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 fights over free speech on campus and in the larger society often pit Boomers and Gen X’ers on the side of free expression and Gen Z and Millennials on the side of protecting people from hearing views they deem offensive.

It is not a coincidence that much of this discussion centers on safety, a concept that started with a focus on physical safety and has now extended to emotional safety—or even safety from discomfort. The trend has its roots in physical safety for children: The slow-life strategy involves parents having just one or two children and carefully protecting them, which tends to increase interest in child safety. American culture became very interested in safety after 1995, right when the first Gen Z’ers were born. Use of the phrase “stay safe” more than quadrupled in American books between 1995 and 2019, as did the more emotionally focused “safe space” (see Figure 6.25). Concerns around safety proliferated since the 2000s, with safety the stated reason for everything from school policies prohibiting students from carrying over-the-counter drugs such as aspirin to giving 9-year-olds smartphones.

Fewer Gen Z teens get drunk, get into physical fights, or get into car accidents than teens in previous generations. Gen Z also extends the concept of safety beyond preventing physical harm to preventing emotional harm, placing a premium on what they call “emotional safety”—not being upset or offended by words or experiences.

Gen Z is speaking up about their mental health, and they are not shy about it. The less positive news is that they are talking about it more because they are suffering more.

Perhaps the trends are due to Gen Z being more willing to admit to mental health problems on surveys than other generations, even though the surveys are anonymous and confidential. As some have put it, perhaps Gen Z teens “are OK with saying they are not OK,” and the increases are solely the product of less stigma around mental health issues and more comfort with admitting to problems. If so, there would be no changes in behaviors related to mental health, since behaviors can be more objectively measured and do not rely on self-reports of symptoms. However, the changes do extend to behaviors. For example, more teen and preteen girls have been admitted to the emergency room after deliberately harming themselves, with the largest increases among 10- to 14-year-old girls, where rates quadrupled (see Figure 6.36).

The trends in self-harm behaviors and suicide attempts are not reliant on self-reports on surveys, yet the trends are very similar to the increases in reports of symptoms. This strongly suggests that more teens really are suffering.

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.

Then I came across a poll from the Pew Research Center, and things began to fall into place. The poll graphed smartphone ownership in the U.S., which started in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone and crossed 50% at the end of 2012 into the beginning of 2013. This was also around the time that social media use among teens went from optional to virtually mandatory—in 2009, only about half of teens used social media every day, but by 2012, 3 out of 4 did (in the large Monitoring the Future study). Among all the possibilities, the rise of these new technologies seemed the most likely culprit for the rise in teen depression, self-harm, and suicide.

The very large and sudden changes in mental health and behavior between Millennials and Gen Z are likely not a coincidence: They arose from the fastest adoption of any technology in human history. The case for technology, especially social media, causing the rise in mental health issues among young people relies on four primary pieces of evidence: 1) timing, 2) impact on day-to-day life, 3) group-level effects, and 4) the impact on girls. Only a small amount of this evidence was available when I was writing iGen in the mid-2010s—the rest has emerged since then.

Timing. Teen depression and digital media use increased in lockstep.

If it’s the smartphone or social media, they asked, then where is the evidence from other countries? It soon began to roll in. Self-harm, anxiety, and depression increased sharply among teens in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. For example, depression rates more than doubled among 13- to 16-year-olds in the United Kingdom, with the sharpest increases after 2010 (see Figure 6.40). These data also help rule out causes that are more specific to the U.S., such as worries around school shootings, or polarization around Trump.

Smartphones were adopted worldwide, and teen loneliness and psychological distress increased worldwide—and in a pattern remarkably similar to that in the U.S.

Impact on day-to-day life. There’s another reason why digital media is the most likely culprit for the rise in depression: It changed day-to-day life in a fundamental way.

Group-level effects. Smartphones and social media don’t just affect individuals; they affect groups.

The impact on girls. Many of the increases in mental health issues are larger among girls than among boys.

TV time is only weakly linked to unhappiness, and gaming (which is more popular among boys) is pretty much a wash until it reaches 5 hours a day. But unhappiness starts to trend upward after just an hour a day of social media use for girls.

Gen Z is also less optimistic about their personal prospects. After rising sharply between Boomers and Gen X’ers and staying high among Millennials, teens’ expectations for their future educations, jobs, and material prospects suddenly declined as Gen Z began answering the questions (see Figure 6.53). Fewer Gen Z’ers expect to work in professional jobs, fewer expect to get a graduate or professional degree, and fewer expect to own more than their parents—even though median incomes rose during this period.

Six out of 10 Gen Z’ers disagreed with this statement, thus arguing that the society is unfair. Perhaps as a result, 3 out of 4 Gen Z’ers think we should, in effect, tear it all down and start over, saying “significant changes” to the government’s “fundamental design and structure” are necessary (see Figure 6.54). The old way of doing things, they feel, doesn’t work anymore. Most stunning is this: 4 out of 10 Gen Z’ers believe that the founders of the United States are “better described as villains” than “as heroes.”

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.

Perceived vs. actual gender discrimination in getting a college education is even easier to quantify. The number of teen girls who believed that women were discriminated against in getting a college education doubled between 2012 and 2019. Yet in 2019, the majority (6 out of 10) of college degrees went to women, and 4 out of 10 to men, which is the opposite of what you’d expect if gender discrimination were occurring. Women have earned the majority of four-year degrees since 1982, and the percentage of degrees going to women has steadily increased since. Yet as more and more women were walking across the stage getting their bachelor’s degrees, more and more teen girls believed that the cards were stacked against them in getting a college education (see Figure 6.58

Believing that the cards are stacked against you is an example of what psychologists call external locus of control. If you have an internal locus of control, you believe you are in control of your life. An external locus of control is the opposite: the belief that nothing matters, because it’s all up to luck and powerful other people to determine what happens. That is unfortunately occasionally true, but it’s also a defeatist way of looking at the world—and it’s more common among Gen Z.

Gen Z has followed the lead of older generations into political polarization. Even

Overall, Gen Z has gone the way of the older generations, increasingly moving to the poles of political belief, but they are doing so sooner in life. The long-term results of that are still unknown.

During every election year since Gen X’ers were young in the 1980s, organizations had tried to get young adults to turn out to vote, yet young adult voter participation was stuck at embarrassingly low levels, especially during midterms. Gen Z ended that in dramatic fashion. Gen Z’s negativity about the country has its disadvantages, but one upside is greater political participation.

The increase in loneliness points to a social cause for the rise in mental health issues that appears among both liberal and conservative teens, but more strongly among liberals. A prime candidate: how teens spend their social time.

If liberal teens spent less time socializing in person and more time on social media than conservative teens, that might explain why their mental health suffered more. That appears to be the case. In 2018–2021, more liberal teen girls were heavy social media users than conservative teen girls. Liberal teen boys were also more likely to be heavy social media users than conservative teen boys (see Figure 6.69). In addition, the decline in face-to-face social interaction—for example, in going out with friends—was larger among liberals than among conservatives (for example, among girls; see Figure 6.70

These trends in social interaction mirror the changes in mental health almost perfectly: Both liberals and conservatives change, but liberals change more. The social lives of liberal teens were conducted more online and less in person, while the social lives of conservative teens were closer to how they were in the early 2010s, with less time on social media and more time going out with friends than among liberals.

spending more time online and less in person? Liberals are, by definition, more comfortable with social change than conservatives. Thus liberal teens and their parents may have more quickly embraced the changes wrought by technology. Liberal teens were more attracted to the new ways of communicating online and were more willing for electronic communication to replace in-person social interaction. Similarly, liberal parents (who are more likely to have liberal children) might have allowed teens more time online and were less concerned about teens not going out as much. This was just the way things are now, they likely thought; change is inevitable. Conservative parents might have been less convinced that this new way of socializing was the right way to go. They may have become more strict in regulating their children’s use of technology and less strict in letting their teens go out in person.

Both of these phenomena—rapidly sharing information and getting into arguments about it—were much more likely to happen after social media became popular. When teens discussed police shootings, climate change, or antigay discrimination in, say, 2005, those discussions were more likely to take place face-to-face, where negativity is less likely to get out of hand because the other person is right in front of you. But in the 2010s, emotions around political issues were whipped into a frenzy online in an environment that rewarded anger and negativity. Thus it might not be political conversations per se leading to more depression and loneliness among liberal teens, but where and how those conversations took place.

While only 55% of teens in 2018 regularly slept seven or more hours a night, 85% of teens in spring 2020 did so. With most schools in virtual mode, teens did not have to get up early to commute to school, so many got more sleep. Since sleep-deprived teens are more likely to be depressed, getting more sleep might have helped mitigate the negatives of the pandemic after the initial shock of the change had passed. Teens might also have appreciated getting a break from the treadmill of going to school and participating in activities, allowing them to slow down and take a break during the early pandemic months. Teens also spent more time with their families. Two out of 3 teens said their families had become closer during the pandemic, and more than half said they were spending more time talking to their families than before the pandemic. Teens also used technology in ways more conducive to better mental health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaped Gen Z’s worldview in ways that will be with them for the rest of their lives. The constant back-and-forth of school closures and event cancellations may have taught them greater flexibility. The Great Resignation of workers in 2021 improved the number of jobs available to them, which could pay off for Gen Z economically for years into the future. But it’s not all good: Gen Z was already more anxious and depressed than previous generations before 2020, and the pandemic may have cemented their mental vulnerability and their decidedly negative view of their country and the world around them. Gen Z is unique, with their pessimism contrasting with Millennials’ optimism and their slow and sheltered upbringings so different from that of Gen X’ers. However, Gen Z shows early signs of having something in common with Boomers: the unapologetic desire to change a system they believe isn’t working anymore.

Most Polars will not be able to remember a time before COVID.

Polars will grapple with these two issues for most of their lives. This generation has also been called Alphas, after the Greek letter A; after Generation Z, this gambit argues, the only way to use letters is to go back to the beginning of the alphabet.

Just as Gen X grew up after “everything happened” during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, Polars were born after the revolutions of the smartphone and social media.

According to U.S. Census projections, Polars will be the first generation with a non-White majority. As of 2020, they had a barely non-Hispanic White majority at 50.7%, a number that will decline as the population of women in their childbearing years becomes more non-White over the course of the 2020s. Polars are also the generation with the highest number of multiracial people. The 2020 Census found that the number of multiracial Americans nearly quadrupled from 2010 to 2020, from 9 million people to 33.8 million.

Children are now much less likely to be killed due to injuries (including car accidents, homicides, drownings, and poisonings) than they were when Gen X’ers and Millennials were the children under 9 (see Figure 7.1). Car seat and seat belt laws, safety caps on medications, and swimming pool safety changes have done their work to make the world safer for Gen Z and Polar children.

Not only are kids physically safer, but their families are more secure economically. Even with the economic disruptions of the pandemic, child poverty was lower in 2020 than at any time since the 1970s; child poverty had come close to an all-time low in 2019. Thus Polar and Gen Z kids are less likely to be poor than Millennial and Gen X kids were (see Figure 7.3). The poverty rate of adults under 64, which includes nearly all parents of children under 18, was also at an historically low rate even in 2020. In 2019, adult poverty was lower than it had been at any point since 1979.

Barring economic disaster, American Polars may grow up the most economically advantaged generation of children in several decades.

Screen time for children often replaces other kinds of play—usually types of play that involve more exercise.

These are the twin truths about children’s health: Continuing a trend begun by Gen Z teens and young adults, Polar children are less likely than ever to be injured, but more likely than ever to get little exercise and to be overweight.

The country has shifted from a collectivist society, where freedoms and customs were rigid and roles were constrained, to one where individualism and the freedom to be who you want to be are paramount. Social norms have changed from the fast-life ideals of teen independence and early-20s marriage to the slow-life standard of a longer childhood and postponed adult responsibilities. The generations have gone from a cohort with resilient mental health even when they were the age group most at risk during the pandemic (Silents) to young people in the midst of a full-blown mental health crisis as they grapple with growing up in the smartphone era (Gen Z). Now that we know the generations—how they marry, work, feel, think, live, and vote—we’ll explore how these dynamics will play out in the future and how the economic, political, and social differences between them will reverberate as the generations turn over in the years to come.

The Boomer dominance of politics and business persisted longer than usual due to the slow-life strategy and technology facilitating healthier aging. The 2020s are clearly the decade when that changes.

1. Remote work. For all of its challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced many Americans to the advantages of ditching their commutes. Gen X’ers and Millennials with children appreciated the greater flexibility and family time, and Gen Z—used to the convenience of doing everything online—adapted easily. It appears that the work-from-home trend is here to stay.

Gen Z in particular has no memory of the time when getting online from home meant using a modem. As high school and college students, they did their work on their laptop from whatever location was the most convenient and comfortable. The idea of sitting in an office all day when they could be working from anywhere seems strange to them—though many, especially older generations, point out how much camaraderie and idea creation is lost when workers are not face-to-face in the office. Plus, many jobs, from retail to medicine, are difficult if not impossible to do remotely.

The shift toward working at home will have implications for investing and city planning as well. Remote areas will need better cell and broadband service as people can live and work far away from city centers—if there’s solid internet access. In the coming decade, office parks will be emptying out, with many torn down or renovated to build residential housing. Just as industrial spaces were turned into chic loft apartments, cubicle farms will be replaced with townhouses and apartment complexes. Downtown areas with restaurants and shops that depend on commuters will suffer. Home builders will start including a home office—and possibly two home offices—in their floor plans.

2. Safe spaces and speech. When Gen Z’ers arrived on college campuses around 2013, older generations were taken aback at some of their demands, such as for trigger warnings on sensitive material. Students also asked for “safe spaces” they could retreat to in times of stress. Similar requests may soon appear in the workplace. It might not be long before some workplaces set up “safe spaces” with relaxing videos, comfy chairs, and calming music where workers can go if they are upset or stressed. Many companies already have break rooms that

3. Gen Z are not Millennials. Companies that hire entry-level employees have already seen their workforces shift from mostly Millennials to mostly Gen Z’ers. In the 2020s, organizations that hire more experienced workers, such as for roles in management, law, medicine, and academia, will see this shift as well as Gen Z ages into their late 20s and early 30s. That means a transition from optimism to pessimism, entitlement to insecurity, and self-confidence to doubt. Millennials were challenging because they expected praise as a given; Gen Z’ers are challenging because they need praise for reassurance. Managers who just figured out Millennials are now figuring out Gen Z.

Gen Z is actually less likely than previous generations to want a job that is interesting, and less likely to want a job where they can make friends, continuing trends begun by previous generations (see Figure 8.2). Gen Z might think they don’t need to make friends at work because they already have a circle of friends they keep up with online; social media has made it easier than ever to keep in touch with friends even if they are physically far away. Gen Z is also less interested in a job that gives them status, continuing a downward trend begun by Millennials (not shown).

there are two things that are more important to Gen Z’ers than previous generations: a job where they can help others and a job that is worthwhile to society (see Figure 8.2). That mirrors a trend in life goals: Recent classes of incoming college students have increasingly said it is important to help others who are in difficulty. Empathy is making a comeback, and Gen Z wants to know they are making a difference, including at work.

4. Everything is political. Not that long ago, official communications from universities and corporations were all business—they focused fairly narrowly on information relevant for day-to-day operations. At universities, that standard began to end in the mid-2010s when students increasingly demanded that the university administration communicate, and sometimes apologize for, events taking place off campus. This trend was not confined to prestigious private institutions.