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Self Absorbed

I was reading The Danish Way of Parenting recently and found most of the advisory solid common-sense. Worth a reminder for any parent who is actively child-raising - feeling worn-out and directionless often goes with the territory so a gentle reminder to set aside the emotional, uncalibrated response with a more calm and measured one can only help. This sentence caught my attention:

The Narcissistic Personality Indicator (NPI) was developed in 1970 to assess narcissism, and many studies have demonstrated its validity. Jean Twenge and her colleagues analyzed NPI scores for college students between 1982 and 2007 and found that during that twenty-five-year period, the level of narcissism rose significantly and steadily. The level rose so dramatically that by 2007 nearly 70 percent of college students scored higher in narcissism than the average college student in 1982.

While the obvious conclusion from reading that could be that a higher population of self-absorbed, unfeeling and uncaring people in society would lead to bad outcomes of all kinds including parenting disasters, but there would be more to it. Societal norms would need to adapt to cater to a largely narcissist population -the first of which might be in the way we consume goods and services, That gave me a lot to ponder over.





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