The "Know-It-Alls"

[Narcissus]

"I am not young enough to know everything." -Oscar Wilde

We've been dubbed the Facebook generation, self-absorbed with our computers, iPods, and Blackberries. We can't go a day, rather an hour, without checking our email, and many of us have our own personal blogs. So it's no surprise that we are often characterized as a Narcissistic generation, a much more self-absorbed, "look-at-me" generation than our parents.

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. [NY Times]

Today's youth are marrying later, prolonging their "me-time", a time where they are clinging onto their adolescence in hopes of holding off adulthood and all of the responsibilities that it entails. But we are left wondering if this is really as dramatic as people are making it out to be. Mr. Arnett, the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties” argues that this is "not a permanent generational characteristic", but rather just a "temporary condition of being self focused"

With 23 year-olds sitting on top of mega-companies, our pop culture turning their contemporaries into stars after a one hit reality show on MTV, and not to mention all of our elementary teachers telling us for years that we could "be whatever we wanted to be" when we grow up, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that our generation wants it all... Sorry that we don't want to settle at some job where we will have to spend years kissing ass before we make it to the top. Sorry that we have IDEAS that we want to work on before we marry and get the house with the white picket fence and pot roasts in the oven. With the state of our economy lately, we should be rewarding these self-absorbed youths, who think of the world as their playground and are thirsty to create. Oscar Wilde's quote at the beginning always makes us smile. Being young, you are less afraid of failure and more open to taking the risks that are necessary for innovation. These "kids" may "think they know everything", but maybe they are on to something.