Generations by Jean Twenge
As of the 2020s, the American adult population is popularly divided into five major demographic cohorts: the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials (also called Generation Y), and Generation Z (also called Zoomers). These cohorts are usually 15-20 birth years long, shorter than biological generations; it is more fitting to think of them as social and cultural generations with blurry boundaries. Owing to enormous technological and social changes throughout the past century, each generation has experienced the world in a different way. The five generations differ significantly in their attitudes, values, priorities, view of society, and view of themselves.
The Silent Generation (born 1925 - 1945)
The Silent Generation was the generation of children who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. They have often been an overlooked generation, sandwiched between the more famous Greatest Generation and the more numerous Baby Boomers. The Silent Generation reached adulthood after the end of World War II, entering an uncharted world of prosperity and possibility.
A difficult but sheltered childhood. Growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, Silents observed and experienced the hardships of the period. However, as children rather than adults at the time, they were shielded from some of the era’s greatest horrors. Silents grew up without grand expectations for their futures and they often remained frugal for their entire lives. Silents were the first generation for whom completing a high school education was the norm; 86% completed high school, versus only 50% of members of the Greatest Generation.
Generation-defining technology: home appliances. The middle of the 20th century saw the mass adoption of convenient appliances such as washing machines, refrigerators, and microwave ovens. These new inventions significantly reduced the labor-intensiveness of running a household, allowing Silents to live differently in adulthood from their parents. The nuclear family became the basic unit of society, with extended relatives declining in importance. Silent Generation housewives personally performed many household chores that their parents would have outsourced to paid house servants; house servants fell into decline as a line of work. An unprecedented fraction of Silent women sought paid work outside the home, though women were usually limited in practice to a small set of all-female low-prestige occupations. Silents also raised more children than their parents, marking the first time in two centuries that America’s birth rate meaningfully increased.
The marriage-centered life. By modern standards, Silents paired off into couples very quickly; the average age at first marriage for women dipped as low as 20. Romantic pairings usually formed in high school and college, driven heavily by a conformist culture and a fear of being the last one left single. Silents had much higher divorce rates than their parents as a result of their rushed courtships and the increased importance of good spouse selection in the nuclear family model. However, divorced Silents tended to remarry and to remarry quickly. Marriage was a central institution for the Silent Generation, with only 5% of elderly Silents having never married.
The architects of equality and individualism. Thanks to more years of schooling and more exposure to mass media, the Silents were the most educated and worldly generation up to that point. Many old institutions that pigeonholed people into specific social roles started to feel stifling and artificial. In a world where technology had recently automated a lot of manual labor and made physical brawn less important, the usual justifications for excluding women from the workforce felt more hollow than ever. With many children, small support networks, and the expectation of doing all the housework even if they did paid work, many Silent Generation women felt that they were in an impossible bind. The barring of Black Americans from mainstream economic life and from intermarriage with White Americans was increasingly seen by Whites as a cynical and rotten setup. Young adult Silents were the primary leaders of the Civil Rights movements during the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement ultimately enshrined in law the idea that discrimination based on demographic group membership was wrong and that all people deserve to be treated fairly and equally at the individual level. Having ushered in a new individualistic culture with remarkable speed, Silents would go on to become steadfastly conservative in their middle age and beyond. Silents have regularly accused younger generations of activists of going too far. Silents have been accused in return of having declared victory over injustice too early.
Baby Boomers (born 1946 - 1964)
Demographers widely predicted that birth rates would rise after World War II, but they underestimated both the scale and the duration of the baby boom. The Baby Boomer generation has always been a bulge on the population pyramid, too big to overlook. Despite spanning just two decades of birth years, the Baby Boomers have dominated America’s political ranks for four decades, from the 1990s to the 2020s. Stereotypes of Baby Boomers have changed greatly throughout their lifetimes, but they have always had a history of being vilified from both above and below.
The most drugged generation ever. In their youth, the Baby Boomers stood out for the intensity and diversity of their drug use. Nearly all Baby Boomers tried alcohol in their teens, small majorities tried tobacco and marijuana, and significant minorities tried amphetamines, tranquilizers, barbiturates, and cocaine. Drug use started off as an act of youthful rebellion against elders, only to become so popular that it became an act of peer conformity. As they reached adulthood, Baby Boomers scaled back their drug use and downplayed their past histories, but self-medication with substances remained a lifelong habit for many Boomers. The Baby Boomers’ rate of deaths by drug overdose was 10 times higher than that of the Silent Generation. The Baby Boomers were a peak generation in terms of drug use; every generation since the Boomers has consumed less drugs than the one before.
Generation-defining technology: the birth control pill. The availability of contraceptives decoupled sex from children, with major consequences for cultural norms surrounding marriage. Contraception allowed women to continue their education for longer and establish their careers before having children. Sex outside of marriage lost most of its taboo, as did having children outside of marriage. The Baby Boomers largely abandoned the old practice of calling shotgun weddings in response to pregnancies, leaving marriage as a standalone institution only entered for its own sake. Compared to their parents, Baby Boomers had much higher expectations for their marriages and more options for life outside of marriage, leading to an explosion in divorce rates. Some of the Boomers’ “free love” sexual idealism was punctured by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which hit the Boomers harder than any other generation and which was the number one killer of Boomers during their middle age.
The first diverse workplace. The Baby Boomers were the first generation to live their entire adult lives in a world where discrimination based on race, sex, or religion was forbidden, at least on paper. Baby Boomer women and Blacks had much higher educational attainment than their Silent counterparts. Many informal obstacles remained, but the Baby Boomers were the first generation where women and Blacks entered high-skill and high-prestige occupations in meaningful numbers. Formerly unisex professions, both all-male and all-female, stopped being unisex, with gender-neutral job titles eventually becoming commonplace.
The rise of inequality. During the working lives of the Baby Boomers, America transitioned from a manufacturing-centric to a knowledge-centric economy. Highly-educated white-collar Baby Boomers thrived, whereas blue-collar Baby Boomers faced greater economic insecurity than their parents. A large gap in both earnings and happiness developed between workers with college degrees and workers without them, creating a new class divide along educational lines. The Baby Boomers have been vilified as the architects of the modern class system, but these trends were already underway well before they became America’s ruling generation in the 1990s. The Baby Boomers have also been accused of climbing the success ladder, yanking it away, and leaving the younger generations fighting for scraps, but this overlooks the fact that much of the Baby Boomer population has never been rich.
An idealistic generation, until it wasn’t. Baby Boomers have always been politically engaged and willing to speak their minds. They broke longstanding taboos on publicly discussing many topics, including mental illness, sex, domestic abuse, and sexual harassment. Their first major political victory as a generation was in their protests against the Vietnam War and against conscription. Influenced by television, Boomers had grand visions for their futures and for society, refusing to settle for the simple family-centric lives of their parents. Often unable to reach their ambitions and unrooted by a lack of structure in their lives, Baby Boomers had significantly higher rates of mental illness than Silents. As they reached middle age, with careers, mortgages, and kids to worry about, their concerns became more economic and pragmatic, with the yuppie replacing the hippie as the dominant Boomer stereotype. As elderly politicians, Baby Boomers have been remarkably non-radical, especially considering the utopian visions of their younger years.
Generation X (born 1965 - 1979)
Generation X is the forgotten middle child of generations, sandwiched between the larger Baby Boomer and Millennial generations. The term “Generation X” wasn’t even coined until 1991, created as a retrospective label for the point where new children no longer resembled Baby Boomers. Generation X was the first generation to have no living memory of 1950s-style traditionalism. They were the last generation to grow up in a world of analog technology.
The latchkey kid. Generation X children lived during a transition period where having two working parents was already normal but where the availability of after-school programs and paid childcare had not yet caught up with this new reality. A common dynamic for Generation X children was to return from school to an empty home and have a few unsupervised hours before their parents returned from work. Low supervision had some negative side effects, including higher teen pregnancy rates and higher street crime, but it also left Generation Xers with independence and resiliency. As adults, Generation Xers looked back on their sometimes-lawless childhoods with a mix of nostalgia and horror, ultimately choosing a more hands-on approach with their own children.
Generation-defining technology: television. While television had already influenced the Silents and the Boomers, it arguably influenced Generation X the most. Generation X grew up in a time where television programming was ubiquitous, at the peak of its cultural power, and not yet fragmented into an overwhelming set of choices. Across the country, Generation Xers experienced the same mainstream popular culture to a degree unmatched by any generation before or since. Exposure to the same TV content left Generation X with a source of social bonds. Exposure to diverse experiences and viewpoints left Generation X more accepting of individual differences. Exposure to lots of advertising left Generation X highly materialistic and determined to get rich. Exposure to negative news left Generation X cynical and distrustful of authority figures, institutions, and people more broadly.
A doomed generation, until it wasn’t. Generation X often looked unpromising during its youth, only to eventually find its way. Generation X’s early sexuality looked like a social breakdown, but by normalizing longer courtships, cohabitation before marriage, and higher marriage ages, Generation X had lower divorce rates than the Baby Boomers. Generation X youth were demonized as psychopathic superpredators, but crime rates drastically declined in the 1990s and Generation Xers have been well-adjusted adults ever since. Generation X was full of political apathy, but eventually became a distinct voice on topics like environmentalism and LGBT rights. Generation X was seen as ill-equipped to compete with the Baby Boomers in the job market, but it was more systematic about picking majors and careers with high earnings potential than any prior generation. Generation X looked slow to get started in adulthood, but caught up once their longer educations paid off. Generation X faced a sluggish economy in the early 1990s, but later made a name for themselves as the pioneers of society’s transition from analog to digital technology.
Millennials (born 1980 - 1994)
Millennials were primarily the children of Baby Boomers and they have repeatedly been compared to their parents. As the Baby Boomers were a large generation and had children at roughly replacement-level fertility, Millennials were a similarly-sized large generation.
When “parenting” became a verb. Born in an era of widespread birth control, Millennials were the first intentionally-planned and intentionally-timed generation of children. Baby Boomers revolted against the neglect and discipline common in their childhoods with a more positive and attentive style of parenting. Millennials grew up amid an unprecedented cultural focus on enrichment, safety, and self-esteem. Millennials, especially the older 1980s-born ones, were stereotyped in their youth as indulged, entitled, and full of unwarranted self-confidence. Millennials were the happiest generation of children ever, but much of their optimistic idealism got punctured as they grew older and confronted the world beyond their sheltered childhood bubble.
Generation-defining technology: the internet. Millennials witnessed the gradual rise of the internet and digitization of the world during their youth. Millennials were the first generation to take easy information retrieval, low-friction communication, and the absence of boredom for granted. Internet-era entertainment was usually home-based and solitary, leading to a decline in in-person socialization. Millennials were the primary creators of social media platforms and their first cohort of users. Not as firmly grounded in the physical world as earlier generations, Millennials were less materialistic; Millennial aspirations were often about attaining desired experiences or lifestyles rather than possessions. Millennial-led activist movements were often online-first, taking on a decentralized and leaderless structure much like the internet itself.
Eventually educated, eventually successful. Baby Boomer anxieties around economic insecurity and class mobility were reflected in their raising of the Millennial generation. Millennials grew up with the message that education and achievement were critically important and that they should expect to continue their educations beyond high school. Millennial childhoods were both coddled and competitive; adults resolved the contradiction by making everything a competition but making everyone a winner, leading to phenomena such as grade inflation in schools. In the end, Millennials were a highly educated generation full of first-in-the-family college graduates; two thirds of Millenials completed at least one year of education after high school, while one third completed four years or more. Due to their longer educations, the novel burden of high student loan debt, and the ill-timed 2008 financial crisis, Millennials faced a slow start to their adult lives and appeared on track to end up poorer than their parents. The economic fortunes of Millennials finally turned for the better starting in the mid-2010s and they are now a well-off generation.
The decline of sex, romance, and marriage. In a world of online dating, internet pornography, accessible birth control, and weak taboos around non-marital sex, the conditions seemed ripe for a hypersexual and disinhibited generation. The exact opposite happened, with singlehood and sexlessness rising and sexual frequency declining across the board. Rather than create a culture of casual sexual hookups, online dating created a superficial and hypercompetitive sexual marketplace with few winners, many losers, and many people too discouraged to even try. As dating and partner searching increasingly took place within dedicated settings, it became less socially acceptable to make romantic advances on people outside of those settings. Many single Millennials satisfied their sexual needs with a solitary mix of masturbation and pornography. Sex declined among romantic couples as well, likely due to greater competition from other indoor late-night activities. Millennials viewed marriage as a capstone of adulthood to be pursued only once they were well-established as individuals, a view that further increased the average age of marriage and reduced the fraction who married at all. Romantic couples remained by far the most popular household structure, but living with roommates, alone, or with parents all rose in popularity.
The decline of fertility. Millennial women experienced enormous income growth relative to earlier generations of women, significantly shrinking the gender income gap with men. In many opposite-sex couples, incomes were relatively similar and the woman’s income was too big to drop. Even though daycare often cost as much as a second mortgage payment, it still made economic sense to pay rather than have someone leave the workforce. In a world where children were seen as an individual choice rather than an inevitability, parents faced greater responsibilities and weaker support networks. Parents became solely responsible for timeboxing their children’s schedules and for ensuring their children were well-behaved in public places. Millennials were in a strong position to raise children by any objective measure, but the lifestyle and economic opportunity costs of having them had risen to unprecedented levels. While almost all Millennials expressed interest in having large families while in high school, they usually delayed, scaled back, or dropped these ambitions in their early adulthoods. The childbearing years of the Millennial generation are not yet over, but they are projected to have a sub-replacement total fertility level of 1.6 births per woman and to have a childlessness rate of about one quarter. Adult Millennials greatly popularized pet ownership thanks to the lower hassles involved, using family-like terminology for their pets that would have felt out of place in prior decades.
Generation Z (born 1995 - 2012)
Millennials were often called Generation Y before the the Millennial term became predominant, so the next generation’s most popular name is Generation Z. Generation Z was the first digital-native cohort and the first to have never known the analog world. Owing to increased non-White immigration and increased racial mixing since the 1960s, Generation Z is on track to be the last generation where single-race non-Hispanic Whites are a majority of the population.
The gender-fluid generation. The adoption of male-style fashions by women had begun with the Baby Boomers, but it wasn’t until Generation Z that the flip-side taboo on men dressing and styling more like women started to dissolve. Whereas previous generations had mounted challenges against gender roles, Generation Z began looking more critically at the socio-cultural institution of gender itself. While terms such as “tomboy” had long existed, Generation Z had a more expansive vocabulary for the many subtypes of gender nonconformity and for the full breadth of sexual orientations. A record-high 16% of Generation Z identified as LGBT, with the increase overwhelmingly coming from a greater share of women who self-reported as bisexual. Living in a world full of text-centric communication, multicultural or ambiguously-gendered names, and people who deviated from the gender binary, Generation Z popularized the usage of the gender-neutral singular they pronoun and the self-declaration of one’s pronouns.
Generation-defining technology: the smartphone and social media. Hitting critical mass in the early 2010s, merely half a decade after their introduction, smartphones were the most rapidly-adopted gadget in human history. Coupled with social media, the practical cost of digital socialization fell to almost zero, with in-person socialization becoming a bigger hassle in comparison. The smartphone’s convenience blurred the boundaries between time spent consuming digital media and time spent in the physical world. By giving everything a big audience, social media blurred the boundaries between private life, public life, and political life. Even more than television and the internet before it, social media gave its users a lopsided highlight reel of the world, leaving people with impossibly-high aspirations for their own lives as well as highly cynical views of society at large. Partly due to these new inexhaustible sources of easy stimulation, Generation Z was the most squeaky-clean generation of teenagers in history, with record-low rates of drug use, criminality, accidents, and risky sexuality.
Digital depression. Mental health abruptly declined around the world starting in the early 2010s, aligning with the mass adoption of smartphones. As the first generation to experience this new digital landscape during the vulnerable tween and teen years, Generation Z was impacted the hardest. Depression, historically a disease of twenty-somethings, increasingly affected teenagers too, with suicide and self-harm rates rising among girls in particular. Whereas older forms of screen time such as television and video gaming are not correlated with worse mental health outcomes until multiple hours of usage every day, social media had negative impacts in as little as one hour per day. Smartphone scrolling had such low barriers to entry that it easily crowded out alternative healthy activities such as sleep, socialization, and physical activity. The economics of social media algorithms encouraged the amplification of negative content that stoked outrage and self-doubt, leaving its users feeling pessimistic and helpless. Generation Z has shown high self-awareness of its mental health struggles and a high understanding of the warped incentives of the digital world, but it also recognizes that network effects often trap them in a world they don’t like.
The most liberal generation ever. In a country where each younger generation is more liberal-leaning than the one before, Generation Z is currently the most liberal of the five politically-active generations. Generation Z is more similar in values to Millennials than Millennials are to Generation X; the main cultural divide right now is between the three older analog-era generations and the two younger digital-era generations. Today’s young people are not uniformly liberal is as often stereotyped; they have significant internal divides based on gender, education level, and urban versus rural residence. However, even today’s young Republicans are much more likely than old Republicans to hold certain liberal positions such as supporting LGBT acceptance, marijuana legalization, expansion of the social safety net, and action against climate change. The younger generations are much more skeptical of organized religion than the older ones, often seeing religion as authoritarian and intolerant. The younger generations have more negative views about the present state of race relations and gender equality; being young, they see only an unsatisfying status quo and not the history of progress that preceded it. The political topics with the greatest generational divides are often emotionally-charged and identity-related topics like race, gender, sexuality, and religion. Many families therefore have ugly political schisms across generational lines, with Generation Z and Millennial grown children refusing to discuss politics with their Generation X and Baby Boomer parents.
How the generations truly differ
Many theories of generations overstate the importance of shared historical events or assert without evidence that generations follow a cyclical pattern. The past century of history has not been cyclical; it has been a one-way trend of ever-advancing technology. Technology has enabled new lifestyles, changed the nature of human relationships, and altered society’s incentive structures. Technology explains inter-generational differences better than any alternative theory.
In some cases, the same dynamic has played out repeatedly across the generations. Every generation was bold and progressive in its youth, only to decide in middle age that the world had changed enough. Every generation developed an enduring attachment to the technologies of its youth, whether it’s the Baby Boomers’ love of phones, Generation X’s love of email, or Millennials’ love of texting.
In some cases, a trend did indeed peak in one generation and then decline. Examples of peaks include marriage and fertility among the Silents, drug use and divorce among the Baby Booomers, materialism among Generation X, and narcissism among Millennials.
However, there are two major trends that have only escalated over time and have not reversed. These are the “kids these days” laments that have stood the test of time because they have been true at every moment in time.
1. Each generation is more individualistic than the one before.
On the cultural spectrum of collectivism versus individualism, each generation has moved further towards the individualistic end. This is not the same thing as saying each generation is more liberal; a more politically accurate term would be that each generation is more socially libertarian. Apart from some perennial political deadlocks such as abortion and gun control, the culture wars of living memory have overwhelmingly ended with victories for individualistic positions.
All low-technology cultures are collectivist by necessity. When survival is precarious, life is a team sport that binds people in webs of interdependence. People have prescribed roles to play and they need to set their individual goals aside in favor of the group’s cohesion. By making independent living easier and more convenient, technology has reduced people’s soft social dependencies on one another. In individualistic cultures, people are seen as individuals first and foremost, with group memberships taking on lesser importance. Individualistic people are more assertive of the right to make their own choices and more tolerant of other people’s right to do the same. Each new generation has experienced unprecedented freedom to live life on its own terms, but has also faced the confusion and unrootedness that comes with it. Some of the observable side effects of modern individualism include less rigid hierarchies, more casual fashion, weaker gender roles, and an explosion in the diversity of baby names.
Individualism is a package deal and not an absolute good. Some of the downsides of individualism include social isolation, mass cynicism, and difficulty in coordinating group action, all of which are visible in the youngest generations. During moments such as the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s individualistic culture proved to be a liability rather than an asset.
2. Each generation lives a slower life than the one before.
While technology has sped up the pace of day-to-day life by making many tasks take less time, it has counter-intuitively had the opposite effect on human lifetimes as a whole.
In low-technology cultures, people live fast and die young. The optimal parenting strategy is to start having children early, have as many as possible, invest as little in them as you can get away with, raise them to be minimally functioning adults as fast as possible, and accept that you may lose a few along the way. Technological changes have moved parenting towards a quality-over-quantity strategy. By reducing child mortality, modern medicine and safety standards gave parents the peace of mind of knowing that all their children will likely reach adulthood and none of their efforts will be wasted. The greater affluence of modern parents means they feel less pressure to get their kids to leave the nest as fast as possible. The high educational requirements and high inequality of modern society encourage a nurturing style of parenting over an inattentive style.
Each generation of children has grown up more slowly than the one before. Each generation of children has experienced fewer adult-style responsibilities but also fewer adult-style freedoms. Adolescence and emerging adulthood have become distinct life stages in their own right. The slow life strategy is most visible in the average age at first marriage, which has risen by nearly a decade within the span of a human lifetime. The ages for many other traditional adult milestones have risen as well, including the first paid job, first driver’s license, first romantic date, first sexual experience, first alcoholic drink, first child, and completion of education. 13-year-olds once routinely got paid gigs as babysitters, but now they are often legally deemed young enough to need babysitters themselves. With parenting having become a longer and more intense project, the experiences of other developed countries suggest that fertility will not rise above replacement levels again.
Just as people are growing up more slowly, they are also growing old more slowly. This is mostly the result of technology improving material living conditions and making life less physically demanding. Being healthy in one’s 60s has gone from being the exception to being the norm. Today’s adults widely report looking, feeling, and acting younger than their parents at the same age. Slower aging is especially apparent in the Baby Boomers’ continued presence in public life in their 70s and in the relative lack of Generation Xers in leadership positions.