A "millennial" is a person born between 1980 and 2000. And, if you believe common stereotypes and the good folks at FOX News, they are also "a generation of deluded narcissists" who are "higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more...and having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier...because it makes them feel special, for a while."
Most of the time you can replace the word "millennials" with "kids these days" and get the same meaning. What is the matter with kids today? Get off of my lawn, you darned kids!
A quick Google search will disprove all of those claims about specific behaviors. Millennials aren't "drunker than ever"—
alcohol consumption rates have been consistently dropping since the 90's. (Note: on all of the following graphs, the y-axis represents the percentage of American youth doing the indicated behavior):
They aren't "smoking more"—youth smoking rates have dropped to the lowest in American history and are still going down:
They aren't "having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier"—
rates of sexual behavior among youth have been falling at a slow but steady rate over the last couple of decades, and teens are waiting longer to have sex than in the recent past:
They aren't "higher on drugs than ever"—
teen illicit drug use has generally declined or remained stable in the last twenty years, with the exception of marijuana use (which has fluctuated quite a bit but generally declined since its peak at the turn of the century):
These statistics and more are freely available in detail from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Center for Disease Control, the Guttmacher Institute and DrugWarFacts.org.
Oops. Maybe certain journalists at FOX should consider doing their research before making such bold statements about generational trends.
The "entitled narcissists" claim is not a completely unfounded lie like the other lies are, though; it is simply misinformed. Psychologists such as Jean Twenge have argued that scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) have risen over time. In order to verify her results, Brent Roberts, Grant Edmonds and Emily Grijalva combined her data with other data from similar studies using a rigorous statistical technique known as "meta-analysis." When they examined all of the data, the supposed increase in narcissism disappeared. However, a new trend emerged that seems obvious in hindsight: people become less narcissistic as they grow older. In other words, older generations will always tend to be less narcissistic than younger ones. Surprise!
Kali Trzesniewski and Brent Donnellan corroborated their results by examining data from more nuanced personality tests (as opposed to the NPI, which has been criticized for conflating narcissism with healthy self-esteem) taken by 477,380 U.S. high schoolers between 1976 and 2006. They also found no indicators of rising narcissism over time.
Hopefully, now that we have cleared that issue up, people will stop accusing millennials of being hedonistic narcissists. But then again, the people slinging those accusations may not have enough respect for the facts to stop once they have been proven wrong.
For more information on the subject, check out some of the following resources:
Psychology Today, "Is it Narcissism--Or Just High, Healthy Self-esteem?"
The Atlantic, "The Persistent Myth of the Narcissistic Millennial"
USA Today, "Look Into the Hearts of the We Generation"
U.S. News, "Millennials Aren't Work-Hating Lazy Narcissists"
