Weisel: Combating our generation’s inflated self-importance

About a month or so into our freshman year, many of us come to a startling realization: We’re… About a month or so into our freshman year, many of us come to a startling realization: We’re not as great as we thought we were.

People our age, as numerous scholars have pointed out, have developed an inflated sense of self-importance. The culture in which we grew up cultivated this attitude and created what psychology professor Jean Twenge calls “Generation Me.”

As a Pitt News editorial reported earlier this year, Twenge and her colleagues published a study in British journal Self and Identity that analyzed students’ confidence levels from 1966 to the present. The study found that in 2009, about 60 percent of college freshmen considered themselves more intellectually “self-confident” than average, compared to only 39 percent in 1966.

While I could probably attribute our self-importance to any number of factors, the first culprits that come to mind are our parents, who during the 1970s saw their ideals of peace and love shattered by war and cynicism. As a direct result, they became more self-centered, believing personal success to be the only means of escaping a corrupt society.

Enter our generation, persons born into families that instilled in their children the same individualistic zeal. We were taught that we are unique individuals with the potential to accomplish anything we put our minds to. And unsurprisingly, we believed it. A 2002 Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth study found that 99 percent of academically gifted children considered themselves capable of meeting their parents’ expectations.

Clearly, our parents’ encouragement helped our self-perceptions. However, what we weren’t told was that in order to be successful in a given field, we must also have a “knack” for work in that field — we can’t rely on motivation alone. So instead of balancing intelligence and self-awareness, we ended up with indiscriminate self-confidence.

One place this problem manifests itself is in social media. A 2010 Digital Surgeons graphic showed that approximately 29 percent of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 and 25 — a higher percentage than composes any other age group. It’s not difficult to see why: The site allows us to publicize our supposedly sharp opinions and to delude ourselves into thinking we’re important enough that someone, anyone, will care.

Social media and the Internet provide ample opportunity for us to advertise ourselves and seek the attention that our self-importance thinks it deserves.

However, just because we’re the self-important generation doesn’t mean we have to remain that way. We just have to learn to live in reality.

An important first step in achieving this objective is identifying our strengths and weaknesses early. As children, we were encouraged to pursue every imaginable goal. Though this is a nice sentiment, it’s useless if we can’t recognize what we can and can’t excel in. When we identify our shortcomings at a young age, we give ourselves time to find the things we can, in fact, accomplish. Only then can we cultivate our strengths and make realizing our dreams a greater possibility.

Living in reality also requires surrounding ourselves with realistic people. Especially now that we’re in college and separated from our family, it’s imperative that we choose our new relationships wisely. Instead of seeking friends who are always praising us, we should seek friends who will tell us when we make a mistake, as well as let us know what we’ve done well. We should seek friends who draw our attention outward and who keep us balanced between self-improvement and the improvement of our surroundings, because both are important.

Lastly, we should remember that we are, in fact, special, albeit on a much smaller scale than we originally thought. We still have our own talents. No one will see them, however, until we crack that shell of self-importance and let reality seep through.

Contact Elizabeth at eaw62@pitt.edu