready and able to cooperate.

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Twenge spends far more time on stories, media reviews, and quotes than on the statistics themselves – a good thing, making the book more readable and emotionally persuasive. She talks of William Hung, It's a Wonderful Life, Oprah, Dawson's Creek, cuddle parties, and MTV. She quotes Tyler Durden, and the entertaining fuming of a journalism teacher, and the stupefying lack of irony in the our-generation manifestos Quarterlife Crisis and Whatever Happened to the Class of 1993?, and a young jerkoff who trick-or-treated at Twenge's door without even wearing a costume but accepted her candy and scowled and said "More!". She reprints Calvin & Hobbes. Those are more fun than numbers, and give the story behind the numbers: that's why you'll want to read the book.

But for the length of this section, I wish here to give you a grab-bag of her statistics and data points, just to give a sense of the types and scale of change she discusses. Some of them, I think, are pretty darned interesting, even presented so starkly.

Chapter 1: You Don't Need Their Approval
* "In 1924, a group of sociologists did a famous extensive study of the citizens of a place they called Middletown (later revealed as Muncie, Indiana). When mothers were asked which traits they wanted their children to have, they named strict obedience, loyalty to church, and good manners. In 1988, few mothers named those traits; instead they chose independence and tolerance".

* "In a recent survey of men, 62% of those aged 18-to-24 said they are comfortable discussing their personal problems with others, compared to only 37% of those aged 65 or older."

* "In a 1990s study, 33% of women in their forties said that tampon commercials should not be aired on TV, whereas only 5% of the women under thirty felt this way".

* "In 1979, 29% of people failed to stop at a particular stop sign in a New York suburb, but by 1996 a stunning 97% of drivers did not stop at all. In Trinkaus's most ironic finding, the number of people who paid the suggested fee for lighting a candle at a Catholic church decreased from 92% to 28% by the early 2000s. In other words 72% of the people cheated the church out of money in the latest observation".

Chapter 2: An Army of One: Me
* "The term 'self-esteem' wasn't widely recognized until the late 1960s, and didn't become talk-show and dinner-table conversation until the 1980s ... A search for 'self-esteem' in the Books section of Amazon.com yielded 105,438 entries in July 2005 (sample titles: the Self-Esteem Workshop, Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem, Ten Days to Self-Esteem, 200 Ways to Raise a Girl's Self-Esteem)".

* "Boomers talk about the self using language full of abstraction, introspection, and 'growth'. New things call for this kind of meticulous thought, and require the idea that the process will take time ... In 1967, a whopping 86% of incoming college students said that 'Developing a meaningful philosophy of life' was an essential life goal. Only 42% of GenMe freshmen in 2004 agreed". (Twenge and I are both with our generation, thinking "meaningful philosophy of life" sounds kinda stoned.)

* " 60% of teachers and 69% of school counselors agree that self-esteem should be preserved by 'providing more unconditional validation of students based on who they are rather than how they perform or behave'".

* "In the early 1950s, only 12% of teens aged 14 to 16 agreed with the statement 'I am an important person'. By the late 1980s, an incredible 80%, almost seven times as many, claimed they were important".

(I checked with Cindy: she, like me, would've been in the unimportant 20%. Please note, in case you think that's sad, that we have not become basket-cases. Thank you.)

Chapter 3: You Can Be Anything You Want to Be
* " 81,384 high school and college students ... completed questionnaires measuring what psychologists call 'agency': a personality trait involving assertiveness, dominance, independence, and self-promotion ... the average 1990s college student scored higher than 75% of college boomers from the 1970s".

* "After being told to surrender a toy, one kintergardener screamed, knocked over her desk, and three books at the other kids. Another 6-year-old told his teacher to 'Shut up, biitch'. 93% of 39 schools agreed that kintergardeners have 'more emotional and behavioral problems' today than even five years ago".

* "Seventy percent of late-1990s high school students expected to work in professional jobs, compared to 42% in the 1960s ... In 1999, teens predicted they would be earning, on average, $75,000 by the age of thirty. The average income of a thirty-year-old that year? $27,000."

Chapter 4: the Age of Anxiety (and Depression, and Loneliness)
* "Only 1% to 2% of Americans born before 1915 experienced a major depressive episode during their lifetime, even though they lived through the Great Depression and two world wars. Today the lifetime rate of major depression is ten times higher ... In one 1990s study, 21% of teens aged 15 to 17 had already experienced major depression ... Researchers have concluded that the rate of change is too large and too consistent across studies to be explained solely by reporting bias".

* Between 1997 and 2002, the amount Americns aged 25-34 spent on mortgage, property taxes, health insurance, and home repairs all went up by 15 to 24%. The amount the same Americans spent on clothing, entertainment, furniture, and alcohol all went _down_ by 3 to 11% ... and not by choice.

Chapter 5: Yeah, Right: the Belief that There's No Point in Trying
* "In 1966, 60% of college freshmen said that 'Keeping up to date with political affairs' was an important life goal. Only 34% agreed in 2004, and that was up from an all-time low of 28% in 2000'".

* "David Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans under 40 Don't Follow the News, interviewed 18-to-24-year-olds in 2002. He found that 60% could not name a single Supreme Court justice, 48% did not know what Roe vs Wade was, and 62% could not name any of the three countries Bush had identified as the 'Axis of Evil'". (Note to reader: if you can't do any better - hey, here's a moment to go look stuff up. 'Kay?)

Chapter 6: Sex: Generation Prude Meets Generation Crude
* As someone who didn't lose – er, discard – his virginity until age 24, I prefer not to quote the statistics in this chapter. They make me all jealous.

Chapter 7: the Equality Revolution
* "In a 2000 poll, 72% of high school seniors said they had a good friend of another race".

* "Back in the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark performed a famous experiment in which they gave black children the choice of playing with white dolls or black dolls. Most of the black children chose to play with white dolls, leading the authors to conclude that the black children had very low self-esteem ... During the 1980s, black Americans' self-esteem increased until it was notably higher than whites'. By the 1990s, 58% of blacks, and 61% of black college students, displayed above-averages self-esteem".

* "As late as the 1970s, there were no female news anchors, few female lawyers, and even fewer female scientists. The New York Times and other newspaprs ran want ads under "Help Wanted: Male" and "Help Wanted: Female" ... [today] Women earn 57% of all college degrees, and almost half the degrees of law and medicine".

* "In a 2002 survey, 82% of 18-to-22-year-olds said their mothers worked outside the home at least some of the time when they were growing up, compared with ... 34% of the mothers of the World War II generation".

* In 1970, the average age for first marriage was 22 for a man, 21 for a woman... and that's how long "free love" usually lasted. By now the average first marriage comes at 27 for a man, 25 for a woman.

* "While only 30% of Americans support gay marriage, 59% of American 18-year-olds do".

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The story goes like this. After World War II, an exhausted generation of soldiers came home from five years surrounded entirely by men and guns. They were horny, they were happy to be home, and they produced an extraordinary overflow of new children, average family size four kids per couple: the Baby Boom. Advertisers realized that these Baby Boomers could influence a huge amount of buying, and started to pamper the boomers with attention, and toys, no group of children had ever seen before.

Soon after, the sex research of Alfred Kinsey was seen to undermine the church's worship of virginity, as was the birth-control pill; and Benjamin Spock's books on parenting made spanking unfashionable. As the boomers got old enough, they developed a philosophy of liberation, rock'n'roll, fixing the corrupt adult system, and never trusting anyone over thirty. It was a switch from Middletown's "strict obedience, loyalty to church, and good manners", and it was a huge generational fight, though the advertisers were happy to sell designer tie-dye.

The generational fight is over, though. Boomers taught themselves collectively to "wave the freak flag" - a phrase which, as Twenge notes, still requires the implied groupthink of flags. But they chose, out of principle, to raise scruffy hoodlums like me, who could take it for granted, from birth, that our opinions count and that maybe our "errors" are just "differences of opinion".

And by now, my generation is raising kids, and not only raising them to the same self-importance, but not even realizing that there was ever a debate over it. As Twenge argues, even movies that claim to be set in the 1950s (Mona Lisa Smile, Pleasantville, Back to the Future, the Majestic) or traditionalist cultures (Bend It Like Beckham) are reliable propaganda for Do Your Own Thing, and the characters in the movie respond with rapture and conversion, the way real life people of the time never would have.

Did you ever read Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher's mid-1990s bestseller about how teenage girls have their self-esteem shattered and stomped? I did. It impressed me at the time, though I wasn't then teaching middle-school or high school myself (if I had, I would've smelled something fishy in it). Turns out that no, GenMe teenage girl self-esteem goes _up_ during adolescence: the "crisis" was simply that teenage boy self-esteem went up even more, so girls were lagging. This was demonstrated beyond doubt by Psychological Bulletin in 1999, which, to Twenge's irritation, didn't stop the Girl Scout Council from launching "Uniquely ME!", a self-esteem program, three years later.

Ironically, as Twenge shows, high self-esteem is _not_ correlated (or maybe it's negatively correlated) with achievement in school or at work. It is correlated with criminality, narcissism, and bad relationships, though.

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The final chapter of Generation Me devotes itself to solutions to the problems created by the triumph of self-esteem. Some are directed to parents, some to marketers, some to employers, some to young readers of the book. Some are political, such as adopting the government-run daycare and maternity-leave policies of Europe. None of her solutions are messianic, but all, in modest ways, make sense.

This is _not_ to suggest that "problems" are all that's discussed. I like weird families who remind me of the Sycamores. I like assertive women, I hate segregation, I hope someday to attend my Aunt Jean's gay wedding. I like that there's an incredible 1.8 million bands posting MP3's on Myspace. I like smart movies about content that would've been almost illegal and unthinkable forty years ago. I was totally one of those punks who thought he understood the material better than his teachers did – and just often enough to make things interesting, I was right.

But we live in a culture where kids are taught to expect more, to _demand_ more, while the economy gives them less as soon as they hit adulthood. It makes sense to try and deal with both trends.

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That's my review. For anyone still here, I want to bring up the most surprising theory Twenge generates during Generation Me – one that she under-estimates and undersells. It's about why depression has become so common.

What is the #1 cause of depression? The loss of a loved one - due to death, sure, but also due to breakup and rejection. Twenge notes that since the average age of marriage has gone up more than four years since 1970, that's an extra four-plus years in which people can experience heartbreak.

But since she mentions it, there's a lot more to it than she may realize. The average age of puberty has gone _down_ by about three years over the same span. In other words, a normal boomer might start dating at 16 and stop dating at 21; a normal GenMe kid might start dating at 13 and stop dating at 26. That's _more than double_ the time in which to experience romantic failure and heartbreak.

It gets worse. In Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac, he explains that depression, neurologically, acts a little like an addiction: the first depression is the hardest one to set off. Every time a person experiences depression, it takes a little less to set off the next one. So 13 years risking heartbreak is far, far more dangerous than 5: it's enough time to make a brain's chemistry fragile.

Also, once self-fulfillment hit it big, the divorce rate climbed to 50%. Heartbreak don't always stop at marriage no more.

I don't have a solution. I'm just thinking about it and going "Wow". But I like books that inspire me to do that.

Recommended: Yes