7 Sleeps To Go...Delusions of Grandeur

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I was flicking through a free magazine - one of those you get inside one of the daily newspapers over here - on my bus ride home on Friday night when an article called Star Syndrome caught my eye.  

The line under the heading read:

'Big rewards for minimum effort and the endless self-obsession encouraged by Facebook have left the younger generation at the mercy of their own egos'.

Hmmm I thought.  I quite like Facebook...it fills the long bus trip home (besides reading blogs of course) and the games are cute/addict-able...my curiosity piqued, I read on.

'it is ironic that young people are suffering from delusions of grandeur when graduates are finding it almost impossible to get jobs.'

So Facebook has become the harbinger of doom and the cause of rising unemployment amongst those poor, poor youngsters? Is this for real, I thought...but apparently this 'syndrome' has a name - Narcissistic Personality Disorder (or NPD for those that love an acronym).  And the next quote I read was the kicker:

'Will the new generation of NPD children eventually fall on their faces or will the world simply continue to keep the truth from them?'

So I say this... quaking a little at the response I might get and cloaked in that self-doubt unique to those of us who have children in our lives by association rather than as parents...I think they might have a point!

I think you will probably agree with me that you can't 'teach' resilience and it's only through life's lessons that any of us develop our own coping mechanisms and inner 'toughness'. 

So then how on earth do parents, or society at large for that matter, prepare children for the hardest lesson of all?  Life doesn't always feel good - and it's how we bounce back and deal with life's 'stuff' that's important rather than railing against the world's unfairness in not recognising what we are truly entitled to.

What do you think?  Just how much self-esteem is too much?
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• Narcissism Goes Big Time (psychologytoday.com)
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• why aren't you more emphatic about my lack of empathy? (text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com)

ps...there are only 7 sleeps to go 'til the Big Birthday Plus 1. I'm sure that must entitle me to something...after all, one of the 'signs' of the Narcissism is having one's own blog...