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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.
The United States is currently populated by six generations: Silents (born 1925–1945), Boomers (1946–1964), Generation X (1965–1979), Millennials (1980–1994), Generation Z (aka iGen or Zoomers, 1995–2012), and an as-yet-unnamed generation born after 2013 (I call them Polars; some marketers have called them Alphas).
Studying the ebb and flow of generations is also a unique way to understand history. Events such as wars, economic downturns, and pandemics are often experienced differently depending on your age.
Major events can certainly shape a generation’s worldview. Those who lived through the Great Depression, for example, were often frugal for the rest of their lives. However, this view of generations as shaped by cycles of events misses the rest of cultural change—all
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 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.
Technological change isn’t just about stuff; it’s about how we live, which influences how we think, feel, and behave.
Technology also contributes to many of the major events prized in classic generational theories.
Airplanes played a role in at least four major events of the last one hundred years: World War II (where planes were used in combat, including dropping the first nuclear bomb), 9/11 (where planes were used as weapons), and the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics (where both viruses spread via airplane travel).
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.
Individualistic cultures such as the U.S. value freedom, independence, and equality, while more collectivistic cultures such as South Korea instead value group harmony and rule-following.
By the 1960s and 1970s the highly individualistic world we know today had begun to emerge in many countries around the world: Personal choice was paramount, the U.S. military became an all-volunteer force, and “do your own thing” became a mantra.
Treating people as individuals means setting aside the idea of group membership as destiny, which gave rise to movements for individual rights based on gender, race, and class, enshrining equality as a core value of the culture.
Assuming verbal language mirrored written language, 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.
Technology makes individualism possible. Until well into the 20th century, it was difficult to live alone or to find the time to contemplate being special, given the time and effort involved in simply existing.
In contrast, modern citizens have the time to focus on themselves and their own needs and desires because technology has relieved us of the drudgery of life.
Technology also made the middle class possible. With labor-saving devices decreasing the need for servants and farmworkers, more people could do other types of work, and most of that work paid better and allowed for more freedom.
Large cities, which promote individualism as they allow people to live fairly anonymously without their behavior being monitored by everyone else (as is common in small towns), are made possible by technology.
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.
The link between individualism and LGB rights is also true over time. As cultures grow more individualistic, they place more emphasis on individual choice and less on everyone being the same.
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.
In the early 20th century, leaving the house usually meant a suit and hat for men and a dress and gloves for women—and often a tight girdle. People dressed this way even in their time off.
During this era, the goal of clothing was to communicate status. Being respectable meant dressing a certain way to be presentable to others. Individualism turns this around: The goal of clothing is for the person wearing it to be comfortable.
Technology also leads to another cultural trend that’s had an enormous impact on how we live: taking longer to grow up, and longer to grow older.
This was childhood in the mid-20th century: You had responsibilities, but you also had freedom. Mothers told their children to play outside as long as they were home by dinner; parents considered it normal for 8-year-olds to be gone, unsupervised by adults, for the entire day.
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).
The fast life strategy is more common when the risk of death is higher both for babies and for adults, and when children are necessary for farm labor.
Education took fewer years and lives were shorter, so development happened faster at each life stage. That meant more independence for young children; more working and dating for teens; marriage, children, and jobs for those in their late teens and early 20s; feeling old by 45; and death in one’s 60s.
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.
These slower life trajectories are all ultimately caused by technology, including modern medical care (which lengthens life spans), birth control (allowing people to have fewer children), labor-saving devices (which slow aging), and a knowledge-based economy (which requires more years of education).
In their 1991 book, Generations, Strauss and Howe argued that major events caused generations to cycle through four different types (Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive), with each type suited for their age during the event.
Although some of Strauss and Howe’s predictions were eerily prescient—for example, they forecasted a major event would occur around 2020—the generations did not behave as predicted.
If Millennials resembled the Greatest generation, for example, they would have come together collectively as one to face the challenge of the pandemic, relying on their strong sense of patriotic duty and rule-following.
Instead, patriotism declined and rule-following was controversial. As for Gen Z resembling the Silent generation, Silents embraced traditional gender roles and married youn...
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The strong influence of technology since the middle of the last century has seemingly broken the previous ...
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Someone doesn’t have to know or care that they are a Millennial to have been influenced by the technology and culture present when the generation was growing up. So even if you don’t feel like a Millennial, if you were born between 1980 and 1994, you are one.
“Not All [X] Are Like That.” The NAXALT fallacy is the mistaken belief that because someone in the group lies at the extreme, the average does not exist.
Most Westerners have been trained to think of choices as stemming from personal preferences alone, and our behavior as impacting only ourselves. But we are all interconnected.
First, it means generational trends have an impact even if you’re the exception, even if you dislike the trends, and even if you’re not a member of the group advocating for change.
Second, our interconnected relationships mean the causes of generational changes aren’t centered just on individual behaviors but on group-level dynamics.
As smartphones and social media became the pervasive norm, everyone was affected whether they used them or not. The whole social dynamic changed as communication shifted online and away from in-person meetings and phone calls.
Some have questioned why the numbers of years in the defined generations are getting smaller as people are having children later, thus lengthening reproductive generations. The answer is straightforward: The generations we label and discuss publicly, like Boomers and Gen Z, are social generations, a different concept than reproductive generations.
What about the idea that older people have “always” complained about younger generations? This is often used to argue that generational differences don’t actually exist—how can younger generations be “too soft” when people said the same thing fifty years ago?
With technology making life progressively less physically taxing for each generation, each generation is softer than the one before it.
The survey data also help address this question: They rely on young people’s own reports, not the complaints of their elders. Studying generational differences is about understanding, not about criticism.
“ ‘OK Boomer’ is more than just an imperious insult; it’s frustrated Millennial shorthand for the ways the same people who created so many of our problems now pin the blame on us.”
The analogy to a family works fairly well in the 2020s: Silents and Boomers are the powerful older siblings, Millennials and Gen Z are the energetic but misunderstood younger siblings, and Gen X—the middle child—is often forgotten.
What about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic? Surprisingly, most attitudes and behaviors do not show unprecedented changes between 2019 and 2020–2022. That might be because so many trends of the 2010s, from declining face-to-face interaction to increasing political polarization, were heightened by the pandemic, not reversed by it.
Consider just two of the generation’s members: civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (b. 1929) and Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933). Much of the social change we associate with Boomers and the 1960s instead originated with Silents.
Still, Silents are often overshadowed and forgotten, wedged between the Greatest generation (born 1901–1924), who were celebrated for winning World War II, and the Boomers, who continued the social upheavals that Silents debuted.
