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.

Although meant to illustrate the limitations of origin stories, the idea of turtles resting on progressively larger turtles has always reminded me of the search for ultimate causes of phenomena: Each cause leads to another below it, in an endless chain of turtles, making it difficult to see what is really causing things to change.

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.

Technological change doesn’t always result in uniformly high individualism—for example, Japan is a collectivistic country immersed in technology. But individualism can’t exist without modern technology. Every individualistic country in the world is an industrialized nation, although not every industrialized nation is individualistic.

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.

At the beginning of the 20th century, 1 out of 10 children who reached their 1st birthday did not reach their 15th. By 2007, however, only 1 out of 300 Americans died in childhood. Deaths of children 5 to 14 plummeted more than 80% between 1950 and 2019.

This is a good description of the U.S. in the 21st century: It is a stable (low-death-rate) environment, but also one with considerable competition for resources due to income inequality and other factors.

In his book Sapiens (A Brief History of Humankind), Yuval Noah Harari noted that historians rarely consider how technological progress impacts people’s happiness and well-being. That should end now: We need to understand not just how things have changed but the impact on the generations’ mental health.

Generations are a way of understanding the past, but they also can help us understand the future. As the generations go, so goes the world.

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.

Just ask Michael McConnell and Jack Baker (both b. 1942). The two applied for a marriage license in 1970 in Minneapolis; at the time, Minnesota’s marriage laws did not explicitly mention the gender of the participants. The clerk denied their petition and they took the case to court. They were able to get a marriage license in another county after Jack changed his name to the gender-neutral Pat Lyn. Wearing white bell-bottom pantsuits and macramé headbands, the two were married in 1971, though the county clerk later refused to file the marriage record. Newspaper coverage of their case at the time referred to Baker as McConnell’s “roommate” or “homosexual friend,” and the University of Minnesota rescinded McConnell’s job offer. When he sued, the court criticized him for attempting to “foist tacit approval of this socially repugnant concept upon his employer.” Their original marriage case, Baker v. Nelson, was curtly dismissed by the Supreme Court in 1972 “for want of a substantial federal question.” Their marriage, finally legally recognized in 2019, is thought to be the longest same-sex marriage in the U.S.

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.

A lot of people called and said, ‘I’m not afraid of death. It’s getting there that scares me.’ ”

One of the first reporters to write full-time about the AIDS epidemic was Randy Shilts (b. 1951). Growing up in Iowa, Shilts hadn’t known anyone else who was gay. He came out while an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, and after several years of writing for the gay newspaper the Advocate he was hired by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981. Before long, he was reporting on AIDS full-time. He eventually wrote And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, a sweeping history of not only the epidemic but the gay community’s reaction to it and what he viewed as the Reagan administration’s catastrophic failure to do anything about it. The 1987 book, though controversial in some circles, was a bestseller and was made into an HBO miniseries about the AIDS epidemic. Shilts tested HIV positive in March 1987 and by 1993 suffered from two of the maladies described in his book, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma. “HIV is certainly character-building,” he said. “It’s made me see all of the shallow things we cling to, like ego and vanity. Of course, I’d rather have a few more T-cells and a little less character.” Shilts died from AIDS in February 1994. He was 42.

In a 1969 Gallup poll, only 1 out of 25 American adults said they had ever tried marijuana, but that number rose to 1 out of 8 in 1973 and 1 out of 4 in 1977.

The generation gap around marijuana persisted even as Boomers grew into adulthood. In 1987, when it was revealed that Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg (b. 1947) had smoked marijuana “on a few occasions” as an undergraduate in the 1960s and as a young professor in the 1970s, his nomination collapsed under the disapproval of the Senate Judiciary Committee, most of whom where Greatests and Silents. Put on the spot in 1992 about whether he’d ever smoked pot, Bill Clinton (b. 1946) equivocated by saying he had tried marijuana but “didn’t inhale.” But by 2008, with the generation gap softening, Barack Obama’s (b. 1961) earlier admissions about smoking marijuana (and even using cocaine) when he was younger passed by with barely a mention.

Boomers Karen Wagner (b. 1952), the first female litigation partner in a major New York City law firm, and Erica Baird (b. 1948), the first female partner in a large accounting firm, write that as young women they “were thrilled to get real jobs—albeit in a man’s world. Ladies rooms were up the stairs and down the hall. The uniform was an adaptation of male garb, effectively disguising the female shape.… We strategized about how to be seen—and heard.” Some firsts took longer than others. The New York Times reported that the first two female sanitation workers in the city were doing well—in an article dated January 31, 1987. Gender segregation in jobs affected men, too. When Celio Diaz Jr., a married father of two from Miami, applied to be a flight attendant in 1967, Pan American World Airways rejected him for being male. Diaz sued and lost in 1970 when the court ruled (incredibly) that being female was a bona fide occupational qualification for being a flight attendant. He appealed, and the case was eventually settled in his favor in 1972. Unfortunately, Diaz was then older than Pan Am’s maximum age for the job. Other men would get the opportunity, though, with Pan Am hiring men for the position beginning in July 1972. As the Miami Herald opined, “Next time you settle down for a long jet flight, don’t be startled if the ‘stewardess’ who comes to fluff your pillow is a husky former policeman,” describing the change as a “Men’s Lib–style effort.” Before long, “stewardess” be...

This was a large shift. An American born in 1964 was 35% more likely to take their own life than one born in 1935. The uptick in suicide among Boomers started early: The suicide rate for 15- to 19-year-old Boomer teens in 1970 was more than twice that of Silent teens in 1950.

As we saw earlier in the chapter, Black adults were instead increasingly happier between the 1970s and the 2010s, so their trends are different. Yet there was also a growing class divide in happiness among Blacks: The happiness of lower-income Black adults stayed steady, and the happiness of higher-income Blacks increased. Thus the happiness gap also widened among Blacks. So for both White and Black Americans, class divisions in happiness increased over the decades, with the result a net gain in happiness among Blacks and a net loss among Whites. Among the four groups (higher-income Blacks, higher-income Whites, lower-income Blacks, and lower-income Whites), only one declined substantially in happiness: lower-income Whites. Knowing this helps explain a good deal of recent history, from Trump’s election in 2016 to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Because unhappiness breeds mistrust, these trends also help explain many White lower-income Americans’ resistance to vaccines and mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the mental health corollary to what Case and Deaton found in their analyses of the death rates of the middle-aged: The increase was much larger among those without a college degree. In another paper, they found that average years of life expectancy between ages 25 and 75 decreased among those without a college degree and increased among those with one. By 2018, an American with a college degree could expect to live three years longer than someone without one. That was true for both Blacks and Whites: In recent years, mortality differences by race have narrowed, but differences by education have grown larger.

If you were a kid in the 1970s or 1980s who returned to an empty house after school, you’d let yourself in and a parentless late afternoon would stretch before you. A pack of cookies and several episodes of Happy Days and Mork and Mindy reruns later, your parent or parents would get home. This was the life of the latchkey kid, named after the key you wore on a string around your neck.

Boomers and Gen X’ers were instead raised in the fast-life strategy era: They roamed their neighborhoods freely and were often told to “come home when the streetlights come on.” If you want Gen X’ers to come out of the woodwork on social media, all you have to do is post something about your unsupervised childhood. “If you’re wondering why Generation X is the way it is, it’s because millennial/GenZ had parents constantly googling, ‘best parenting strategies for your growing miracle,’ and ours were like, ‘You can play with a knife in your room just don’t smoke weed in the kitchen,’ ” a Twitter user named Mikel Jollett wrote. A stream of similar takes from Gen X’ers followed. “I think people who didn’t grow up in the late 70s and early 80s have absolutely no idea how neglected we were & how socially acceptable dangerous ass shit was,” agreed Shannon Foley Martinez. “Parents had literally no idea where their kids were or what they were doing like 90% of the time.” Many Gen X’ers revel in the untrammeled independence they had as children and teens, believing it helped them learn valuable lessons for adulthood. One Gen X’er wrote, “We just figured things out. It was both terrifying and exhilarating, the total freedom we had, and the absolute vulnerability we weren’t yet aware of.” Another said, “I roamed far and wide from age 4 onward.… I wasn’t neglected and I’m thankful my parents didn’t hover over my life as if I were made of glass.”

Higher education is the definition of deferred gratification.

Then there’s the influence of technology on trust in institutions. Social media and the internet in general put individualism on steroids: People can do their own research because there are more places to find information, correct or not. When medical information could only be found in inaccessible textbooks, most people had no choice but to trust their doctors. When information is online and instantly available, everything can be questioned. That has some clear benefits, because patients can become educated and advocate for themselves. However, the downside of too much information from too many sources became obvious very quickly after the vaccines rolled out. “I did my own research” works well when information comes from well-vetted sources, and badly when it doesn’t. But it’s hard for many people to tell the difference between a source they can trust and one they can’t. Don’t like it? It’s fake news. “Fake news” at first meant falsifiable stories posted by questionable websites for mercenary gain, but the phrase eventually lost meaning as it was used to reject anything someone didn’t like. With online news the norm, and trust low, the truth is up for grabs. In a society with a pervasive sense that you can only trust yourself, collective action—even collective agreement on basic facts—is no longer possible.

For Gen X’ers, especially White Gen X’ers who had the luxury of not thinking about race very often, King’s beating and the LA riots came as a shock. Gen X is the first generation to have no firsthand memories of segregated schools, separate water fountains, and freedom marches. Racism was supposed to be over.

Of course, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem: LGBT people can’t come out, and media can’t portray them positively, if prejudice abounds and the culture is not accepting. Something had to set the stage, and that was individualism. If everyone is an individual who can make their own choices about whom to love, previous rigid social rules around sexuality don’t make much sense anymore. As individualism gained ground after the 1960s, attitudes started to shift, and greater acceptance of LGBT people was the eventual result over the course of the decades. It’s not a coincidence that Gen X, the first generation to take individualism for granted, would also be the first in which most supported same-sex marriage—support Millennials and Gen Z would bring to new heights.

As far back as we have measures, and as both teens and young adults, Millennials are the most optimistic and self-confident generation in history.

The easiest way to piss off a Millennial or a Gen Z’er is to say something like “In my day, we just worked our way through college.” Well, in the Boomers’ day the University of California was tuition-free for state residents.

At times social media sites also felt like a private Millennial haven where people could commiserate with each other outside the earshot of older generations, most of whom are not as active on the sites. Social media became a Millennial echo chamber for economic complaints. As Derek Thompson (b. 1986) put it in the Atlantic, a “popular template of contemporary internet analysis” is “If you experience a moment’s unpleasantness, first blame modern capitalism.”

The results are clear: Gen Z young adults are much more likely to identify as either trans or nonbinary than other generations. While only 1 out of 1,000 Boomers identify as transgender (one-tenth of 1%), 23 out of 1,000 Gen Z young adults (2.30%) identify as trans—20 times more (see Figure 6.2). By this estimate, there are now more trans young adults in the U.S. than the number of people living in Boston.

Let that sink in: Twice as many teens were taking their own lives in 2019 than just 12 years before, and three times as many kids in 4th to 9th grade died at their own hands. These are not small increases. If the suicide rate had stayed at its 2007 level through 2019 in the U.S., 2,873 more 10- to 14-year-olds would still be alive, enough to fill all the seats on 20 domestic airplane flights. So would 6,347 more 15- to 19-year-olds (44 planes) and 8,457 more 20- to 24-year-olds (59 planes). That’s a total of 17,677 additional young lives lost, averaging more than 1,300 a year, enough to fill 9 planes. Imagine if 9 airline flights filled with 10- to 24-year-olds crashed every single year, killing everyone on board. Airplanes would not be allowed to fly again until we figured out why so many were crashing. Yet that is how many more additional lives have been lost to suicide among American young people since 2007.

Going forward, this will be the biggest challenge in the U.S. and potentially around the world: How can leaders convince young people that their country is a good place to live? If they can’t, young people might want to junk everything and start over. There’s a name for that: a revolution.

In 1962, the kids’ cartoon show The Jetsons premiered, featuring a family of four living decades into the future. The show conjured up a panoply of nifty gadgets that ran the gamut of eventual 2020s accuracy from video calls (yes) to robot assistants (sort of) to flying cars (no). Even with this array of creative technological forecasting, it was somehow beyond the imagination of The Jetsons’ creators to envision that wife Jane Jetson would have a job outside the home. The writers understood the transformative power of technology in its direct effects, but not in its downstream impacts on attitudes and behaviors—impacts that arguably changed life even more than a robot assistant.

It appears that the work-from-home trend is here to stay. In 2019, about 5% of all paid days for employees (across all industries) were worked at home. That surged to 62% in 2020 and by August 2022 had stabilized at 31%. For those working in information, technology, or finance, it settled at 50%. One economist described the change as “the largest shock to labor markets in decades,” noting that “in America alone this is saving about 200 million hours and 6 billion miles of commuting a week.”

The generational turnover in leadership will facilitate this change. Gen X bosses, who began their careers during the computer revolution, are more likely than Boomers to approve of their employees working from home, or at least doing so part of the time. Millennials feel the same. In a 2021 poll, 55% of Millennials questioned why workers should go back to the office when productivity has been high while working remotely; only 36% of Boomers agreed, despite their greater vulnerability to COVID.

After spending much of their formative years on Zoom, Gen Z favors choice and flexibility. “I actually love going into the office—it feels more organic,” said Ginsey Stephenson (b. 1999). “But I don’t know how anyone went into the office every day.” Recent college graduate Sam Purdy says he doesn’t want to be “stuffed in a cubicle” every day. “You’re going to see us prioritize things other than work and push back on things like [having] to be in the office.” When David Gross (b. 1981) announced to his advertising agency employees in 2021 that they would be returning to the office full-time, they responded with complete silence. “Is the policy mandatory?” asked one young man. After working from home during the pandemic, the idea of getting dressed in business attire, commuting to an office, and staying there for eight hours five days a week sounds exhausting to many.

It also sounds unsafe. Even as COVID becomes endemic, it will be difficult for some to go back to 2019-style cavalier attitudes about getting sick, whether that’s COVID or the flu. Gen Z was already a highly cautious generation before 2020, and they are likely to remain so for their entire lives. This also has implications for sick days and flexibility—Gen Z expects to be able to make their own choices about whether they feel well enough, or safe enough, to go to work. The days when in-person attendance can be required no matter what, with penalties for not showing up, may be gone. Managers will increasingly be balancing the need for sick leave with the need for employees to be present. In office jobs this can be solved with remote work in some cases, but in service sector, manufacturing, and health care jobs the solutions are not as clear.

Atlantic writer Derek Thompson calls the digital commute the next industrial revolution, geographically decoupling work locations and home locations for the first time in history. The future of work is both everywhere and nowhere.

Millennials were challenging because they expected praise as a given; Gen Z’ers are challenging because they need praise for reassurance.

As Gen Z’ers rise in the workplace ranks, managers will need to help them channel their anxiety into productivity without dismissing it. Some of the best advice to communicate is this: Try not to get distracted when you’re stressed, but face the project head-on and try to make progress. That is much more likely to relieve your stress than spending time on social media, surfing the web, and all the other things we’re tempted to do when we feel anxious. It’s a battle to stay focused.

“Good morning, Mike,” says Jose as he walks into the office. Pop quiz: Who is Jose talking to, his boss or his employee? In our current society, it’s a trick question—Mike could be either Jose’s boss or his employee. But not that long ago, it would be immediately clear that Mike was Jose’s employee, or at least his coworker, because no employee would call the boss “Mike.” He’d be “Mr. Smith.” Before about 1990, employees were virtually never on a first-name basis with the boss.

One example of individualism and younger workers’ power winning out is company policies around appearance. Until recently, employers such as Home Depot, UPS, and Disney required workers to cover up their tattoos and prohibited facial hair. But with tattoos and facial hair seen as a form of individual expression, especially among Millennials and Gen Z, those policies have been relaxed. UPS, for example, now allows beards and mustaches as long as they look “businesslike.” UPS executive Christopher Bartlett said the new policies “would create a more modern workplace for our employees that allows them to bring their authentic selves to work.” Disney had long outlawed tattoos among theme park workers (whom they call “cast members”). The company now allows tattoos to, as executive Josh D’Amaro wrote, “remain relevant in today’s workplace… [and] enable our cast members to better express their cultures and individuality at work.” Companies will increasingly find employees advocating to eliminate any policy that limits self-expression, especially self-expression through appearance.

The best thing about the internet is that we have access to endless information; the worst thing about the internet is that we have access to endless information.