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Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cause Everything Else That’s Great and Awful

Gen X set the precedent for today’s social justice warriors and capitalist super-soldiers. Enjoy, and also, sorry!

U.C.L.A. students celebrating graduation in what we believe was 1990, which was an awesome year except for all the endless horrible bad things. Credit... Joe Sohm/Visions of America/UIG, via Getty Images

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By Alex Williams

May 14, 2019

What is an X? An empty set, a place-holder, a nothing that fills a void until an actual something comes along.

For the members of Generation X , born between 1965 and 1980, that was never us.

“They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own,” wrote Time magazine in a 1990 cover story called “20-something” that marked our debut, as a class, on the national stage. “They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders.”

Leave aside the fact that struggling 20-somethings of any era tend to sneer at luxury goods. At that point, the oldest members of Generation X were 25. No one really knew what we were.

But someone apparently knew what we weren’t: dreamers, revolutionaries, world-changers, like the baby boomers before us. To the extent that we were defined, we were defined in the negative — the first generation in American history to be written off before it had a chance to begin.

Now it’s been a quarter century since the clichés ossified. Here is another negative to chew on: What if everything we decided about Generation X turned out to be wrong?

This generation is even smaller than it might appear

There is one thing people do get right about America’s Generation X: There aren’t that many of us — roughly 65 million , according to recent data from the Census Bureau. Sandwiched between the change-the-world boomers (around 75 million) and the we-won’t-wait-for-change millennials (approximately 83 million), we were doomed to suffer a shared case of middle-child syndrome, an eight-figure-strong army of Jan Bradys.

And our generation may be smaller than that. Only 41 percent of the people born during those years even consider themselves part of Generation X , according to one MetLife study.

Most people I know who ever copped to X-ness were born in the later ’60s or early ’70s, a window of maybe eight years. (My wife was born in 1979 and has no idea who Fonzie is. Case closed.)

Read more about the tech, music, style, books, rules, films and pills that scream Gen X.

Our generation also showed a disturbing tendency to lose its leading lights due to untimely death. Boomers never got over losing Jimi, Janis, and Jim during a ten-month span of 1970 and 1971, but consider the Generation X icons who were snuffed out at an early age: Tupac Shakur, Jeff Buckley, Brandon Lee, Elliott Smith, Biggie Smalls, River Phoenix, Shannon Hoon, Aaliyah and a certain beloved flannel-clad rocker from Aberdeen, Wash., who has gotten enough ink in Generation X articles.

It wasn’t just that our numbers were small. Our cultural moment was a blip. Boomers owned several decades of mass entertainment, and it was truly mass — from “Howdy Doody” in the 1950s to “The Big Chill” in the 1980s, with about 82 percent of the rock ’n’ roll that’s worth listening to between them.

We don’t even have exclusive rights to our own name. Generation X was the title of 1964 book about mod-era British teenagers , a punk band from the 1970s featuring Billy Idol and satirical novel usually mistaken as a sociological treatise by Douglas Coupland — all boomers.

The artifacts that branded Generation X as irony-obsessed iconoclasts scarfing antidepressants under a permanent Seattle-gray sky — think “Hunger Strike,” by Temple of the Dog, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation,” maybe “The Ben Stiller Show” doing a “Lassie” parody with Charles Manson as the dog — were niche to begin with, and were booted from the stage after maybe four years of the early ’90s.

Grunge was on life support the moment the news media decided to call it “grunge” (to folks in the scene, it was still punk). It was given last rites in 1992, when Marc Jacobs unveiled his then-risible (now visionary?) “grunge” line that got him fired from Perry Ellis.

And grunge was cremated, its ashes flushed down the Pike Place Market Starbucks toilet, that same year when the Styles section of this newspaper allowed itself to be hoaxed by a former Sub Pop records employee on its “Lexicon of Grunge,” serving up bogus mosh-pit lingo like “big bag of blotation” (drunk), “lamestain” (uncool person) and “swingin’ on the flippity flop” (hanging out).

So it’s easy to decide that Gen X is culturally irrelevant — if you’re comfortable with the dangerous prospect of making sweeping conclusions about the identity, values and culture of millions of individuals from every imaginable background.

Did the working-class class trans kid living in Tulsa, Okla. , the Marine recruit from the South Bronx, the heiress in Rhode Island, and the surfing phenom in Huntington Beach, Calif., all groove on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in 1992? Would it matter if they did?

But to cede irrelevance, even after 25 years of reflection, would be to let the winners — the boomers, or maybe the millennials — write our history for us. Like bell bottoms, aviator shades and Birkenstocks, we have been wearing the clichés imposed by other generations since Zima was cool (Zima was never cool).

And now, as our AARP cards begin to arrive in the mail, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to turn those clichés on our heads one by one?

We were never slackers

There it is, the Big Bang, the Generation X cliché from which all others were born. But where did “slacker” come from? The answer, in one sense, is obvious: from the 1991 film of the same name by Richard Linklater (also a boomer).

“Slacker” featured a bunch of 20-something nonactors wandering around Austin, Tex., before a 16-millimeter-film camera muttering daffy inanities like “we’ve been on Mars since 1962” until the film’s $23,000 budget ran out. Martian colonies, apparently, were what you talked about when you were young, the economy was lousy and you could still freely traverse Austin without running aground on banh mi food trucks and émigrés from Brooklyn.

“Slacker” was, by all counts, a seminal film , although I don’t remember any of my Gen X friends getting through more than 30 minutes of it.

We preferred “ Dazed and Confused ,” Mr. Linklater’s celluloid Slurpee from 1993, because that was about high school students in 1976 — yes, boomers! — and for years we bought the lie that older people’s culture mattered more than our own, just because there were more of them. Rootless cosmopolitans, we were told to look to the past for significance, so we did — to the Sinatra Rat Pack ( “Swingers,” 1996), to Kennedy-era Madison Avenue ( “Mad Men,” created by Matthew Weiner, b. 1965), to the male blow dryer era (“ That ’70s Show ”).

What we did not find significant was the “slacker” label.

“The slacker tag never really applied to me, or anyone I knew,” said Sarah Vowell (b. 1969), an author and contributor to “This American Life” who spent her 20s juggling graduate studies with a teaching gig at an art school and multiple deadlines per week as a freelance journalist. “Even though my friends and I all looked like extras from ‘Reality Bites,’” she said, “our Puritan work ethic was probably more 1690s than 1990s.”

Central to the slacker myth was coming-of-age during the early ’90s recession, which, according to ’90s surveys of our generation, apparently doomed us to failure for life.

And yes, the recession was real. People lost jobs (including George Herbert Walker Bush, in the 1992 Presidential election). People looked for jobs and did not find them. But the recession that supposedly served as cement shoes for a generation was, in historical terms, relatively short and mild . It lasted just eight months, with unemployment bottoming out at 7.8 percent , compared to the 1980s recession that lasted 16 months with a peak unemployment rate of 10.8 percent , and the Great Recession starting in 2007, which lasted 18 months with unemployment around 10 percent .

But by the time the ’90s recession ended, in March of 1991, the oldest Gen Xers were barely 26. The youngest were in middle school. And the post-recession economy that followed was closer to the Roaring ’20s than the Depression ’30s, marked by the longest running economic expansion in the nation’s history. Gen X had it good.

With low inflation, rising productivity due in part to technological advances and a booming stock market, the National Debt Clock near Times Square actually started to run backward by 2000 , as flush times allowed the country to pay down its debt.

Whether or not we still hated “yuppies,” as Time magazine once asserted, the professional classes of Generation X were beginning to earn, and that only continued, despite the giant dislocations of the dot-com bust (2000) and the Great Recession.

By the middle of this decade, in fact, Generation X already had more spending power than either boomers or millennials, according to a survey by Shullman , a market research company that focuses on the luxury sector, with 29 percent of the estimated net worth and 31 percent of the income, though we comprise just a quarter of the American adult population.

The generation also seems to have gotten over its aversion to Rolexes and Range Rovers (although not, it seems, red suspenders). As of 2012, we were also spending 18 percent more on luxury goods than our yuppie boomer forebears, according to one American Express survey .

We did not get there by slacking. We just have our own way of enjoying life.

“As for our notorious hustle-to-debt ratio, it speaks to a generational lifestyle ambition that often exceeds our career ambition,” Jason Tesauro (b. 1971), the food writer behind the Modern Gentleman series of advice books, wrote in an email.

“I’ve published, accomplished, saved, succeeded, but 0.0 family elders would add my name to our ancestral canon of iconic workaholics,” he continued. “I’m 47 and I can sum-up my financial goals in a simple mantra: ‘Older wine, newer shoes.’ I call it Pellegrino rich. I just want enough affluence so that when I’m asked, ‘Still or sparkling?’ I don’t have to check my balances first.”

We totally did sell out, again and again

Younger generations who consider the Kardashians the highest model of professional achievement might have a hard time believing it, but there was a brief moment where some Gen Xers did actually express the opinion that selling out was bad. Maybe they just figured no one was buying.

It certainly was true for Elliott Smith (b. 1969), the prototypically X singer-songwriter, as he made abundantly clear during his memorably strange Oscars appearance in 1998.

Somewhere between Billy Crystal’s Broadway-by-way-of-Bel-Air opening number and Sean Connery popping the envelope on “Titanic” for best picture , Mr. Smith, the McCartney of melancholy, ambled onstage, alone with an acoustic guitar , looking uncomfortable, not just in his ill-fitting white suit, but in his own skin.

Mr. Smith, then 28, was an inscrutable genius plucked from the college-town club circuit. He mumbled and squirmed through interviews, rocked greasy hair and thrift-store sweatshirts onstage, and had a tattoo of the state of Texas on his arm, even though he hated Texas.

To the surprise of virtually everyone, including Mr. Smith himself, his forlorn song “Miss Misery,” which was featured in “Good Will Hunting,” had been nominated for best original song.

From a Generation X perspective, it seemed like a moment of arrival. Here was one of our own — complicated, elusive, yet infinitely worthy — at last given the chance to serenade the Bob Mackie gowns and tuxedos with lyrics like “to vanish into oblivion, it’s easy to do.”

And for him, it was. The moment of triumph lasted exactly 120 seconds. The Titanic crew (who else?) took home the gold statuette for “My Heart Will Go On,” sung by Celine Dion (who else?), and Mr. Smith followed what seemed like a predestined Gen X career arc — a couple more critical-darling albums that failed to go platinum, or even gold, and an early death, in 2003, from a knife wound to the heart — an apparent suicide, albeit a highly murky one .

“I’m the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous ,” he once said, and it sounded like an epitaph for a generation — except for pretty much everything else that happened in the 1990s.

It is often said that we were the last analog generation, and it’s true, most of us remember rabbit ears, vinyl records before they were ironic, and calling 1-800-Collect on sidewalk pay phones.

But our lo-fi world ended on October 13, 1994 with the introduction of the Netscape browser, which made it possible to actually “surf” the “net,” to invoke a term that has aged a lot worse than vinyl albums. In the coastal capitals of capitalism, opportunity, suddenly, was in the air.

“I remember distinctly thinking ‘Wait, you mean I don’t have to wait a decade to start something?’” said Andrew Yang (b. 1975), the tech entrepreneur and current presidential candidate , who bailed on his prestigious Big Law job in 2000 to start a web company.

There was no time for talk about Mars colonies. There were fortunes to be made. Generation X professionals were suddenly eager to sell out, so long as it came with stock options and a tent at Burning Man ( founded 1986 ). They felt pity for sellouts of an earlier generation, like the hippie-turned-yuppie boomers whose idea of a payday was a crushing yellow-tie job in finance or law and a BMW 5-series. Dude, where’s your ambition?

For some, it almost seemed easy. James Altucher (b. 1968), a serial entrepreneur turned self-help guru , was a broke dude who liked to fiddle with computers when the madness started. Back then, every company needed a website, but no one seemingly knew how to build them.

One Fortune 10 company had no luck getting a big advertising agency to cobble one together, “so they asked a friend of mine,” Mr. Altucher said. “He didn’t know how to do it. He asked me. I knew how to do it. I had zero dollars in the bank was working a full-time job. Three weeks later I made the website and they gave me $250,000.”

As much as millennials like Mark Zuckerberg like to claim dorm-room-to-riches ethos, X got there first. Two late-’90s whiz kids, Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman, were still in their early 20s when they went public with a company, Globe.com, which they started in their Cornell dorm room . It was some crazy idea called a “social network” — imagine. Overnight, they were worth nearly $100 million .

And overnight, they weren’t.

Still, you get the point. The boomer Steve Jobs might qualify as the original disrupter, but when boomers broke the rules, there was always a sense of grandiosity and self-satisfaction — Procol Harum performing with the London Symphony Orchestra. Mind: blown.

When X broke the rules, it was punk rock, the Dead Kennedys covering “Viva Las Vegas” (I know, Jello Biafra was a boomer, but spiritually, he belonged to us). We broke the rules because we didn’t care about the rules. We weren’t even sure they existed.

Consider Facebook, a company founded by fresh-faced millennials like Mr. Zuckerberg himself, except for the token, trailing-edge Gen- Xer, Sean Parker (b. 1979), the company’s founding president and, effectively, its id. No skinny-armed tech geek, Mr. Parker was a tech swashbuckler who built his entrepreneurial reputation on piracy (or so the record companies argued about his first venture, Napster); threw Hollywood-lavish parties that would make his onscreen alter-ego, Justin Timberlake (one of the oldest millennials), proud; and famously proclaimed that “running a start-up is like eating glass . You just start to like the taste of your own blood.”

For Generation X, anarchy was a business model. The “New Economy” was our economy.

Were we not apathetic so much as app-athetic. Sorry, that was lamestain. Whatever! The digital natives of the millennial generation would hardly be drowning in 1s and 0s without Xers like Elon Musk (b. 1971), Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google (b. 1973), Jack Dorsey of Twitter (b. 1976) and even Tom Anderson of Myspace (b. 1970), who for a brief, shining moment was everyone’s friend .

Our generational megalomania was hardly confined to techies. Jay-Z (b. 1969) took Martha Stewart’s human-as-brand impulse and created an empire state of mind. He became a generational icon, turning four letters and a hyphen into a fashion line, a nightclub chain, a sports agency, a tech company and a sliver of a professional basketball team, while still managing to cut a few albums along the way. Diddy (then Puffy) (also b. 1969) went from mogul to rap star, as if it were a hobby.

“Jay and Puffy made it O.K. to be capitalist in hip-hop,” said Michael Gonzales, a longtime hip-hop writer. “Rap had always been about the jewelry and the cars, with everyone rapping about making the Benjamins. But a lot of those guys were struggling and living at home. Jay and Puffy showed them how to take it to the next level. It wasn’t just all records — you’ve got to get points, own your publishing, own your masters. And that became part of the culture.”

Are you a businessman or a business, man? And the adage applied to women, too — in some ways for the first time. Missy Elliott (b. 1971) saw what was obvious, founding her own label and becoming a producer.

Far from staring down morosely at scuffed Converse All-Stars, we craned our necks, looking for that next big thing over the horizon, never comfortable, never satisfied. If that next big thing was bad, we got over it.

During the housing bust of the mid-aughts, we got creamed. Many of the home buyers among us had only recently began trading up to house the kids we put off having. Often, we were buying near the top of the market. Our median home equity plunged 43 percent during those years, according to Pew Research Center, a lot worse than for boomers (28 percent).

Who’s sorry now? Between 2010 and 2016, Generation X saw its median household net worth skyrocket 115 percent. Boomers were still mired at pre-2007 levels.

Maybe that’s the thing about being a generation without any particular identity or belief system: We are adaptable, a weedy species, like rats or cockroaches, built to survive any environment. We are hard to stamp out.

We were never cynical and disaffected

In 2012, our generation finally made its mark in Washington, or seemed to. Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin (b. 1970) became the Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s running mate, a potential vice president. The McJob generation, it seemed, might actually inherit one of the most powerful jobs in the world (well, kind of).

While not exactly the ’90s Mountain Dew ad vision of shreddin’ youth, Mr. Ryan’s Generation X-ness became a presumptive selling point to youngish voters, even as Mr. Romney evoked their mom’s divorce lawyer.

As I wrote in 2012 in The Times, Mr. Ryan “favors grunge music, Coen brothers movies and craft brews. He sprinkles the word ‘awesome’ into daily speech.” As a teenager, he even worked an actual “McJob,” at an actual McDonald’s.

The Gen X notables I talked to then, however, seemed underwhelmed. “I wonder if the Germs ever felt this way about having Belinda Carlisle as their first drummer,” Johnny Knoxville said, in the most Generation X terms imaginable.

America’s “jackass” need not have worried. Congressman Ryan did not get the job. Six years later, we still have not even sniffed the White House, which may be another reason we suffer a generational sense of athazagoraphobia, an abnormal fear of being forgotten or left out, as Jeff Gordinier pointed out in his 2008 book, “X Saves the World.”

Lots of people seem to believe that Barack Obama was the first Generation X president. The confusion is understandable. As a teenager, the 44th president spent afternoons smoking pot in a van with a crew called the Choom Gang , which is a very Generation X thing to do.

But Mr. Obama was born in 1961 and therefore is not Generation X by most definitions. Some demographers like to argue that the generation began in 1960. To put it in scientific terms, this is hogwash. Most people born in 1960 graduated from high school in 1978. The white suburban high school students I remember in 1978 wore feathered hair, thought Camaros were cool, and considered “Lucky Man,” by Emerson Lake and Palmer, to be the height of synth-pop. Case closed.

There is no guarantee that Gen X will ever hatch a president. One vague possibility is the mediagenic Democratic hopeful Beto O’Rourke, “ a walking, talking Generation X cliché ,” as Elizabeth Spiers of The Washington Post put it. The former Texas congressman “was a skater ( sort of ),” Ms. Spiers wrote. “He was in a punk band called Foss ; he was, we learned recently, part of a hacker collective called the Cult of the Dead Cow , where he ran a bulletin board called TacoLand.”

He had an early moment — then Mr. O’Rourke’s popularity was immediately leapfrogged by another mediagenic white male , Pete Buttigieg, who at 37 occupies some sort of Generation Y gray zone.

Still, we may still have our day. Generation X, along with Millennials, finally rocked the vote in greater numbers than boomers and older voters in the 2016 election , according to Pew. That is one way, at least, we can still feel young.

We invented “woke”

We were never an afterthought of American politics if you take “politics” to mean the all the real stuff that goes on outside the Beltway, in terms of gender politics, racial politics and environmental politics.

It might be a cliché to say that we are a generation of iconoclasts and mavericks, wired to challenge authority. But when Apple unveiled its “Think Different” campaign in the ’90s, they were selling to us. And we bought it.

Many of us lived it, too. Before “politically correct” was a cudgel that Fox News types used to hammer the left over gender-neutral bathrooms, college students of the ’80s and ’90s who might now identify as progressive rallied under the P.C. banner as a point of pride, renovating a busted old language for a new era where “pets" became “animal companions,” “illegal aliens” became “undocumented workers,” and “gay people” became “queer,” which was confusing for a lot of straight people at the time.

“My Gen X world when I was young was full of activists, not slackers — AIDS activists, reproductive health advocates, and L.G.B.T. fight pioneers,” said Garance Franke-Ruta (b. 1971), a longtime political journalist who in her late teens led a campaign for the advocacy group Act Up to pressure the government and pharmaceutical companies to develop new AIDS drugs.

It didn’t hurt that we grew up in a post-Civil Rights era, where knocking down walls — like the one in Berlin — was less a goal than an assumption.

“My mother didn’t go to integrated schools; I did,” said Kevin Powell, a Jersey City-bred activist, speaker and author who was also a member of the MTV’s “Real World” cast in 1992. “So my friends were from different backgrounds. I loved N.W.A., but I also loved Guns N’ Roses.”

On television, we grew up with shows that were pushing envelopes, Mr. Powell said — “All in the Family,” pitting an old-school blue-collar bigot against a self-righteous lefty son-in-law; “The Jeffersons,” featuring a mixed-race married couple; “Soap,” with an openly gay man dating a male football player.

“I believe that shaped us,” Mr. Powell said. “I can quote stuff about the Monkees, about ‘Soul Train,’ and I’ll get white people, Latinx people, Asian people, black folks, all different folks having the same reference points. I really believe that we were the precursor to millennials. There were these crossing of boundaries.”

It was hardly one big gorgeous mosaic (it never is). In our formative years, we saw racial attacks in Howard Beach, Queens , and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn , become national news, as well as the rise of neo-Nazi skinheads and gay conversion camps. Gay marriage was politically unthinkable, and even some progressive boomer parents had a hard time when their children came out.

Even so, some progressive Xers saw an old order crumbling, sometimes just with a visit to the record store. “When I think of the meat of the ’80s, I think of the gender-bending of the early Depeche Mode, the early Cure, Erasure, Culture Club, even Wham,” said Alli Royce Soble (b. 1973), a photographer and painter who now identifies as nonbinary, recalled the abundant sense of permission growing up in the Atlanta suburbs. “Being young and coming out, music was my connection to a community.”

In the wake of Anita Hill’s testimony during the Clarence Thomas hearings, a generation of Generation X women rallied to the call by the third-wave feminist Rebecca Walker (b. 1969): “ Do not vote for them unless they work for us . Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives.”

It was one step toward #MeToo. There were others. Some were small, but not insignificant.

Tabitha Soren (b. 1967), who unwittingly became a generational symbol when she interviewed the first President Bush as an MTV News correspondent, fresh out of New York University, recalled how Kathleen Hanna of the Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill “had the brilliant idea of moving male mosh pits to the back of the show, so that girls didn’t get pushed out of the way, combat boots in their faces.”

“It was a metaphor as much as a more ideal way of seeing shows for everyone,” said Ms. Soren, now a photographer .

The hard-won proto-woke triumphs of that era look a little more complicated now. The Beastie Boys, when they weren’t fighting for the rights of rich kids from New York private schools to party, were celebrated for ending the rocker tendencies of white suburban youth and opening the door for them to discover Public Enemy and Queen Latifah.

Leaving aside the 2019 questions of cultural appropriation, even the Beasties have to admit that a lot of their beer-swilling party-boy fans were “probably not that far off from Brett Kavanaugh,” as Michael Diamond (b. 1965), or Mike D, told Vice in a video published last year.

It’s a messy question. No matter. We’re used to them. We were born into Vietnam and Watergate and at a time when, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx was burning. We came of age in a decade ravaged by AIDS and crack. Ideologues find that sort of stuff crushing. Survivors, on the other hand, survive.

Maybe this is why, in a country cleaved between blue and red, we tend to shade purple, opting for pragmatism over ideology. On several hot-button issues — immigration, same-sex marriage, government spending — we tend to split the difference between the more conservative boomers and the more liberal millennials, according to Pew.

We are the original “socially liberal, economically conservative” generation, David Rosen, a consultant who focuses on the psychology of politics , recently wrote in Politico Magazine — we were happy to believe that the problems are bad, but their causes are very, very good , as the joke goes. This scrappy, if self-defeating, independent streak, he suggested, was a consequence of our under-parenting. “If you wanted lunch and Mom and Dad weren’t around, all the moral values in the world wouldn’t add up to a grilled cheese sandwich,” Mr. Rosen wrote.

You could take all of that as a negative — once again, here we are in the wrong place at the wrong time, right the middle — displaying centrist tendencies in a political climate that celebrates the extremes.

But I’m not so sure. In today’s polarized online hellscape of a world, regardless of background or political chances, I like our chances to fix things after whatever inferno awaits. I have to. It would kill me to see millennials take all the credit.

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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

By Louis Menand

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

TITLE The Four Musicians Of The Apocalypse

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Buffalo walk one behind the other in a straight line.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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Jonathan Haidt on “The Anxious Generation”

By David D. Kirkpatrick

Who’s Afraid of Judging Donald Trump? Lots of People

By Eric Lach

Jonathan Haidt on the Plague of Anxiety Affecting Young People&-Plus, Judi Dench

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Douglas Coupland … ‘I see myself as an app.’

Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30: ‘Generational trashing is eternal’

Three decades after his debut novel made him the unwilling voice of a generation, the author wonders whether – after Y, Z and now C, for Covid – individuality will become obsolete

On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation

I’m 59 and a half years old – and these days I no longer feel that I identify as a human being. I’ve turned into an app. I’m a filter for words. I filter the ways I experience the world.

How you identify has always been a big deal. In the late 1980s, I disliked being classified as a baby boomer so much that I had to invent my way out of it; my debut novel, published 30 years ago, was called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture . Why accelerated? By the tail end of the 80s and the start of the 90s it felt as if history was finally emerging from locked-in syndrome. The Soviet Union was over. Liberal capitalism was triumphing. Music changed completely. It became a cliche that every other advertising montage showed someone sledge-hammering the Berlin Wall – and there was this new group of younger people who obviously didn’t fit into any pre-existing category, so who were they? Marshall McLuhan wrote that the oversimplification of anything is always exciting, which is I think what happened with Gen X. The term became a meme back when society only had five or six of them a year.

‘There’s nothing so micro-humiliating as making a Brady Bunch reference and the room going silent.’

Let me tell you from experience that nothing makes you cringe more on the inside than being introduced somewhere as a voice of a generation. I spent much of the early 90s in TV studios with perplexed interviewers saying: “But surely all young people are boomers. It would be preposterous to think otherwise.” The thing about a term like “Gen X” is that everyone has his or her own definition, and people always wanted me to agree with theirs. At some point I realised X had become something other than me. It had taken on its own life.

I was born in the 20th century at a specific moment in human history where my brain was exposed to TV and film and then, starting in the late 80s, digital technologies. Marketeers love to carbon date generations. But it’s not a hard science. Now that I see myself as an app, I see one of my jobs is to explain the old era to the new era, but there’s nothing quite so micro-humiliating as making a Brady Bunch reference and the room going silent. Generations are united and divided over sentimental markers much more than when they were born.

The false assumption of human sameness is a key ingredient in generational discussions, because without it, you can’t demonise younger people – and there’s a ton of money to be made from demonising the young. It has been entertaining for me over the last 15 years to see the exact same venom that was thrown at Gen X being thrown at Gen Y (millennials) : they whine, they’re lazy, they’re useless and all of that. I think that kind of generational trashing is actually eternal human behaviour – we all just never collectively lived long enough before to see it repeatedly deployed.

Three decades since Generation X came out, what’s changed? Well, millennials are getting old now. There’s even a microdemographic term for those born in the early 80s: “geriatric millennials”. These days, pop anthropology has moved on to scrutinising the mysteries of Generation Z , while Gen Z is now old enough to pick fights with Gen Y. The things that become emblematic of a tribe are often unwitting. For X, it was the flannel shirt. For Y, it was avocado toast. For Z, it is despising avocado toast and skinny jeans . For the next generation, perhaps it will be an industrial tub full of diazepam.

Today, I wonder how much of what we call a generation is simply a matter of any given temporal cohort’s tech exposure during their pre-pubescent neural wiring – plus exposure to global financial cycles.

This discussion of brains and generations is important because around 2010 my own brain started feeling truly different. I realised that I was never going to go back to my old, pre-internet brain: I’d been completely rewired. Ten years later I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like. I find comfort in the fact that brains all over the planet have been rewired similarly to mine. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that our species has never been as neurally homogenised as it is now. So, from a neural perspective, are generations possibly becoming an obsolete notion altogether?

What next? Babies born during the pandemic have been referred to as “Generation C” – for Covid, or Corona. A few years before that, Jordan Hall proposed to reboot the naming system entirely by using Greek letters instead. He suggested “Generation Omega” – the last generation, which sounds glamorous and cool, but then every generation thinks it’s the end of the line. If nothing else, Gen Z has to be wondering what work skills will be truly future-proof from total automation. Me, I think they should start naming generations the way the Americans label hurricanes: start alphabetically and alternate boy/girl.

In my new book, The Extreme Self , which I’ve written with Shumon Basar and Hans Ulrich Obrist , we explore how individuality has been morphing into something else, first because of technology, and then as a consequence of the pandemic. If emotions are being engineered by machines all the time, what does it mean to be a person belonging to a generation any more? Here follow some hints.

Autophobia Is the “fear of being an individual”. Let’s face it: being an individual is a lot of hard work, and these days I’m unsure human beings are cut out for the job. Individuality has become about as much fun as dental flossing; no wonder it’s easier just to subcontract your identity to QAnon or Antifa. You may not get a million hits for your own Instagram post, but your newly adopted fringe group will get them on your behalf. It’s going to be easier to feel utterly alone and also part of a planetary movement.

The pathology bell curve I’m always curious about the point at which personality starts being recognised as a pathology. When does somebody go from being bubbly to being rattled to being a train wreck to being diagnosed with something scary? Maybe we should start describing people the other way around. So instead of saying “Sheila is kind of mellow and collects owl knick-knacks,” we say, “Sheila’s brain has a steady flow of dopamine and she is mildly on the spectrum with low-grade hoarding tendencies.” At least you’d know where you stand. You could also have a nature/nurture index, too, a number to tell people what percentage of someone’s behaviour can be excused by, say, bad parents or growing up in a small town.

High network worth individuals When the internet started for real in the 1990s, everyone thought it would only be used for the forces of good. What drug was everyone taking? And why were people so surprised when it went dark in 2016? Truth be told, it should have gone dark much earlier. I wonder sometimes if Donald Trump is out there quietly building a new internet, in parallel with the blockchainers building Web 3.0. At one point Trump was the most high network worth individual on Earth. He demonstrated that a single individual can transcend august institutions if that individual is networked enough. I wonder who’s now the most connected human being on Earth. Vladimir Putin? Elon Musk? How would you measure it? How do you reward it? (Maybe it’s still Kevin Bacon and always will be Kevin Bacon. Hi. I’m Kevin Bacon. You may remember me from such films as JFK or Footloose .)

The democracy plateau A curious subset of the implosion of individuality is the cratering of democracy, the dynamic of which is: “The internet has told me I’m incredibly special, so if I can’t be in the majority and have the world run my way then no one can run the world their way.” Does democracy have some sort of built-in suicide pill that sooner or later always gets used? And now that we seem to have dismantled consensus-based reality, what will replace consensus?

The hurt wars Everyone is outraged by everything these days, even when they’re not even remotely outraged. It’s mostly fake outrage, the emotional equivalent of Diet Coke. Maybe one day we’ll treat the extreme left and extreme right like racist grandparents you only see once or twice a year. Whatever you do, don’t bring up Greta Thunberg or vaccines .

Me. You. Us. Them. I wonder at what point people stop being people, the exact reversal process of watching newborns become adults. I’m dealing with the elderly much more, and I live in dread of the day someone close to me no longer remembers who anyone is. Maybe it’s the same with generations. We don’t really know when one generation ends and the next one begins. We try and predict the pleasures and hardships they’ll have to endure, but it’s the unintended consequences of the present that dictate the future.

I’ve been Zooming a lot this year, like everyone else, and I always end my calls by closing the lid of my laptop. Maybe that’s all death is: the laptop closing, nothing cosmic, just a gentle click as we stop using our app.

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The ‘social question’ dominating the end of the 19th century was the integration of the industrial workers, in other words, the pacification of class conflict. This was achieved by giving workers some assurance of a stable life course, including the institutionalization of retirement as a normal stage of life funded through public social security. At the beginning of the 21st century, class conflict seems to be defunct and its place taken over by generational conflict. It emerges from historical watersheds and from economic, demographic and cultural changes that create cleavages between generations. However, it remains essential to assess the extent of the generational cleavage per se and the extent to which it masks the continued existence of the class cleavage between wealthy and poor (or owners and workers). There are moreover other cleavages that are usually categorized as “new” dimensions of inequality (in distinction to the “old” ones of class), such as those of gender and ethnicity (or “race”). Emphasizing the generational conflict as the new basic cleavage in society tends to downplay other inequalities, and by this, risks being ideological. In this chapter, the extent of economic cleavages among generations or age groups is assessed by examining relative income positions and poverty rates. How cleavages turn into conflicts depends on the potential for mobilization. Mobilization is assessed by examining political attitudes, participation and voting. The reason for the low salience of generational conflicts so far is the mediating function of political institutions (parties, unions) and of generational relations and transfers in families. Class cleavages may be especially marked among the elderly, and may thus deepen in aging societies, but the potential for class mobilization seems to fade away. Generational cleavages may also deepen, not least through the current trends towards welfare state retrenchment. The risks of (or chances for) generational mobilization depend on the continued viability of the mediating institutions in politics and the family.

Cécile Van de Velde , Camille Peugny

This introduction attempts to pave the way for a renewal of the sociology of inter-generational inequality, through an examination of its emergence, contribution, and current limitations. The first part examines the emergence and development of the concept of “generation” in sociology throughout the twentieth century. Before being seen through the prism of “inequalities,” generation had been defined primarily as a motor for social and cultural change, seen in terms of “consciousness” in the work of Mannheim, and then “values” in the studies of the 1950s and 1960s. The second part takes the rise of inequality between generations as its theme, driven by the great reversal of the 1970s that has lastingly affected the conditions under which young people enter the labour market. Beyond these growing difficulties in the economic field, younger generations seem excluded from the dominant positions and levers of social change, which feeds the discourse around the existence of a “lost generation.” While stressing the importance of learning from this work, the third part explores its limitations and calls for the opening of new research fronts: to re-think the relationships between several generations in order to avoid the opposition between two generations, the first being those of the baby-boomers, and the second those born in the 1960s; to consider inter- and intra-generational inequalities in combination; to relate social inequality and familial solidarity between generations; to pose questions about a possible generational consciousness and its political outcomes. The introduction concludes with a presentation of the articles in the special issue, which contribute new evidence to the scientific discussion.

Ulrike Jureit

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This paper provides an overview the historical precedence and theoretical underpinnings of the generational cycle theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, best known as the Fourth Turning. It also addresses its relevance to the history of the United States and its living generations.

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Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations

Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the United States has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. Now that the youngest Millennials are adults, how do they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before them?

In general, they’re better educated – a factor tied to employment and financial well-being – but there is a sharp divide between the economic fortunes of those who have a college education and those who don’t.

Millennials have brought more racial and ethnic diversity to American society. And Millennial women, like Generation X women, are more likely to participate in the nation’s workforce than prior generations.

Compared with previous generations, Millennials – those ages 22 to 37 in 2018 – are delaying or foregoing marriage and have been somewhat slower in forming their own households. They are also more likely to be living at home with their parents, and for longer stretches.

And Millennials are now the second-largest generation in the U.S. electorate (after Baby Boomers), a fact that continues to shape the country’s politics given their Democratic leanings when compared with older generations.

Those are some of the broad strokes that have emerged from Pew Research Center’s work on Millennials over the past few years. Now that the youngest Millennials are in their 20s, we have done a comprehensive update of our prior demographic work on generations. Here are the details.

Today’s young adults are much better educated than their grandparents, as the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher has steadily climbed since 1968. Among Millennials, around four-in-ten (39%) of those ages 25 to 37 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with just 15% of the Silent Generation, roughly a quarter of Baby Boomers and about three-in-ten Gen Xers (29%) when they were the same age.

Millennials are better educated than prior generations

Gains in educational attainment have been especially steep for young women. Among women of the Silent Generation, only 11% had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree when they were young (ages 25 to 37 in 1968). Millennial women are about four times (43%) as likely as their Silent predecessors to have completed as much education at the same age. Millennial men are also better educated than their predecessors. About one-third of Millennial men (36%) have at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly double the share of Silent Generation men (19%) when they were ages 25 to 37.

Among Millennials, women outpacing men in college completion

While educational attainment has steadily increased for men and women over the past five decades, the share of Millennial women with a bachelor’s degree is now higher than that of men – a reversal from the Silent Generation and Boomers. Gen X women were the first to outpace men in terms of education, with a 3-percentage-point advantage over Gen X men in 2001. Before that, late Boomer men in 1989 had a 2-point advantage over Boomer women.

Boomer women surged into the workforce as young adults, setting the stage for more Gen X and Millennial women to follow suit. In 1966, when Silent Generation women were ages 22 through 37, a majority (58%) were not participating in the labor force while 40% were employed. For Millennial women today, 72% are employed while just a quarter are not in the labor force. Boomer women were the turning point. As early as 1985, more young Boomer women were employed (66%) than were not in the labor force (28%).

Earnings of young adults have only increased for the college-educated

And despite a reputation for job hopping, Millennial workers are just as likely to stick with their employers as Gen X workers were when they were the same age. Roughly seven-in-ten each of Millennials ages 22 to 37 in 2018 (70%) and Gen Xers the same age in 2002 (69%) reported working for their current employer at least 13 months. About three-in-ten of both groups said they’d been with their employer for at least five years.

Of course, the economy varied for each generation. While the Great Recession affected Americans broadly, it created a particularly challenging job market for Millennials entering the workforce. The unemployment rate was especially high for America’s youngest adults in the years just after the recession, a reality that would impact Millennials’ future earnings and wealth.

Income and wealth

The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. The individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. But this belies a notably large gap in earnings between Millennials who have a college education and those who don’t. Similarly, the household income trends for young adults markedly diverge by education. As far as household wealth, Millennials appear to have accumulated slightly less than older generations had at the same age.

Millennials with a bachelor’s degree or more and a full-time job had median annual earnings valued at $56,000 in 2018, roughly equal to those of college-educated Generation X workers in 2001. But for Millennials with some college or less, annual earnings were lower than their counterparts in prior generations. For example, Millennial workers with some college education reported making $36,000, lower than the $38,900 early Baby Boomer workers made at the same age in 1982. The pattern is similar for those young adults who never attended college.

Millennials in 2018 had a median household income of roughly $71,400, similar to that of Gen X young adults ($70,700) in 2001. (This analysis is in 2017 dollars and is adjusted for household size. Additionally, household income includes the earnings of the young adult, as well as the income of anyone else living in the household.)

For Millennials and Gen Xers, large education gaps in typical household income

The growing gap by education is even more apparent when looking at annual household income. For households headed by Millennials ages 25 to 37 in 2018, the median adjusted household income was about $105,300 for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, roughly $56,000 greater than that of households headed by high school graduates. The median household income difference by education for prior generations ranged from $41,200 for late Boomers to $19,700 for the Silent Generation when they were young.

While young adults in general do not have much accumulated wealth, Millennials have slightly less wealth than Boomers did at the same age. The median net worth of households headed by Millennials (ages 20 to 35 in 2016) was about $12,500 in 2016, compared with $20,700 for households headed by Boomers the same age in 1983. Median net worth of Gen X households at the same age was about $15,100.

This modest difference in wealth can be partly attributed to differences in debt by generation. Compared with earlier generations, more Millennials have outstanding student debt, and the amount of it they owe tends to be greater. The share of young adult households with any student debt doubled from 1998 (when Gen Xers were ages 20 to 35) to 2016 (when Millennials were that age). In addition, the median amount of debt was nearly 50% greater for Millennials with outstanding student debt ($19,000) than for Gen X debt holders when they were young ($12,800).

Millennials without a bachelor’s degree more likely to still be living with parents

Millennials, hit hard by the Great Recession, have been somewhat slower in forming their own households than previous generations. They’re more likely to live in their parents’ home and also more likely to be at home for longer stretches . In 2018, 15% of Millennials (ages 25 to 37) were living in their parents’ home. This is nearly double the share of early Boomers and Silents (8% each) and 6 percentage points higher than Gen Xers who did so when they were the same age.

The rise in young adults living at home is especially prominent among those with lower education. Millennials who never attended college were twice as likely as those with a bachelor’s degree or more to live with their parents (20% vs. 10%). This gap was narrower or nonexistent in previous generations. Roughly equal shares of Silents (about 7% each) lived in their parents’ home when they were ages 25 to 37, regardless of educational attainment.

Millennials are also moving significantly less than earlier generations of young adults. About one-in-six Millennials ages 25 to 37 (16%) have moved in the past year. For previous generations at the same age, roughly a quarter had.

On the whole, Millennials are starting families later than their counterparts in prior generations. Just under half (46%) of Millennials ages 25 to 37 are married, a steep drop from the 83% of Silents who were married in 1968. The share of 25- to 37-year-olds who were married steadily dropped for each succeeding generation, from 67% of early Boomers to 57% of Gen Xers. This in part reflects broader societal shifts toward marrying later in life. In 1968, the typical American woman first married at age 21 and the typical American man first wed at 23. Today, those figures have climbed to 28 for women and 30 for men.

But it’s not all about delayed marriage. The share of adults who have never married is increasing with each successive generation. If current patterns continue, an estimated one-in-four of today’s young adults will have never married by the time they reach their mid-40s to early 50s – a record high share.

Marriage rate has fallen the most among those with less education

In prior generations, those ages 25 to 37 whose highest level of education was a high school diploma were more likely than those with a bachelor’s degree or higher to be married. Gen Xers reversed this trend, and the divide widened among Millennials. Four-in-ten Millennials with just a high school diploma (40%) are currently married, compared with 53% of Millennials with at least a bachelor’s degree. In comparison, 86% of Silent Generation high school graduates were married in 1968 versus 81% of Silents with a bachelor’s degree or more.

Millennial women are also waiting longer to become parents than prior generations did. In 2016, 48% of Millennial women (ages 20 to 35 at the time) were moms. When Generation X women were the same age in 2000, 57% were already mothers, similar to the share of Boomer women (58%) in 1984. Still, Millennial women now account for the vast majority of annual U.S. births, and more than 17 million Millennial women have become mothers.

Younger generations (Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z) now make up a clear majority of America’s voting-eligible population . As of November 2018, nearly six-in-ten adults eligible to vote (59%) were from one of these three generations, with Boomers and older generations making up the other 41%.

Gen Xers and younger generations are the clear majority of eligible voters

However, young adults have historically been less likely to vote than their older counterparts, and these younger generations have followed that same pattern, turning out to vote at lower rates than older generations in recent elections.

In the 2016 election, Millennials and Gen Xers cast more votes than Boomers and older generations, giving the younger generations a slight majority of total votes cast. However, higher shares of Silent/Greatest generation eligible voters (70%) and Boomers (69%) reported voting in the 2016 election compared with Gen X (63%) and Millennial (51%) eligible voters. Going forward, Millennial turnout may increase as this generation grows older.

Generational differences in political attitudes and partisan affiliation are as wide as they have been in decades. Among registered voters, 59% of Millennials affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with about half of Boomers and Gen Xers (48% each) and 43% of the Silent Generation. With this divide comes generational differences on specific issue areas , from views of racial discrimination and immigration to foreign policy and the scope of government.

Population change and the future

By 2019, Millennials are projected to number 73 million, overtaking Baby Boomers as the largest living adult generation . Although a greater number of births underlie the Baby Boom generation, Millennials will outnumber Boomers in part because immigration has been boosting their numbers.

Millennials are also bringing more racial and ethnic diversity. When the Silent Generation was young (ages 22 to 37), 84% were non-Hispanic white. For Millennials, the share is just 55%. This change is driven partly by the growing number of Hispanic and Asian immigrants , whose ranks have increased since the Boomer generation. The increased prevalence of interracial marriage and differences in fertility patterns have also contributed to the country’s shifting racial and ethnic makeup.

Looking ahead at the next generation, early benchmarks show Generation Z (those ages 6 to 21 in 2018) is on track to be the nation’s most diverse and best-educated generation yet. Nearly half (48%) are racial or ethnic minorities. And while most are still in K-12 schools, the oldest Gen Zers are enrolling in college at a higher rate than even Millennials were at their age. Early indications are that their opinions on issues are similar to those of Millennials .

Of course, Gen Z is still very young and may be shaped by future unknown events. But Pew Research Center looks forward to spending the next few years studying life for this new generation as it enters adulthood.

All photos via Getty Images

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Generational Analysis Dynamics: Gen Y and Gen X Essay

Introduction: the generation gap, generation x: description and management, generation y: description and management, designing the ultimate management strategy, conclusion: bridging the two cultures.

This paper addresses the differences between Generations Y and X. The goal of the essay is to define the characteristics that set the two generations apart from each other, as well as explore the tendencies that both generations display and research the strategies that can be used to meet the needs of the target populations.

An overview of the existing studies shows that Generation X is defined by its attitude toward family issues, particularly, the emphasis that it places on independence, as well as their impressive academic skills. Generation Y, in turn, is characterized by the emphasis that its members place on diversity in communication, as well as their technological savvy.

To manage the dynamics between the two groups in the workplace, one should consider using the leadership strategy that allows encouraging independence among the company members, as well as offers extensive opportunities for change and active use of innovations. As a result, the premise for meeting the needs of both generations can be built.

The phenomenon known as the generation gap has been in existence for centuries, and it has been known for affecting the relationships between the representatives of different generations extensively. The confrontations in which a generation gap typically results in the workplace lead to a significant drop in the overall productivity levels and, thus, impede the further organizational progress (Durkin, 2008). Therefore, creating approaches that will allow managing the relationships between different generations is crucial to the efficacy of a firm’s performance.

To make sure that the members of Generations X and Y could coexist in the workplace, one should consider adopting the strategy that will include active promotion of independence for Generations X and the introduction of opportunities for an increase in competency levels among the representatives of Generation X. Thus, the environment in which both groups will feel comfortable will be created. Furthermore, a leadership strategy based on the active promotion of diversity and cooperation must be used to make sure that Generations X and Y should communicate efficiently and avoid conflicts successfully.

Generation X is often addressed as the best-educated one, with a significant amount of its members having a Bachelor’s or a Master’s degree and having a propensity toward independence in education, as well as in other domains of their lives. As a result, the representatives of Generation X tend to adopt a pragmatic philosophy and a corresponding set of values. Their maturity and ability to plan carefully make them very valuable employees (Lovely, 2005).

Born between 1965 and 1981, Generation Y is typically defined by its independence and propensity toward active learning (Reynolds, Bush, & Geist, 2008). Driven and eager to explore the existing opportunities, the representatives of Generation Y can be deemed as the product of the globalization process. As a result, the significance of communication and diversity is deeply valued by the target population (Lovely, 2005).

Therefore, it is crucial for a leader and a manager to provide the representatives of Gen Y with an opportunity to explore their potential and engage in lifelong learning as the means of maintaining the quality of their performance high. Furthermore, the enhancement of connectivity between the members of Gen Y must be viewed as a priority since the specified population is defined by its propensity to use information technology as the means of maintaining a consistent connection with their community members and peers (Bolman & Deal, 2017).

As stressed above, it is crucial to make sure that the representatives of both generations should feel comfortable in the workplace. For this purpose, a healthy environment must be created. Particularly, the active promotion of directness, straightforwardness, and transparency in communicating the company’s goals will have to be viewed as a priority (Sapher & King, 1985). Furthermore, it is strongly recommended that a coherent yet flexible plan should be created so that the representatives of Gen Y could follow it closely and at the same time feel independent in managing their roles and responsibilities (Bolman & Deal, 2017).

To build the environment in which the members of Generation X will feel comfortable, one will have to consider offering them an opportunity for consistent professional growth, as well as extensive career opportunities. Thus, the need of the target population to engage in active learning will be satisfied. Furthermore, the pragmatic needs of Gen X, particularly their striving to achieve success in their career will be met.

Therefore, the general management strategy in the environment w where Gen X and Y members must cooperate should imply focusing on effective communication, opportunities for professional growth, and recognition of employees’ independence. As a result, both Gen Y and X members will receive a powerful impetus for excelling in their performance. Furthermore, being bound by a single objective and accepting the importance of cooperation, Gen Y and X members will avoid conflicts in the workplace.

The needs of Generations X and Y are very different, yet a coherent management strategy aimed at promoting efficient communication and professional growth is bound to help the target population come to terms with their differences. By building the environment in which both groups will feel comfortable, one will be able to avoid major conflicts, disagreements, and similar issues. As a result, a rapid increase in employees’ performance is expected.

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership . New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Durkin, D. (2008). Youth movement. Communication World, 25 (2), 23-25.

Lovely, S (2005). Creating synergy in the schoolhouse. The School Administrator, 8 (62), 30-34.

Reynolds, L., Bush, E. C., & Geist, R. (2008). The Gen Y imperative. Communication World, 25 (3), 19-22.

Sapher, J., & King, M. (1985). Good seeds grow in strong cultures. Educational Leadership, 42 (6), 67-74.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Millennial Generation — Comparison Of Generation X And Generation Y

Comparison of Generation X and Generation Y

Categories: Generation X Millennial Generation

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