This book focuses on the current generation of young people, born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, whom I call Generation Me. Right now in the 2000s, this group ranges from elementary school kids to thirty-something adults. Although thirty years is a longer-than-average span for a generation, it nicely captures the group of people who grew up in an era when focusing on yourself was not just tolerated but actively encouraged. A member of this generation myself, I was born in 1971. Like most of us who came along after the Baby Boom, I'm too young to remember Vietnam, Woodstock, or Watergate. During the summer of 1980, when every tree held a yellow ribbon for the Iran hostages, my main activity was running when I heard the chimes of the ice cream truck. Since I'm at the leading edge of this group, however, I'm also too old to have pierced anything except my ears or to have ever owned a Justin Timberlake poster. But when I talk about Generation Me, I'm also talking about myself.

Why the label Generation Me? Since GenMe'ers were born, we've been taught to put ourselves first. Unlike the Baby Boomers, GenMe didn't have to march in a protest or attend a group session to realize that our own needs and desires were paramount. Reliable birth control, legalized abortion, and a cultural shift toward parenthood as a choice made us the most wanted generation of children in American history. Television, movies, and school programs have told us we were special from toddlerhood to high school, and we believe it with a self-confidence that approaches boredom: why talk about it? It's just the way things are. This blasé attitude is very different from the Boomer focus on introspection and self-absorption: GenMe is not self-absorbed; we're self-important. We take it for granted that we're independent, special individuals, so we don't really need to think about it.

This is not the same as saying that young people are spoiled. That would imply that we always got what we wanted. Although some parents are indeed too indulgent, young people today must overcome many difficult challenges that their elders never had to face. While families could once achieve middle-class status on the earnings of one high school-educated person, it now takes two college-educated earners to achieve the same standard of living. Many teens feel that the world demands perfection in everything, and some are cracking under the pressure. Many people reaching their twenties find that their jobs do not provide the fulfillment and excitement they had anticipated, and that their salary isn't enough to afford even a small house. There's an acronym that describes how this growing self-reliance can be stressful: YO-YO (You're On Your Own).

I am also not saying that this generation is selfish. For one thing, youth volunteering has risen in the last decade. As long as time spent volunteering does not conflict with other goals, GenMe finds fulfillment in helping others. We want to make a difference. But we want to do it in our own way. GenMe also believes that people should follow their dreams and not be held back by societal expectations. Taking a job in a new city far from one's family, for example, isn't selfish, but it does put the individual first. The same is true for a girl who wants to join a boys' sports team or a college student who wants to become an actor when his parents want him to be a doctor. Not only are these actions and desires not considered selfish today (although they may have been in past generations), but they're playing as inspirational movies at the local theater. These aspirations are also being touted by politicians, even conservative ones —such opportunities are what George W. Bush is talking about when he says that "the fire of freedom" should be spread around the world.

This is the good part of the trend — we enjoy unprecedented freedom to pursue what makes us happy. But our high expectations, combined with an increasingly competitive world, have led to a darker flip side, where we blame other people for our problems and sink into anxiety and depression. Perhaps because of the focus on the self, sexual behavior has also changed radically: these days, parents worry not just about high school sex but about junior high school sex.

All of this, and we don't even have a name. People born in the late 1960s to the 1970s are often labeled "Generation X," but they have not been reexamined since being named in the early 1990s, long before their primary identity veered from slackers to Internet millionaires. It's just not clear that the GenX label fits now that flannel shirts are out. One advertising executive called the early 1990s depiction of this generation as bored cynics "the most expensive marketing mistake in history." Some descriptions (and birth years) of GenX overlap with what I call Generation Me, but it's clear that the GenX description is incomplete and often misguided. And the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s — today's children, teenagers, and people in their early twenties — has no name at all. Some marketers have used "GenY," which simply parrots the GenX label and thus probably won't last long: who wants to be named after the people older than you? Some have called young people the "Net Generation," as this is the first generation to grow up with the Internet, but this label has not caught on (and being the first to experience something doesn't mean much; the Boomers were the first "TV Generation," but later generations have clearly trumped them in their attachment to the boob tube). "Millennials," a somewhat better name, has also yet to stick, and of course that whole millennium thing is so 1999. But combine this label with the Net Generation idea, and you can name this generation after a version of Windows: the Millennium Edition. The convenient abbreviation? ME.

A neat twist on the Generation Me label — and in the same computer-oriented vein — is iGeneration. The first letter is nicely packed with meaning: it could stand for Internet (as it does in iMac and iPod) or for the first person singular that stands for the individual. Its pronunciation also appropriately suggests vision, either the things inside young people's heads that are usually glued to the computer or the TV, or the vision of young people in shaping a new world. It's an appropriate name for a generation raised with on-demand "iMedia" like TiVo, the Internet, and the ever-present iPod.

I don't really expect the Generation Me label to replace the GenX, GenY, and Millennial labels, though I'd welcome it if it did (iGeneration or iGen might have a better shot). The GenX label has been with us since the early 1990s and is fairly well established, so those of us born between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s are probably stuck with it — though we'd love to shake that slacker stereotype. Those born after 1980 do not yet have a coherent generational identity or name, but this should arrive sometime in the next ten years. What it will be is anybody's guess. Generation Me is a description as well as a label, a way of capturing our most distinctive trait — the freedom and individualism we take for granted. After the relatively unified mass of the Baby Boomers, the rest of us can only hope to be understood; we might not be precisely defined.

For more information, check out www.generationme.org.

Excerpted from "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before" by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. Copyright 2006 by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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