"ME ME ME" Generation: Top 5 'TIME' Magazine Cover Parodies
It seems not a lot of people are impressed with TIME's latest magazine cover, dubbing millennials as the "ME ME ME" generation:
Although there's a subtitle that suggests despite selfies and living in the basement with parents, past the narcissism, millennials have the power to save the world. I tried reading the article to get a sense of how, but sadly I was blocked by a paywall to Joel Stein's article. (The journalism industry needs to do what a journalism industry has to do in order to survive, after all.)
Still, the nature of the cover itself can be easily interpreted to suggest that millennials are the only generation to have suffered from crippling egotism, when that simply isn't the case. As a story in the Atlantic points out, every generation has been the "Me" generation at some point. The only major difference now is that millennials have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to highlight their me-ness.
But like I said, a lot of people are pissed off. For example, as Tom Hawking wrote for Flavorwire, "Millennials may be 'narcissistic, materialistic and addicted to technology,' as Stein alleges early in his article; they’re also drowning in college debt, slaves to an internship 'system' that demands ever-increasing work for no pay, and entrants into a job market that’s replaced employment rights with the 'flexibility' of never being able to afford health insurance."
The same sentiments have been expressed in a viral Internet meme that both mocks and criticizes TIME's cover. Here are the top five (and fair warning, since these were made by angry internet meme-makers, it's gonna get a little dicey in here):
