The Selfie Generation: An Epidemic of Online Narcissism

Will we forever remain the Selfie Generation?

I love social media—just not all of it.

I could do without motiv­a­tion­al quotes, bath­room selfies, impossible ping-pong trick shots, wing­tip sun­sets, Instagram teen mod­els, jet-set life­styles with fil­ter packs, keep­ing up with real­ity super­stars, LinkedIn net­work­ing threads, Tik Tok pranks, butt pos­ing in yoga pants, baby pic­tures, MrBeast, Twitch stream­ers speak­ing in baby voices, man-buns mak­ing per­fect cups of cof­fee, rampant Twitter debates, and snap­shots of feet on beaches.

Still:

Will we fig­ure out what it means to be grownups in social media?
Or will we remain infant­il­ised kidults?

Here goes:

A Decade of Novelty Wears Off

I turned 30 in 2009 and spent the last dec­ade exper­i­en­cing a social media uni­verse dom­in­ated by teens and 20-somethings. Sure, new trends are excit­ing, but still.

I’ve enjoyed see­ing oth­er­wise mature, intel­li­gent, middle-aged friends do duck­face selfies in front of their bath­room mir­rors — or weirdly flex­ing about their latest bicycle session. 

But such nov­el­ties even­tu­ally wear off, too.

I think we’re a gen­er­a­tion of adults who don’t know what it means to be grownups on social media. 

Read also: Social Media — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Some take the route of being omni­po­tent multi-experts who are fiercely opin­ion­ated about everything. Others try to save the world by organ­ising them­selves around the cent­ral task of sham­ing oth­ers pub­licly. Some try too hard to impress oth­ers by self-pro­mot­ing their per­son­al life choices. Others opt out; they go quiet.

“Being young today is no longer a trans­it­ory stage, but rather a life choice, well estab­lished and bru­tally pro­moted by the media sys­tem. While the clas­sic paradigms of adult­hood and mat­ur­a­tion could inter­pret such infant­ile beha­vi­or as a symp­tom of devi­ance, such beha­vi­or has become a mod­el to fol­low, an ideal of fun and being care­free, present in a wide vari­ety of con­texts of soci­ety. The con­tem­por­ary adult fol­lows a sort of thought­ful imma­tur­ity, a con­scious escape from the respons­ib­il­it­ies of an ana­chron­ist­ic mod­el of life. If an ideal of matur­ity remains, it does not find beha­vi­or­al com­pens­a­tions in a soci­ety where child­ish atti­tudes and adoles­cent life mod­els are con­stantly pro­moted by the media and tol­er­ated by insti­tu­tions.”
— Jacopo Bernardini, The Infantilisation of the Postmodern Adult and the Figure of Kidult

Read also: Online Wannabeism: Why We Mimic Social Media Influencers

6 Levels of Emotional Maturity

But how do we bet­ter under­stand the emo­tion­al matur­ity of the Selfie Generation? In The Secret of Maturity by Kevin Everett FitzMaurice, a matur­ity pro­gres­sion of six steps is outlined.

Level 1: Emotional Responsibility

Level 1 matur­ity means that you under­stand that your feel­ings are your choices. 

People who haven’t yet reached this level of matur­ity tend to blame their feel­ings on extern­al stim­uli, such as oth­er people, places, things, forces, fate, and spirits. 

Beware: When people get eas­ily offen­ded, espe­cially on behalf of others.

Level 2: Emotional Honesty

Level 2 matur­ity means you under­stand your feel­ings and have the cop­ing mech­an­isms to allow for genu­ine emo­tions instead of sup­press­ing them.

People who haven’t yet reached this level of matur­ity tend to hurt them­selves emo­tion­ally because they haven’t yet learned how to cope with their inner emotions. 

Beware: When people pub­licly paint them­selves as vic­tims of their feelings.

Level 3: Emotional Openness

Level 3 matur­ity means that you can be pur­pose­ful in vent­ing your emo­tions with the intent to let them go because you’re done with them.

People who haven’t yet reached this level of matur­ity tend to be insec­ure in know­ing how and when to share their feelings. 

Beware: When people pub­licly over­share to wal­low or are unaware that their shar­ing has the oppos­ite effect than they were aim­ing for.

Level 4: Emotional Assertiveness

Level 4 matur­ity means that you take respons­ib­il­ity for clearly com­mu­nic­at­ing your emo­tion­al needs with those who care about you.

People who haven’t yet reached this matur­ity level tend to fear ask­ing oth­ers to respect their emo­tion­al needs. 

Beware: When people allow oth­ers to make them feel bad but can­not set whatever bound­ar­ies they need.

Level 5: Emotional Understanding

Level 5 matur­ity means you no longer force your­self into ima­gin­ary or con­veni­ent ideas about who you are and what you should feel.

People who haven’t yet reached this level of matur­ity tend to have cer­tain firm beliefs about them­selves that stem from ideas or prin­ciples, not genu­ine emotions. 

Beware: When people try too hard to pro­ject a false self-image, which only makes them feel worse.

Level 6: Emotional Detachment

Level 6 matur­ity means you are detached from your ego, and noth­ing can no longer both­er you bey­ond your control.

People who haven’t yet reached this level of matur­ity tend to have cer­tain self-con­cepts to defend or promote. 

Beware: When people can’t truly appre­ci­ate liv­ing in a world where people make each oth­er feel good and bad about things.

Life Experience and Maturity

Shaping tech­no­logy to favour human­ity will require a size­able dose of matur­ity, char­ac­ter, and life experience. 

“To me, it’s just one symp­tom of a broad­er trend of infant­il­isa­tion in Western cul­ture. It began before the advent of smart­phones and social media. But, as I argue in my book “The Terminal Self,” our every­day inter­ac­tions with these com­puter tech­no­lo­gies have accel­er­ated and nor­m­al­ised our culture’s infant­ile tend­en­cies.”
— Simon Gottschalk, pro­fess­or of Sociology at the University of Nevada

John Mellkvist, a Swedish PR con­sult­ant and futur­ist, is on a per­son­al quest to raise aware­ness that the “older” work­force is con­stantly undervalued.

For instance, Mellkvist is push­ing loc­al industry media to list “50 over 50” as a coun­ter­weight to all juni­or mar­ket­ing and PR list­ings. I sup­port his work whole­heartedly, of course, but I can’t help but react against the absurdity of under­es­tim­at­ing pro­fes­sion­als with extens­ive exper­i­ence and robust networks.

Why shouldn’t we be con­fid­ent enough to shape social media to reflect our gen­er­a­tion better? 

Read also: What Remains of the Xennial Generation?

The Selfie Generation and Maturity

“People want to be loved; fail­ing that admired; fail­ing that feared; fail­ing that hated and des­pised. They want to evoke some sort of sen­ti­ment. The soul shud­ders before obli­vi­on and seeks con­nec­tion at any price.”
— Hjalmar Söderberg (1869−1941), Swedish author

I think of my beha­viour on social media as I pon­der the vary­ing levels of emo­tion­al matur­ity among my peers in the selfie gen­er­a­tion. Getting sucked into a mael­strom of click­bait and humbl­eb­rags is taxing. 

It’s a pecu­li­ar side-effect: online self-pub­lish­ing with zero fric­tion has made it easy to resort to imma­ture and react­ive behaviours. 

“A status update with no likes (or a clev­er tweet without retweets) becomes the equi­val­ent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewrit­ten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to con­form to the opin­ions of those around us.”
— Neil Strauss, Wall Street Journal

Imagine if we, at least those of us who think of ourselves as adults and who don’t wish to belong to the Selfie Generation any­more, could shift our approach to social media:

Good stuff.
But first, let me take a selfie.

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