We are the face of Narcissism

We tweet, we blog, we facebook, we bookmark, we are linked-in, we post ourselves on you-tube, we post our shots on Flickr,  it’s all about us and our seemingly fascinating lives that we want to share with the whole world! We think we are social media rock stars, and unknowingly, we have become the face of this narcissistic age.

What is narcissism? Dictionary.com defines it as, “an inordinate fascination with oneself,” or, “gratification derived from admiration of one's own attributes.”  

Our generation seems to fit this definition. Each of us seeks individualism, pseudo self-awareness, and confidence in our reasoning. We feel the need to honor the world with our frustrations, beliefs, and elite opinions. Nobody cares about what we ate, how little we slept, or how our boss mispronounced our name. But that’s the etiquette that we follow in the digital world, we acknowledge what we want, and respectfully move on in other cases. As much as I recognize the trend in others, I am guilty of it too. I post frequent updates on my facebook page because that’s my mode of communication with my friends who are scattered across the globe. 

Read a similar story titled Generation Me vs. You Revisited published by The New York Times. Here is an excerpt: “Conventional wisdom, supported by academic studies using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, maintains that today’s young people — schooled in the church of self-esteem, vying for spots on reality television, promoting themselves on YouTube — are more narcissistic than their predecessors. Heck, they join Facebook groups like the Association for Justified Narcissism. A study released last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press dubbed Americans age 18 to 25 as the ‘Look at Me’ generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.”

Now let’s think of how this narcissistic attitude will affect us in the long run. Will it hinder our personal relationships? We need to balance this prevailing behavior before it gets the better of us. Just a thought…