How did Fitzgerald portray the attitudes of the 1920s?

Fitzgerald was ahead of his time in articulating the defining elements of the 1920s. He recognized that the Jazz Age was rooted in "outer-directed" focus. This condition was one in which individuals lived for external reality and for the expectations of other people. Fitzgerald demonstrates a time period in which there is a noticeable lack of "inner-directed" guidance. For the most part, the Jazz Age is depicted as a monument built upon a firmament of sand.
The outer-directed nature of the time period ultimately reveals its emptiness. Underneath the glamour and glitz is a crippling hollowness, a vacant nothingness that underscores their existence.
Fitzgerald operates as both storyteller and historian in how he is able to detail this aspect of the 1920s. To a great extent, Fitzgerald shows how the excessive "outer-directed" condition of being helps to perpetuate unsound economic habits that would inevitably lead to the 1929 Stock Market Crash.