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.

The word generation is now more commonly used to refer to social generations: those born around the same time who experienced roughly the same culture growing up.

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).

Many books and articles on generational differences are long on subjective observations but short on hard data. Others poll a small segment of people and attempt to draw broad conclusions. With the age of Big Data upon us, that no longer needs to be the case. In these pages, you’ll find the results of generational analyses spanning twenty-four datasets including thirty-nine million people—nearly as many people as live in California, the most populous state in the U.S. With so much data, it’s possible to get a better understanding of generational differences than ever before.

But as I traveled the country giving talks about iGen, managers, parents, and college faculty would ask, “But hasn’t new technology affected all of us?” Or they’d want to know, “Do other generations also look different now from before?” This book is the answer to those questions—and to many others about Silents, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Polars.

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.

Two of these intervening causes are individualism (more focus on the individual self) and a slower life trajectory (taking longer to grow to adulthood, and longer to age).

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

Individualistic countries were the first to embrace equal rights for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people, while more collectivistic countries have not. Same-sex marriage is legal in the Netherlands and Canada but is not in China or Saudi Arabia. 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.

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. As an academic paper put it, “When competition for resources is high in stable environments, selection favors greater parental investment and a reduced number of offspring.”

Neither the slow- nor fast-life strategy is necessarily good or bad. Both are adaptations to a particular place and time, and both have advantages and disadvantages. The same is true of individualism, which also has upsides and downsides. This is a good caveat to keep in mind for the rest of the book: Just because something has changed over the generations does not make it bad (or good). Often, it just is.

This book’s conclusions about generational differences are based on twenty-four datasets, some of which go back to the 1940s. They assess children, adolescents, and adults and include a staggering total of 39 million people (see Figure 1.6), considerably more than the combined population of the ten largest cities in the U.S. This is a significant upgrade from my previous book, iGen, which relied on four datasets including approximately 11 million people. These datasets allow us to hear each generation’s story through the voices of its members. That fulfills the primary goal of this book: To separate the myths from the realities of generational differences so we can understand each other better.

even if you don’t feel like a Millennial, if you were born between 1980 and 1994, you are one. It’s true that these birth-year cutoffs are somewhat arbitrary—if you were born between, say, 1978 and 1982, you could argue that you are either a Gen X’er or a Millennial and have a point. In fact, some people born in this span have taken to calling themselves Xennials, a combination of Gen X and Millennials. Even though the cutoffs aren’t exact, it is clear that people have different experiences depending on the year they were born; it’s just a question of where you draw the line.

Like all group differences, generational differences are based on averages. For example, the average Gen Z teen spends more time online than the average Millennial teen did in 2005. Of course, some Gen Z teens spend little time online, and some Millennial teens spent a lot of time—there is considerable overlap between the two groups.

The NAXALT fallacy is the mistaken belief that because someone in the group lies at the extreme, the average does not exist.

Someone who assumes every Millennial they meet got married in their 30s, is less religious, and is highly self-confident is stereotyping, because they are assuming every individual fits the average. However, such stereotyping is an error in interpretation, and not in the studies themselves.

it’s not a valid criticism of generational studies to say that they “overgeneralize.” If a study finds, say, that Gen X’ers are more materialistic on average, that doesn’t mean all Gen X’ers are highly materialistic. Someone who assumes so is overgeneralizing, but the study itself is not.

generational change is not just about individual people changing; it’s about cultural norms shifting.

cutoff have experienced essentially the same culture. But the line has to be drawn somewhere. It’s also true that generations are sometimes too broad: those born ten years apart but within the same generation have experienced a different culture. Still, too many micro-generations would be confusing and would make it harder to discern broad generational trends. I’ve tried to take a compromise position: Although the chapters are organized by generations, most of the graphs in this book are line graphs showing all of the years instead of bar graphs averaging everyone in the generation together—the transitions between generations and within generations also tell important stories.

generations are turning over faster because the pace of technological change has sped up.

we can compare different generations at the same age, so age can’t be the cause of any differences. If more Gen Z young adults are depressed than older Gen X adults in any given year, that could be due to either age or generation. But if the number of 18- to 25-year-olds who are depressed has increased over the years, that’s not due to age—it means something is different for this generation of young adults.

With technology making life progressively less physically taxing for each generation, each generation is softer than the one before it. Just because something has been said before doesn’t make it wrong, especially if the change keeps going in the same direction.

the Silent generation ushered in some of the most impactful social changes in American history.

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.

Nearly all Silents were born too late to serve in World War II, creating a dividing line in generational experience.

“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.” Silents have seen things they never would have dreamed of when they were young, and their life trajectory from tradition to change reflects the transformation of American society since their midcentury youth.

In the popular imagination, the countercultural shift from 1963 to 1970 was driven by Boomers. In fact, most of it was led by Silents.

Gradually, an emphasis on individual rights began to replace the old system of social rules organized around race, gender, and sexual orientation. In the early 1960s, Blacks and Whites were segregated in the South, women were actively discriminated against in professions such as law, medicine, and engineering, and people could be arrested for being gay. By 1970, all of these had begun to change, eventually resulting in the enshrining of one of the most deeply held beliefs of our current society: that people should be treated equally. That is also, not coincidentally, one of the core beliefs of an individualistic culture.

The case was eventually heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 as Loving v. Virginia. The court ruled that laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and that “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.” The couple always saw the issue as very straightforward. “Tell the Court I love my wife and it is just not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia,” Richard Loving wrote to the ACLU lawyers.

Author Erica Jong (b. 1942) calls Silents the “whiplash generation.” “Caught between our mothers (who stayed home) and the next generation (who took the right to achieve for granted), we suffered all the transitions of women’s history inside our skulls,” she wrote in 1994. “Whatever we did felt wrong. And whatever we did was fiercely criticized.”

Combining all of the survey data 1972–2021, Silents were twice as likely as those in the Greatest generation (born 1901–1924) to believe that traditional gender roles were not necessarily better, a huge shift in just one generation (see Figure 2.4

The New Woman of the 1930s and 1940s was “soaring free,” Friedan writes, but by the late 1940s she “hesitates in midflight, shivers in all that blue sunlight and rushes back to the cozy walls of home.” Friedan was onto something: Americans married younger in the 1950s than in the 1930s, with the result that Silents married younger than any other generation born in the 20th century.

Benita Eisler found that the ethos of the 1950s and 1960s prized “doing it yourself” when it came to child rearing, without the expectation of the intergenerational and paid help common in families just a few decades before. It was perhaps a precursor of the increasing individualism that would come later, but with the Silent twist that it was individualism of a nuclear family. “Never before had hundreds of thousands of college-educated women, wives of the professional middle classes, refused to share even the most menial duties of childcare with paid help,” she writes.

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.

The early marriages and baby boom of Silents’ young adulthoods may be one reason why they are seen as a conformist generation, as silent and undisruptive as their name. Yet Silents also led the civil rights, feminist, and early LGBT rights movements. Which characterization is true? Both. Silents are like the two-faced Roman god Janus, for whom January is named, who looks toward both the past and the future: They lived their young adulthood in a more collectivistic, family-oriented time in American history, yet also helped give birth to the more individualistic, equality-focused country it would become.

Only Silents identifying as Black, Hispanic, or another race/ethnicity followed the traditional path of increasing in conservativism as they got older; White Silents were already conservative even in middle adulthood.

Under pressure from the Boomer generation, the U.S. adopted an all-volunteer military by the 1970s. The centering of choice weaves through nearly every aspect of the Boomer experience, from the essential to the trivial.

American culture began the 1960s as a collectivistic culture (focused on social rules and group harmony) and ended it as an individualistic one (focused on the needs of the self and thus often rejecting traditional rules). Each subsequent decade continued the trend of more individualism. Thus, in the sibling-like squabble of the generations, Gen X’ers and Millennials are somewhat justified in pointing at the Boomers and bellowing, “But they started it!” (Two caveats bear repeating: Neither individualism nor collectivism is all good or all bad—each has its trade-offs—and these two cultural systems do not neatly map onto liberal or conservative political ideologies.)

In the 1880s, almost half of boys were given one of just ten names, and nearly 1 out of 4 girls received one of the ten most popular names. Names were a way to fit in. That was still true in 1946, when the first Boomers were born—especially for girls, who were actually more likely to receive a common name in the 1940s than in the 1800s. Then the change begins: Common names became less and less popular, falling precipitously as the decades went on (see Figure 3.4). Names became a way to stand out. By the time Boomers were naming their Millennial children in the 1980s, only 1 out of 5 received one of the ten most common names. Common names faded from there, with Gen X and Millennial parents choosing progressively fewer common names in the 21st century. Since 2010, only 1 out of 14 received one of the ten most popular names.

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.

A generational shift around homosexuality was also evident (see Figure 3.5), foreshadowing the greater acceptance of LGBT people to come in later decades. The idea that people love who they love was just beginning to take root, with Boomers nearly twice as likely as Silents to believe that homosexuality was “not wrong at all” in the 1970s, though that view was still in the minority.

From the vantage point of the 2020s, it is difficult to fathom just how unacceptable being unmarried and pregnant once was. Well into the 1960s, when a girl got “in trouble,” a shotgun marriage usually followed. When that wasn’t an option, some girls and young women were sent to brutal maternity homes away from their families. One woman referred to the place where she was sent as a “shame-filled prison.” Nearly all gave up their children for adoption, many under duress. Even the language was punitive: Babies born to unmarried mothers were called illegitimate. Or, as one unmarried mother was told, “our children would be called bastards on the playground.” By the late 1970s, maternity homes closed as abortion was legalized and single mothers were no longer shunned.

Contrary to ideas of rampant 1960s-style free love, most Boomers married at ages that would now be considered shockingly young: In 1970, the average woman getting married for the first time was not yet 21, and in 1980 she was not yet 22 (see Figure 2.5 in the last chapter).

Boomers continued the upward trend in divorce that Silents started in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the divorce rate began to decline in 1981, it stayed at historically high levels long enough to produce a significant generational shift in divorce. Plus, fewer Boomers remarried than Silents. As a result, in the 2020s, more than twice as many Boomers are divorced than Silents were at the same age in the 1990s and 2000s (see Figure 3.8).

and sedatives like quaalude. In less than a decade from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, drugs went from counterculture to mainstream. By the 1970s, drug use was no longer a way to rebel—it was a way to fit in, and it had spread widely. As writer Candi Strecker observed, “The Seventies fulfillment of the Sixties revolution was unattractive blue-collar teens puking Quaaludes at a Grand Funk Railroad concert.”

Boomers stand out in the variety and intensity of their substance use, which was unprecedented at the time—and hasn’t been equaled by high school students since (see Figure 3.11). The Gen X’ers who followed might have been turned off by the downsides of their older siblings’ or parents’ drug use, finding different outlets for their individualism (more on that in the next chapter).

This is the oft-repeated story of race in America: During the Boomers’ lifetimes, mandated segregation was outlawed, voting rights for Black people in the South improved, and racial discrimination was ruled illegal and became much less socially accepted. Yet in other ways, things are much the same. As President Obama said at the event marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 voting rights march in Selma, “Our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer.”