Growing up has always depended on social conditions and contexts. However, it is in the last two decades that major changes in growing up and in the transition from youth to adulthood have emerged. If the digital networking of the world is producing a new form of generational and cultural homogenisation of children and young people, the highly visible differences and inequalities in life situations are causing great tensions among young people. The price of the contradictions of modern growing up is the increasing number of health and psychosocial problems among children and adolescents. A noticeable consequence of such psychosocial conditions is increased feelings of loneliness and social exclusion. The inadequate capacity to process stressful situations is also reflected in the occurrence of violence among adolescents. Violence becomes a problem-solving strategy, as a rule, when there are no other coping models available. As a consequence, transitions to adulthood are also altered. In particular, these transitions are increasingly individualised and fragmented. The answer to the increasingly difficult, ambiguous and uncertain transition from youth to adulthood is the development of a passive, defensive, diffuse identity. We seem to be moving in the direction of the unilateral development of an infantile adulthood, inward-looking and neglecting the important problems of the community. All this is creating a kind of mass cultural narcissism, which only decades ago was considered a personality disorder. Today, however, it is precisely this kind of narcissistic personality that thrives best in the modern world. The causes of this kind of narcissism lie in modern consumer society, which naturally has a vested interest in growing a population of adults with weak selves and well-developed unconscious impulses, especially the tendency to seek immediate gratification of desires.
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