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 amendment on sex discrimination passed, and so did the bill as a whole, to the elation of both civil rights activists and feminists. As a result, Boomers were the first American generation to spend their entire adult lives in a country where job discrimination based on sex, race, and religion was against the law.

The change was sweeping. In the 1970s, it was still unusual—or unheard-of—for women to be TV reporters, judges, astronauts, soldiers, pastors, or police officers. By the 1980s, it was common; by the 1990s it was accepted (though sometimes grudgingly); and by the 2000s it was nearly taken for granted. This was the trajectory of Boomer women as they moved through adulthood, with the country changing along with them.

Change takes time to proliferate—it’s a mistaken perception that most Americans embraced feminism in the 1970s and then rejected it in the 1980s. If anything, it was the other way around.

In a 2018 poll, Millennials and Gen Z were more likely than Gen X’ers, Boomers, or Silents to say that sexual jokes and comments were harassment. There was also a generational divide in reporting sexual harassment: 53% of older women who experienced harassment never reported it, compared to 44% of younger women.

Given the flower-child, antiwar, antiestablishment reputation of the Boomers during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, you’d expect Boomers to be liberal Democrats. And in the 1970s, they were—nearly 7 out of 10 identified as Democrats in the early 1970s, pinning their green McGovern ’72 buttons with the peace doves to their jean jackets. A full 2 out of 3 were Democrats in the late 1970s during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. And then—just like that—the Boomers went from hippies to yuppies in the 1980s. The diminutive form of the acronym for Young Urban Professionals, yuppies were the educated Boomers of the 1980s, moving up the ranks at law firms and advertising agencies. They were the real-life counterparts of Michael and Hope and Elliot and Nancy in thirtysomething, successful careerists trading banter and raising families; they were David and Maddie in Moonlighting, flirting with each other while wearing sleek suits and driving around Los Angeles in a Beemer.

As people grow older, they tend to become less liberal and more conservative, and with most liberals Democrats and most conservatives Republicans, that means Republicans tend to tilt older. This is an age effect, not a generational one; anyone who predicts the demise of the Republican Party on the basis of the age of its adherents is forgetting that some liberals in their 20s will become conservatives by their 50s.

Boomers didn’t create the situation that led to the rise in income inequality—at the time, the country was led by Greatests and Silents, with Boomers too young to be in power. Boomers could have done more to combat income inequality once they did rise to political power in the 1990s and 2000s, but, arguably, the train had already left the station.

challenges the generational narrative of the past few years pitting rich Boomers against poor Millennials—the pervasive idea that Boomers climbed the ladder to success and then pulled it up once they got there, leaving younger generations with scraps. The truth is many Boomers never made it up the ladder to begin with. Most Boomers are not the perpetuators of this system—instead, they were its first casualties.

Instead of Boomers pulling the ladder up after them, leaving Millennials fighting for scraps, a large portion of Boomers never climbed the ladder in the first place. Some are paying with their mental health and, eventually, their lives.

For Boomers, ages 37 to 55, 9/11 was an ominous sign that their generation’s leadership years were going to be more challenging than they thought. For Gen X, ages 22 to 36, the event cast a pall over what was supposed to be a joyful and ambitious time of building careers and families. For Millennials, ages 7 to 21, 9/11 felt like the end of childhood, or at least the beginning of a less buoyant one, and a generational “where were you when it happened” touchstone. There was one positive aftereffect: Perhaps due to a feeling of unity against a common enemy, people were nicer to each other in public places in the months after 9/11; Americans had seemingly collectively decided not to sweat the small stuff.

The worrying that Boomers did in the 1980s about whether they had “sold out”? Gen X didn’t get it then, and often doesn’t get it now. With the idealism of the 1960s ground to dust by the time they came along, there was nothing to sell out from. To all but a fringe segment of Gen X, getting a good job and making money wasn’t selling out—it was just what everyone wanted to do. Gen X knew that from the jump, and American culture hasn’t returned to the abstract idealism of the ’60s in the six decades since.

They were also the first generation to enter young adulthood in the age of the internet and the last to experience an analog childhood, with all of the cassette tapes, playing outside, paper books, and boredom that implies.

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.

Computers and email cleaved Gen X from Boomers, texting Millennials from Gen X, and TikTok Gen Z from Millennials. 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.

Gen X kids watched what was on TV because it was there. Why would a 10-year-old watch Battle of the Network Stars if YouTube was available? They wouldn’t, but Gen X kids had nothing else to watch, so Battle of the Network Stars it was. The result was a more unified pop culture experience than has existed since, and a trove of pop culture touchstones experienced by most Gen X’ers.

Boomers’ defining moment was the JFK assassination, for Gen X’ers “There is only one question,” insists X’er Susan Gregory Thomas: “When did your parents get divorced?”

Gen X was the first generation where having divorced parents was considered normal, the first generation where a sizable minority would experience Dad (or Mom) moving out.

The number of working mothers began increasing as far back as we have reliable data—1948—and was already over 50% by 1972, when nearly all school-age children were still Boomers (see Figure 4.2). So a good number of Boomer schoolchildren—somewhere between 30% and 60%—also had working moms. Latchkey kids were not a new thing when Gen X came along.

married women with children were in fact more likely to work for pay when Millennials were children compared with when Gen X’ers were children—the percentage of married mothers with children under 6 who were in the workforce surged past 50% in 1984, just as preschool children were more likely to be Millennials than Gen X’ers. The increase in working mothers was a fairly linear trend, not something that only impacted Gen X’ers.

The biggest change was in the consistency of mothers’ paid work: While most Boomers’ mothers worked some of the time or not at all, most later Gen X’ers and Millennials’ mothers worked most of the time. High school seniors saying their mothers had never worked reached all-time lows with Millennials—not Gen

Organized after-school programs didn’t become widespread until the 1990s. Thus, in the intervening time when more Silent and Boomer women were working but there was little reliable care for school kids, there were more latchkey kids. Once the Millennials came along, two-income families became more acknowledged and accepted, and more childcare became available.

As the birth rate declined and families grew smaller, parents had fewer children and protected them more carefully. That meant not leaving them at home alone. Millennial children left to their own devices began to be stigmatized as “unsupervised,” with stories of kidnapped children filling the news even though kidnappings were no more common than they had been during Gen X’s childhood. In addition, it was more expected that teens would go to college, slowing down the life trajectory. Ten-year-olds were a dozen or more years away from adult responsibilities, not eight years, so had more time to develop independence.

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.

Of course, even as they glorify their independent childhoods, many Gen X’ers are also now the parents who protect—and sometimes overprotect—their kids.

1. Gen X married later than any previous generation in American history.

2. The lower age for first sex (a fast-life indicator) and the higher age for first marriage (a slow-life indicator) lengthened the gap between the two.

Gen X “lost their childhood innocence” by having sex sooner, but embraced adult commitments by getting married later. But that trend wouldn’t last forever: After teens transitioned to Millennials, the age for having sex started to rise, as did the age for marriage and children, pushing the life trajectory markers back into sync so all of them were slowing down. In sum, Gen X’ers had the shortest childhood and the longest adolescence of any generation born in the 20th century.

3. Having children started to become uncoupled from being married. In

The divorce rate fell after the 1980s, with the divorce rate in 2019 about half of that in 1981—partially because Gen X’ers married later, and those who marry later are less likely to divorce. Divorce is more common than it was in the early 20th century, when it was taboo, but considerably rarer than when Gen X’ers were becoming the children of divorce themselves. Divorce fell especially steeply among those with a college education:

it’s pretty stunning that 1 out of 3 women in a so-called slacker generation born in the zero-population-growth 1970s has three or more kids. Raised in a time when kids were out of style, Gen X brought them back in.

For Gen X, though, individualism wasn’t a journey—they were born at the destination. They didn’t need a map, because the culture of the self is their hometown. They didn’t need to explore the territory of the self in a group, because they were already there. Since they were small children, Gen X learned from their Silent and Boomer parents that the self came first. Gen X’ers didn’t have to march in a protest or attend a group session to realize that their own needs and desires were paramount. They just knew it. This is one of the key differences between Boomers and Gen X: Gen X’ers came of age after the culture had decided to leave behind the old, collectivistic rules and embrace individualism. The first Gen X’ers didn’t turn 10 until 1975, when American culture had already arrived at a loud, bell-bottom-wearing, pot-smoking rejection of the collectivistic culture of just a dozen years prior. For Gen X’ers, individualism is taken for granted: Of course the needs of the self come first. Duh.

Gen X’ers were actually more confident and had higher expectations for themselves than Boomers did at the same age. They were the first generation to take it for granted that feeling good about yourself was necessary. And despite Gen X’ers’ frequent astonishment at Millennials’ brazen optimism, their own generation also fully embraced self-focus and high expectations.

Psychologists group life goals into two primary categories: intrinsic (meaning, ideas, helping others) and extrinsic (money, fame, image). The shift away from the ephemeral and toward the material started almost as soon as the 1970s began: College students became much less likely to say that “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” was important, and much more likely to say that “becoming very well-off financially” was important (see Figure 4.11). This was a trend begun by late Boomers and cemented by Gen X; like many trends, it built over more than one generation. By the late 1970s, students rated becoming well-off as more important than developing a life philosophy, and by the time first-year college students were Gen X’ers in the 1980s, nearly 3 out of 4 said that being well-off was important. In the words of Gen X’s favorite Boomer (Madonna, b. 1958), they were material girls living in a material world. (“ ’Cause the boy with the cold hard cash / Is always Mister Right.”) This shift was only the beginning: Millennials and Gen Z college students have continued to be motivated less by intrinsic values and more by extrinsic values than Boomers were at the same age. In the 2019 American Freshman Survey of incoming college students, a record 84.3%, said that becoming very well-off financially was important. Gen X cemented a trend that has only grown more pronounced.

the idealistic ’60s were dead and the materialistic ’80s had arrived.

If it takes more money to be middle-class, and college is the way to do that, a shift toward extrinsic values makes sense. It doesn’t quite explain why Gen X high school students were also more interested in vacation homes and boats, suggesting some 1980s-style outsized materialism was still at work. Overall, though, Gen X was in part responding to the marketplace.

Yet it’s clear from these statistics that Black Gen X’ers were the most impacted by the crime wave of the ’80s and early ’90s, a time that would leave lasting scars on the country in general and the Black community in particular. Gen X filmmaker John Singleton (b. 1968) captured this reality with his semi-autobiographical movie Boyz in the Hood in 1991, a tragic drama of young men trying to make their way amid gang violence in South Los Angeles.

over the course of just a few years in the mid-1990s, Gen X’s public image went from unemployed slacker to internet millionaire. Neither likeness was entirely accurate, of course, but the shift in the stereotype reflects actual changes in young adults’ incomes.

There is a possible alternative explanation for the rise in suicides, however: the greater availability of inexpensive guns in the early 1990s. In fact, the increase in suicide deaths among teens was entirely due to suicides involving guns; non-firearm suicides actually went down in the early 1990s. Most suicide attempts without guns don’t lead to death, but those involving guns do. So the rise in suicides for Gen X teens might have had more to do with the preponderance of cheap guns than with mental health. Still, the Gen X teen years were not easy ones, especially in the early 1990s. In the annual surveys of 12th graders, 18% of Gen X teens said they were unhappy in 1992 and 1993, compared to 12% of Boomer teens in 1978.

Overall, Gen X’ers’ mental health is only a little better than Boomers’, but it also isn’t worse. So despite the dire predictions that Gen X would be Prozac Nation, they weren’t—at least not any more than the Boomers were. Maybe they wore black because it was slimming.

All in all, the generations born since the 1960s are markedly less likely to trust other people. Social relationships, whether with friends, family, or coworkers, flow best when they are based on mutual trust. The social fabric breaks down when people can’t trust each other. Distrust creates a society in which everyone is a potential foe. In addition, trust is the cornerstone of the economy. Economic transactions grind to a halt without trust. One economist offers the example of wholesale diamond traders, who give jewelers bags of uncut diamonds to examine. If the trader doesn’t trust the jeweler, the transaction either can’t go ahead or is slowed down considerably by putting safeguards against theft in place.

When the economic system seems rigged, and some people get much more than others, trust erodes. Income inequality has many roots, but one of them is a capitalistic flavor of individualism that tilts tax and government policy toward an “everyone for themselves” attitude. Lack of trust can also come from the move away from social rules that stems from individualism; although individualism teaches respect for others’ differences, it can also promote a “me first” mentality that disregards others’ preferences and can lead to distrust.

Lack of trust allowed conspiracy theories to spread, including rumors of debunked treatments for COVID.

Individualism is also at the core of the resistance to pandemic requirements such as those for mask-wearing: If people think of themselves solely as individuals, no one should be able to tell them what to do. Cultural individualists are not used to thinking about the effect on the collective—that, for example, masks work best if everyone uses them. Mask mandates were a difficult sell in a culture that had embraced full-throated individualism for five decades. Pandemic mandates that shutter businesses and schools have a much bigger economic and psychological impact; resisting those mandates involves many factors beyond individualism. In comparison, mask-wearing is a relatively small burden, making it a particularly strong example of extreme individualism.

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.

Gen X’ers were the first U.S. generation to fully experience a country changed by immigrants from around the world. The Gen X children of immigrants bonded over their common childhood experiences in college dorms and shared their stories with their classmates, some of whom had never heard of a quinceañera, a sari, a hijab, or Chinese New Year. American cuisine, long stuck in a quagmire of hamburgers, casseroles, and Jell-O salads, came to include tacos, sushi, and dim sum even in the middle of the country. My father’s hometown of Willmar, Minnesota, once had restaurants no more adventurous than a Perkins; today residents can dine on Mexican cuisine at Azteca or sample Somali food at the Somali Star.

There is one political and social cause Gen X was passionate about even when they were young: the environment. Earth Day, a holiday inaugurated in 1970, had been languishing for twenty years when Gen X’ers and other organizers revived it for its twentieth anniversary in 1990. That same year, the National Environmental Education Act created programs for students to learn about environmental issues and consider pursuing careers in the area.

Although same-sex marriage will likely have a larger impact on the lives of Millennials and Gen Z, Gen X’ers were at the forefront of the legal and political fight to get it legalized—and witnessed firsthand the entire arc of attitudes toward LGBT people, from disdain (if not violence) to acceptance to celebration.

Beliefs around homosexual sex and marriage show a larger generational difference than any other attitude. From those born at the beginning of the 20th century to the end of it, the number who approved of homosexuality went from nearly zero to more than 3 in 4, increasing

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.

Of course, not all Gen X’ers have the same views, nor do all Millennials or Gen Z’ers, but the free speech wars have a distinct generational bent, and it’s often Gen X vs. Millennials.