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

45% more Millennials than Boomers have had 20 or more sexual partners at equivalent ages (see Figure 5.38). So it’s not just income that is increasingly unequal, but sexual activity (at least in terms of partners).

whether married or not, Millennials are having sex less often than Gen X’ers and Boomers did. Why the widespread sex drought? As we saw earlier, fewer Millennials have children, so parental exhaustion or tiny hands knocking at the master bedroom door aren’t the issue—these interruptions should be less common. Financial strain is unlikely to be the deflating factor, given Millennials’ stellar economic performance; in addition, the decline in sex accelerated during good economic times.

Modern technology means there is simply more to do at home at 10 p.m. than there once was, whether that’s scrolling through Instagram or binge-watching Netflix. And what if you’re in the mood, but your partner is engrossed in a video game or can’t put down their phone? Psychologists coined the neologism phubbing to describe the experience of being snubbed by someone who can’t look away from their phone. The first studies of phubbing examined married couples. Not surprisingly, people who said their partners phubbed them were less satisfied with their relationships—perhaps not the best situation for having frequent sex.

Perhaps Millennials favor better sex over more sex. That could certainly apply to both women and men, but it might be a more common desire among women. If so, Millennial women might be speaking up more about what they prefer—perhaps fewer quickies and less frequent but more satisfying sex. Overall, the sex drought is a bit of a mystery, though the available evidence points to technology and the slow life explaining at least part of the decline.

There is one type of sex that has become more common: having sex with a partner of the same gender. While only 1 in 20 Boomers had had at least one same-sex partner by their late 20s to mid-30s, 1 in 5 Millennial women and 1 in 8 Millennial men did (see Figure 5.40).

Identifying as LGBT—which is distinct from sexual behavior—also varies by generation. In a 2021 Gallup poll, 1 in 11 Millennials identified as LGBT, compared to 1 in 26 Gen X’ers and 1 in 50 Boomers. About half of LGBT Millennials—1 in 20 of the generation overall—identify as bisexual. With the stigma around same-sex relationships lifting, more Millennials are living as members of the LGBT community, and more are having lesbian and gay sex. (There’s more on trends in LGBT identity in the Gen Z chapter).

Religion, by definition, is about believing in things that go beyond the self, and is usually practiced in groups of people who are expected to follow certain rules. Collectivistic cultures tend to be religious cultures, and individualistic cultures tend to be less religious. Growing up slowly is also an uncomfortable fit for religious tenets, which often encourage sexual abstinence until marriage. When the norm is to marry in one’s late 20s or early 30s, fifteen to twenty years after puberty, no hanky-panky until marriage becomes difficult to pull off.

The next theory posited that Millennials would come back to religion when they settled into their 20s and 30s. After all, that was the life stage when people tend to settle down, have children, and start going to religious services with their families. But not Millennials: Affiliating with any religion and ever attending religious services were both at all-time lows among 26- to 40-year-olds (nearly all Millennials) in recent years (see Figure 5.42). Millennials have not come back to religion even as they settled into their family-building years.

2020, nearly as many Millennials were religiously unaffiliated as were Christian (see Figure 5.43). That’s in contrast to Boomers, where nearly three times more were Christian than unaffiliated. That’s an enormous generational difference.

Black Millennials have also moved away from attending religious services (see Figure 5.44). Black Millennials’ attendance still runs ahead of White Millennials’, but it’s heading in the same direction: down.

The numbers of 26- to 40-year-olds who ever pray, who believe in God, and who believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God have all gone down. Overall, Millennials are less religious, in both public and private ways, than previous generations at the same age, and less religious than older generations when compared during one recent year, 2018 (see Figure 5.46). What’s striking in the 2018 data is the gulf between Gen X’ers and Millennials: Gen X’ers are only a little different from Boomers and Silents in their religious commitment, but there’s a pronounced break between Gen X’ers and Millennials. Even as young adults in their family-building years, a time when previous generations returned to religion, Millennials have not done so, and Gen Z is following their lead.

Millennials are not replacing religion with spirituality; they are both less religious and less spiritual.

Although religiosity is declining, it’s important to remember that the majority of Millennials still believe in God, still pray sometimes, and still attend religious services at least once a year. But there is a growing minority of those who don’t and are thus almost completely secular in their outlook. With many Millennials entering their 40s in the 2020s, that is unlikely to change. Millennials are the least religious generation of younger adults in American history—at least as far back as we have statistics, and until Gen Z possibly eclipses them.

For many Millennials, many religions’ nonacceptance of LGBT people was a breaking point. In a 2012 survey of 18- to 24-year-olds—Millennials all—2 out of 3 said they thought Christianity was antigay. Nearly as many believed it was “judgmental” and “hypocritical.” That view continued into adulthood; in a 2019 study, 6 out of 10 Millennials said religious people were less tolerant than others.

In 2020, Millennials were more likely to be liberal Democrats than older generations; excluding Independents, 6 out of 10 identified as Democrats, compared to 5 out of 10 Boomers. However, that means that among those who affiliate with a party, 4 out of 10 Millennials are Republicans—a fairly high number considering this generation is often stereotyped as uniformly Democrat. Millennials were not fans of Trump as much as older generations, though: While nearly all Silents, Boomers, and Gen X’ers who considered themselves Republicans voted for Trump, noticeably fewer Millennial Republicans did (see Figure 5.50).

Since 2017, more Millennials and Gen Z’ers have turned hard left, and more Silents, Boomers, and Gen X’ers have turned hard right, with each progressively older generation turning a little harder right (see Figure 5.53). The numbers of extreme liberals in the younger generations and extreme conservatives in the older generations both doubled since 2017, creating a yawning gulf. These generation gaps play out in the public arena in political debates pitting liberal Millennials against Boomer elders. They have also played out within families, with Millennials increasingly divided from their Boomer parents. Many noticed that conversations around the Thanksgiving dinner table started to get more fraught after the 2016 election. By 2020 and 2021, with pandemic precautions politicized, families often couldn’t agree on ground rules for gathering at all. Time interviewed Boomer Lynette Villano, a longtime Republican and Trump supporter, who was invited to a Thanksgiving family dinner in 2018 and then uninvited when other family members said they didn’t want her there. She is now estranged from two of her children and her sister.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans with a college education were more likely to be Republican, and those without a college education were more likely to be Democrats. For a period in the 1990s and 2000s, party affiliation and education weren’t connected. Then, around 2015, just as many Millennials were forming their political identities during young adulthood, the association between politics and education suddenly flipped: Those without a four-year college education became steadily more likely to identify as Republicans, and those with a four-year college education became steadily less likely (see Figure 5.54). In 2020, the split in political party affiliation by education was the largest among Millennials: Those without a college degree were 15 percentage points more likely to be Republican than those without, compared to a 9-point spread among Gen X’ers. So not only are generations increasingly polarized in their politics, but politics are increasingly polarized by education within each generation.

Millennials’ views are, overall, a reflection of their individualistic ethos: They want people to be able to do what they want to do. That includes stances on issues associated with liberals (such as legal abortion and eliminating the death penalty) as well as those associated with conservatives (disapproving of more gun control; see Figure 5.55). Thus Millennials’ views line up the most with Libertarians, the political party that believes in less regulation and in government staying out of people’s lives.

But after the mid-2010s, something shifted among Whites on the left (see the gray line in Figure 5.59). By 2021, 82% of White Democrats thought that discrimination was the main reason for racial disparities in jobs, income, and housing—almost identical to the 83% of Blacks (not shown) who thought so. In contrast, the number of White Republicans who thought discrimination was the primary reason for racial disparities declined during the 1990s and stayed low through 2021, opening up a yawning gap in views around race between White Democrats and Republicans. Whites’ views of racial discrimination once differed little by political party, but the 2010s polarized Whites by party on racial issues.

By 2020, something historically unprecedented occurred: On several measures, White Democrats were just as racially liberal as Black Democrats. The percentage of White Democrats who agreed that “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Black people to work their way out of the lower class” rose from 50% to 78% over eight years. By 2020, White Democrats were just as likely as Black Democrats to agree (see Figure 5.60).

The shift toward racially progressive views appeared across all generations, but was noticeably larger among Millennials and Gen Z’ers. This generation gap was new. In 2012 and 2014, White Democrats’ views on racial equality were fairly similar regardless of generation. By 2018, Millennials had pulled away. By 2020, there was a considerable gap between White Millennials and their Boomer parents, and especially with their Silent grandparents—even when they were all Democrats (see Figure 5.62). Thus the racial reckoning was a period effect, impacting all generations, but was also a generational effect, with younger generations changing more.

beginning in 2016, White liberals—particularly Millennials and Gen Z’ers—began to say that their feelings were warmer toward Blacks than toward Whites, a reversal of a result found since the 1970s. By 2020, Millennial and Gen Z White liberals rated their feelings toward Blacks 16 degrees warmer than their feelings toward their own racial group (shown by the positive numbers in Figure 5.64). As for Black Americans (not shown), their feelings stayed about the same toward their own racial group and cooled somewhat toward Whites, moving from a comfortable 75 degrees in 2008 to a chillier (though still temperate) 62 degrees in 2020. Thus White liberals felt warmer toward Blacks, but Blacks felt cooler toward Whites.

Just as Millennials became the entirety of 26- to 34-year-olds in the mid-2010s, rates of depression in this age group started to soar—even as depression rates declined or stayed relatively steady among older age groups (see Figure 5.69). The ebullient happiness of Millennial adolescents was beginning to shift into depression among Millennial adults. The dream was beginning to fall apart.

Millennials were unhappy because their reality couldn’t possibly meet their expectations (which he illustrated with a lavender-maned unicorn regurgitating a rainbow). In 2020, Anne Helen Petersen (b. 1981) declared that Millennials were the “Burnout Generation.” Millennials want jobs that are both solid enough to satisfy their parents and cool enough to impress their friends, she noted. “So what happens when millennials… start ‘adulting’—but it doesn’t feel at all like the dream that had been promised?” she asked. Jill Filipovic (b. 1983) agrees. “There is a profound gap between the expectations we were raised to hold and the reality we now experience,” she writes. “Growing up, we believed that if we followed the rules and did the right things… we would be rewarded and life would be, if not amazing, at least good, stable, and predictable. And well, it wasn’t.”

Before 2010, social media was mostly for posting pictures for friends. Then Facebook introduced the “like” button and Twitter premiered the “retweet” button, enabling social media companies to figure out what kept people clicking. The answer was often things that provoked angry reactions. “Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,” Facebook researchers noted in internal memos. The online outrage machine was born.

seemingly everything became political in the U.S. around 2014–2015—even before Trump. That was stressful for everyone, but it may have been more stressful for Millennials than for older generations.

In the individualistic culture Millennials have known all of their lives, individual freedom is valued over the tight social bonds of institutions like marriage and religion. Although individualism has many upsides, its risks include isolation and loneliness and their bedfellows unhappiness and depression. The lone self is a weak foundation for robust mental health; humans need social relationships to be happy and fulfilled in life. That is especially true as people age past young adulthood. This might be why Millennials were happier as teens but not as adults—individualism and freedom feel good when you are young but empty when you are older.

Still, it’s worth asking whether leaving behind institutions that build social connections is the best choice for personal happiness—not just for Millennials but for everyone.

In 2019, Millennials spent less time socializing with other people in person than Gen X’ers did at the same age—about 10 minutes a day less on average (see Figure 5.79). That adds up to an hour and 10 minutes a week, five hours a month, and 61 hours a year less time spent socializing. And that was before the pandemic—by 2021, the lost socializing time was closer to 90 hours a year. Socializing face-to-face is good for mental health.

By 2012, half of Americans owned a smartphone, the fastest adoption of any technology in human history. This swift pace of technological change created a sharp break between those born in the first and second half of the 1990s.

The youngest Gen Z’ers, born in 2012, were 7 or 8 years old when the COVID-19 pandemic began to impact day-to-day life in the U.S. in March 2020, making them the last birth cohort who will remember a world without COVID. Given the impact of the pandemic, that suggests 2012 is probably the right end point for the generation. In iGen, my 2017 book on Gen Z, I suggested the generation began with those born in 1995. A few years later, the Pew Research Center said they considered Gen Z to begin with those born in 1997. I’ve stuck with 1995 based on the sudden shifts that began to appear among teens around 2011–2013.

A recent analysis of 70 million words from online and in-person sources compared the language used by 16- to 25-year-olds to that used by older people. Gen Z was less likely to use the words class, status, nation, religious, or spiritual and more likely to use the words stressful, relatable, gender identity, free, true, honest, fake, cancel, ghost, block, fam, and squad. This is Gen Z in a nutshell: concerned with authenticity, confronting free speech issues, pushing the norms of gender, and struggling with mental health.

Today’s Gen Z teens not only support transgender rights, but arrive home from school excited when one of their friends comes out as trans.

In late 2020 and early 2021, Gen Z was the only generation in which a majority believed there are more than two genders. As recently as the first half of 2020, this was a minority opinion even among Gen Z’ers—a remarkable amount of change over just six months (see Figure 6.1). In contrast, there was only a small uptick in this belief among older generations.

These new attitudes around gender are the logical conclusion of rising individualism in at least two different ways. First, Gen Z’s gender fluidity takes previous decades’ “different is good” and “be who you are” attitudes around race and LGB identification and applies them to gender identity. If people are all unique individuals, then it follows that gender identity is an individual choice—and perhaps people should not be restricted to just two choices. Second, Gen Z’s attitudes put a new twist on the individualism of the post-1960s gender equality revolution, which argued that being male or female should not restrict opportunities or life choices (for example, men should be able to stay home with the kids, and women should be able to be lawyers and doctors). After all, we should treat each person as an individual, not as a member of a gender group that must automatically behave a certain way. Gen Z accepts this and raises the individualistic bar: People should be able to decide which gender group they identify with—or even reject the notion of a gender binary entirely.

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.

There’s another key difference among the generations when it comes to transgender or nonbinary identity. Most Boomer and Gen X people who identify as transgender were assigned male at birth, meaning they were considered male when they were younger and then identified as female. Among Gen Z, however, most transgender people were instead assigned female at birth (see Figure 6.3).

as 18- to 26-year-olds shifted from Millennials to Gen Z, the number who identified as trans skyrocketed. Thus the population of transgender young adults grew from about 220,000 in 2014 to about 900,000 in 2021, an increase of 680,000 people. In seven years, the number of young adults identifying as transgender increased by the size of the population of Las Vegas. This is a true generational shift, and not just about being young.

Some have argued that the increasing societal acceptance of transgender identities has allowed more people to come out as transgender. If growing acceptance were the only factor, though, the number of transgender people should have increased among older generations as well—but it didn’t.

Trans identification increased nearly as much in 2014–2021 among young adults in red states like Ohio, Wyoming, and Texas as it did in blue states like California, New York, and Oregon (see Figure 6.8). Rural vs. urban location also didn’t make much difference. In the 2021–2022 Household Pulse Survey, the percentage of trans Gen Z’ers was about the same in rural areas (2.2%) as in urban/suburban areas (1.9%). There was also no difference in the percentage of transgender young adults in liberal big cities (like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco) versus the rest of the country. Thus the rise in trans identification seems to be national rather than regional, killing off yet another theory. Overall, there’s no easy or verifiable answer to why the changes are so sudden and so much larger among young adults compared to older ones, and why the change is the largest among those assigned female at birth. No matter what the cause, it’s clear that the culture around gender has shifted, and Gen Z is at the forefront of that change.

Boomers, Gen X’ers, and Millennials are adapting to these new ideas, but many still stumble over using a plural pronoun for an individual. Younger Gen Z’ers, though, nimbly glide through pronoun forests with ease. What seems like whiplash-speed cultural change to older generations is simply accepted by many Gen Z’ers—for them, ’twas always thus.

In 2021, 16.1% of young adults (1 out of 6) identified as something other than straight, more than twice as many than just seven years before (see Figure 6.9). Identifying as LGB also doubled among prime-age adults (mostly Millennials) over the same time. In contrast, identifying as LGB barely budged among those older than 42 (corresponding to Gen X, Boomers, and Silents in 2021).

Gen Z is having markedly less sex than Gen X’ers and Millennials did as young adults. In the General Social Survey, a remarkable 3 in 10 Gen Z men ages 18 to 25 have not had sex in the last year—twice as many as when Millennials were the youngest adults (see Figure 6.15). For Gen Z women, it’s 1 in 4, up from 1 in 7 among Millennials. This is not due to the COVID-19 pandemic: The number of Gen Z young adults not having sex was about the same in 2018, before the pandemic hit. Maybe you’ve heard of the sex recession? For Gen Z, it’s a sex depression.

Gen Z teens not only wait to get their driver’s license, they wait to take part in every other activity associated with independence and adulthood. As high school seniors (17 or 18 years old), they are less likely to drink alcohol, date, and work for pay than previous generations of teens (see Figure 6.16). They are also less likely to have sex: When Gen X’ers were teens in 1991, 67% had had sex by 12th grade; by 2021, only 47% had.

It’s a clear manifestation of the slow-life strategy that has rolled out over the course of the last five American generations: When technology extends the life span and requires more education to attain economic independence, parents have fewer children and those children grow up more slowly. Because the slow-life strategy is an adaptation to a particular place and time, these trends are not all bad or all good. They are not an indicator of teens being more responsible or less responsible, or more mature or less mature, but simply of teens taking their time to grow up. Many parents are thrilled that teens are now less likely to drink alcohol or have sex, but have also started to worry that teens are not learning how to be independent. Gen Z’ers themselves know they are missing out on some fun, but are also baffled that previous generations did so many adult things while so young. When I told one Gen Z’er that Gen X’ers in the 1990s drank alcohol by the 8th grade, she said, “Old people sometimes scare me.”

For Millennials and especially Gen Z, however, the entire trajectory of life from toddlerhood to full adulthood has slowed. Childhood has extended into the years once reserved for adolescence, adolescence extends into what was once young adulthood, and young adulthood stretches further and further as education lasts longer and having children is delayed later and later.

Gen Z is following the path of the slow-life strategy into young adulthood, postponing marriage and children. The change for those in their early 20s from the Silent generation to Gen Z is enormous: While 7 in 10 women in their early 20s were married in 1960, only 1 in 10 was in 2020. Nearly half of men in their early 20s were married in 1960, but now only 1 in 14 are (see Figure 6.18). There are some early signs that Gen Z might not just postpone marriage and relationships, but not enter them at all.

By 2020, the birth rate for both teens and for women in their early 20s was the lowest it had ever been since records were first kept in 1918—about half of what it was in 1990, when this age group was Gen X’ers. Among teens, the birth rate in 2021 was less than a fourth of what it was in the early 1990s.

By the 2010s, young liberals began to demand the opposite: that speech be regulated. In the 1980s, only 1 out of 4 Gen X entering college students thought extreme speakers should be banned, but by 2019 the majority of Gen Z incoming college students thought so (see Figure 6.21). In addition, 3 out of 4 students in 2019 thought that colleges should restrict speech deemed racist or sexist. As we saw in the Gen X chapter, this has created a widening generation gap around attitudes toward free speech.

tolerance for controversial speech switched its political ideology. Among Silents and Boomers, liberals were slightly more likely than conservatives to support the free speech rights of someone with racist views, but by the Millennial birth years support among liberals began to decline, dipping decisively below conservatives’ support among those born in the 1990s and plummeting among Gen Z liberals (see Figure 6.23). Thus supporting free speech rights, even for someone with racist views, was once more common among liberals, but is now more common among conservatives.