Skilled Migrant Professionals February 2015 | Page 35

Finance
Narcissism
and personal
wealth

by Bulelwa
Freer
Absolute
Advantage
Financial
Solutions

O

ne of the most common complaints of the 21st century is
that we have collectively turned into a narcissistic society
and that this self-obsession is getting out of hand. Obviously, the chosen scapegoats are often the millennials, Gen X, and
Gen Y…the usual suspects.
I find it quite irritating that they should bear the brunt of blame
for an entire period of social evolution that has been driven by
huge leaps in technological development and carefully manipulated by the marketing and advertising community. These younger generations only know the society they were born into and
grew up in. They have different role models than their parents and
grandparents had with greater access to celebrity ‘heroes’ as role
models, thanks to media and technology.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favour of the narcissism epidemic or Malignant Self Love as Sam Vaknin calls it, in his book of
the same name. It is disturbing and extremely unnerving to grasp
the fact that human beings have become so terribly self-involved.
The malignancy aspect seems to manifest itself when people
go beyond the navel gazing and begin to act on what their intro-

“Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is
not natural. It is man-made and it can
be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”
Nelson Mandela

spection has brought to the surface. Take the body image issue,
for instance. Everywhere you look, there are messages about our
size, suggesting that we are too fat, too skinny, or too flabby, perhaps our skin is too dry, too oily, or too blotchy. Advertisements
tell us that our hair is too straight, too curly, too dry. The list goes
on and on. This relatively recent obsession with body image has
spawned or bolstered countless industries, such as plastic surgery,
weight loss industries, exercise gyms, the cosmetics industry, etc.
Whatever society pays attention to will inevitably expand if there
is profit to be made.
The culminating point of this fixation on perfection is when people are simply too overwhelmed to properly start or don’t know

February 2015 | www.smpmagazine.com.au

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