I think that blaming current narcissistic trends on this guy is extremely naive: as so many others point out these are pervasive all over the western world. And it ignores more fundamental changes, like the growth of private mass media which is now ubiquitous, the permeation of the advertising language into our daily lives, the take-over of the Internet by corporations that profit precisely from our individualization, and other consequences of a decades long ideological war on any form of collectivist thought.
This is a very good point. The author is promoting his book about self-obsession, but conflating self-obsession with self-esteem seems wrong. They are surely linked, but are different things.
In fact, people with low self-esteem are more likely to appear self-obsessed because they need validation and reassurance from other people. They literally spend more time in their own heads, worrying about what others think of them.
If you have a solid core of self-belief, you're less likely to care about others' judgement of you.
Another hypothesis - kids now are overstimulated, their brains are saturated with new stuff, but have not time to process it deeply. The deep processes are mostly activated when there is nothing new to register - i.e. mostly when the child is a bit bored. When there is new interesting stuff the brain is preoccupied by registering it and have no time for any deep reflection.
This is not much different from our problems with too much food.
