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

Equality is one of the unifying themes of cultural change over the last one hundred years, making it one of the unifying themes of generational change.

Stonewall is often considered the first event of the LGBT rights movement, the night when LGBT people decided to fight back. After Stonewall, things slowly began to change as individualism normalized difference and encouraged accepting people for who they are. It took time, which is why most LGBT trends are covered instead in the later chapters. Yet, like the history of the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, the LGBT equality movement began with Silents.

Raised in the more communal 1950s, Silents felt the pressure of conformity in a way later generations struggle to understand.

People who marry before age 25 are more likely to get divorced than those who marry later. With Silents marrying younger than the generations before them, they were also more likely to get divorced.

Silents were the last full generation to benefit from education policies that are now difficult to believe: For example, the University of California was tuition-free for state residents until the late 1960s.

Boomers have also dominated Congress, governorships, university presidencies, and C-suites since the 1990s. Given their outsize numbers and outsize pull, writer Landon Jones (b. 1943) dubbed Boomers “a generational tyranny.”

Boomers were the first generation to mount a significant challenge to the centuries-old rule that sex should wait until marriage and instead argued that it was a choice up to the individual. Although many in previous generations also had premarital sex, it was usually considered something to be ashamed of. The Boomers put the first significant cracks in the artifice of those beliefs, and later generations broke it down the rest of the way.

Some Boomers are still using marijuana in their middle age and elder adulthood; the experiences of their teen and young adult years are still shaping their behavior as older adults. After changing little for decades, marijuana use among 50- to 64-year-olds skyrocketed just as Boomers aged into the group. The same was true as Boomers aged into the over-65 group (see Figure 3.12). These changes happened during a time when marijuana use did not increase among high school seniors (see Figure 3.11) and began before the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in some states (the first was Colorado in 2014)—both of which suggest that the increase in older adults’ pot use was a generational effect more than anything else.

Boomers have also continued drinking alcohol into their elder years, including possibly drinking too much. Public health officials worry the most about binge drinking—or drinking four to five drinks in a short time period, which is enough to get most people drunk. Binge drinking among middle-aged adults began to increase just as Boomers started to dominate the age group, with Boomers who said they had binged on alcohol within the last year jumping 65% from 2007 to 2018

Alcohol use disorder—issues with alcohol severe enough to require treatment—doubled among older adults between 2001 and 2013. In other words, binge drinking is no longer a problem confined to young adults; with Boomers, it’s increasingly an issue among those in their retirement years as well.

By the 2020s, almost 12% of Congress identified as Black in a country where 13% of residents are Black.

Only 3% of new lawyers were women in 1965, but 30% were by 1980

In the 2020 election, older Boomers (ages 65 to 74) had the highest voter participation of any age group: 76% cast a ballot.

Boomers shifted hard toward the Republican side during the 1980s and became majority Republican by the slimmest of margins in the late 2010s and early 2020s as they aged into their 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Looking at the data this way reveals a shocking fact: Boomers were the first group of 56- to 74-year-olds to be majority Republican since the survey began in 1952 (see Figure 3.29). Thus Boomers are more Republican than previous generations were at the same age. It’s a stunning evolution for a generation that was very liberal in their youth, and it creates a sizable generation gap between Boomers and the more liberal Millennials and Gen Z’ers.

Here’s the remarkable thing: Deaths from heart disease and cancer among 55- to 64-year-olds declined between 2000 and 2019. So the two leading causes of death were both declining, but the overall rate of death was still rising. Why? Because Americans in their late 50s and early 60s were suffering more deaths of despair, especially drug overdoses. From 2000, when Silents were the entirety of 55- to 64-year-olds, to 2019, when the group was all Boomers, fatal drug overdoses increased by an incredible factor of ten, fatal liver disease (often caused by alcohol abuse) by 42%, and suicide by 60%

While young adults were once slightly more likely to overdose than older adults, older adults 55–64 were more likely to overdose starting in 2007, with the gap widening by 2020

In short: Not only are Boomers more likely than their predecessors to be unhappy, suffer from more days of poor mental health, experience more mental distress, and be depressed, but they are also likely to die of causes related to mental health, including suicide and drug overdoses. Something about being born between 1946 and 1964 was not good for mental health, and being born between 1955 and 1964 was especially bad.

Like every generation, Gen X contains multitudes, and changes with the times, but its identity is more unfocused than that of other generations. The boundaries of Gen X are also fuzzy. Generation X, the Douglas Coupland novel that named the generation, is actually about those born in the early 1960s, who are usually instead considered late Boomers. (Coupland himself was born in 1961.) At the other end, the later Gen X birth years bleed into early Millennials, inspiring a label (“Xennials”) and a persistent debate about the last year of the generation: Anywhere from 1977 to 1983 has been suggested. I’ve used 1979 because it not only breaks at the decade’s end but also cleaves at a generational watershed: Everyone born in 1979 and before was 21 or older, a full-fledged adult at least by rights, on September 11, 2001.

Gen X is the middle child of generations. That’s true literally of the five adult generations of the 2020s: Silents and Boomers are older, and Millennials and Gen Z are younger. It’s also true figuratively: Just like the middle child in the family, everyone forgets about Gen X. When CBS News posted a graphic of the generations in 2019, they left Gen X out entirely, blithely skipping over the birth years between Boomers and Millennials as if they didn’t exist. Articles and social media fights regularly pit Boomers and Millennials against each other without any acknowledgment that there’s a generation between them.

For the last ten years of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, your generation often dictated how you communicated: Silents and Boomers wanted to see you in person or call you on the phone, Gen X’ers wanted to email you, Millennials wanted to text you, and Gen Z wanted to send you their resume as a TikTok video.