Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

by Jean M. Twenge

The era when you were born has a substantial influence on your behaviors, attitudes, values, and personality traits. In fact, when you were born has a larger effect on your personality and attitudes than the family who raised you does.

So what is the root cause of these cultural changes—and thus the root cause of generational differences? It should be something that keeps progressing year after year, and something with a big impact on day-to-day life. The strongest candidate is technology.

technology keeps moving in roughly the same direction: easier, faster, more convenient, more entertaining. Technology and its aftereffects—on culture, behavior, and attitudes—have broken the old cycles of generations to form something novel. This model—let’s call it the Technology Model of Generations—is a new theory of generations for the modern world.

Along with the direct impacts of technology, individualism and a slower life trajectory are the key trends that define the generations of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Boomers growing up in the 1950s were only rarely told “just be yourself” or “you’re special,” but Millennials and Gen Z’ers heard these phrases much more often. Writing “I love me” would have garnered questions about tautology and perhaps onanism in 1955, but was an accepted expression of high self-esteem by the 2000s.

In general, individualism has the advantage of more individual freedom and choice, and the downside of more social disconnection; collectivism offers less choice but tighter social connections.

Conservatism embraces some aspects of individualism (favoring light regulation of the individual by government) and some aspects of collectivism (emphasizing family and religion). Liberalism prizes individualism’s insistence that race, gender, and sexual orientation should not restrict rights or opportunities, but also supports collectivistic social policies such as government-funded health care.

In the Technology Model of Generations, individualism is caused by technology. How? Technology makes individualism possible.

Being able to hit the drive-thru at McDonald’s and get a hot meal in under five minutes is not an unmitigated good, but it’s a prime example of the amazing convenience of modern life and the flexibility it allows the individual.

Overall, technological progress shifted economies away from agricultural and household work, which required many people to work together collectively, to information and service work, which are often performed more independently.

Technology also favors paid work that relies more on verbal and social abilities and less on physical strength, which brings more women into the workplace, promoting more gender equality.

More recent technological progress has also gone hand in hand with individualism. When people first bought TVs, they had one per family. TVs were so big they were often styled with wood on the outside like a piece of furniture. Then it became popular to have more than one TV in a house so members of the family could watch different things. Now each family member has their own phone or tablet, complete with streaming video and earbuds, so each person can watch exactly what they want to when they want to.

Life history theory observes that parents have a choice: They can have many children and expect them to grow up quickly (a fast life strategy) or they can have fewer children and expect them to grow up more slowly (a slow life strategy).

In the 21st century, infant and child mortality is lower, education takes longer, and people live longer and healthier lives. In this environment, the risk of death is lower, but the danger of falling behind economically is higher in an age of income inequality, so parents choose to have fewer children and nurture them more extensively.

It took decades after the introduction of the landline telephone for half of the country to have one, but the smartphone went from introduction to more than 50% ownership in just five and a half years, the fastest adoption of any technology in human history.

how can younger generations be “too soft” when people said the same thing fifty years ago? It might be because they were always right. With technology making life progressively less physically taxing for each generation, each generation is softer than the one before it.

“Some men see things as they are, and say why,” Robert F. Kennedy (b. 1925) said. “I dream of things that never were, and say why not.”