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July 9 - July 16, 2023
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).
Home appliances (microwaves, washing machines, refrigerators) 1947–1985 Ability to live alone; women pursuing careers; increase in leisure time
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. There was no refrigeration, no running water, no central heating, and no washing machines. Modern grocery stores didn’t exist, and cooking involved burning wood. Those who could afford it hired servants to do the enormous amount of work involved, but the poor did it all themselves (or were the servants doing it for someone else). Daily living in those eras was a collective experience.
Or consider laundry: Instead of slaving over a hot cauldron for an entire day, often with a group of other people, you throw your clothes in a machine and go watch TV for forty minutes. Then you put your clothes in the dryer and watch more TV. Electric washing machines were not widely used until the late 1940s, and clothes dryers were not common until the 1960s. In 1940s rural Minnesota, my grandparents and their neighbors used outside clotheslines for drying. If there was an unexpected cold snap, the clothes would freeze solid.
In the late 1800s, an incredible 1 out of 6 babies died in their first year—so for every six women who had a baby, one would lose the child within a year. Infant mortality declined precipitously during the 20th century, but 1 out of 14 babies still died in their first year when the first of the Silent generation were born in 1925. When the first Boomers were born in 1946, 1 out of 30 babies died before reaching their 1st birthday (see Figure 1.4). Infant mortality did not dip below 1 out of 100 until 1988; in 2020, it had decreased to 1 out of 200.
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.
It took decades after the introduction of the landline telephone for half of the country to have one, but the smartphone went from introduction to more than 50% ownership in just five and a half years, the fastest adoption of any technology in human history.
The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement fundamentally altered American culture, with much of the change taking root in that relatively brief seven-year period from 1963 to 1970, when the Silents were in their 20s and 30s.
In the General Social Survey 2018–2021, the Silent generation was the only living generation in which the majority believed that homosexual sex among adults was sometimes wrong. They were also the only generation to think that marijuana should not be legal. Silents were the only living generation where more than a third thought it was best if women take care of the home and family and thought that a preschool child would suffer if their mother worked.
when Katie Couric asked Ginsburg what she thought about football player Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem to protest police killings of Black people, Ginsburg said, “I think it’s dumb and disrespectful.”
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). Millennial journalist Jill Filipovic argues that “If anything really sets Boomer marriages apart, it’s divorce—they do a lot of it.”
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.
Thus the United States does not just have a growing income gap; it also has a growing happiness gap. More White working-class Americans say they are not happy, a symptom of a swelling discontent. A nation in which one social class is increasingly unhappy while another is content is a nation divided.
If 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?”
The most quintessential Gen X young adult movie might be Clerks (1994),
Contrary to popular perceptions, Gen X’s youthful interest in environmental issues has yet to be equaled by subsequent generations of high school students. Millennials’ interest was markedly lower than Gen X’ers, despite former vice president Al Gore’s 2006 hit documentary An Inconvenient Truth bringing more awareness to climate change. Gen Z has brought interest in the environment back—but still not to the levels of the 1990s, when Gen X was young—and their interest actually waned between 2019 and 2021.
By 2021, even the majority of Republicans supported same-sex marriage. It was arguably the most rapid change of public opinion on a social issue in history.
So the idea that Millennials are highly self-confident is true—but it’s also true they didn’t come up with those ideas out of nowhere. Their parents, teachers, and the culture at large told them to feel good about themselves, and they did.
Similarly, more Millennials were confident that they would perform well in important adult roles. By the early 2010s, 7 out of 10 believed they would be in the top 20% of performance in their jobs—a mathematical impossibility but a psychological reality for a generation raised to think highly of themselves.
Millennials didn’t just entertain these beliefs in their youth—they carried forward to adulthood. When polled in 2015, 52% of Millennial parents asserted they were doing a “very good” job as a parent, compared to 43% of Gen X moms and 41% of Boomer moms.
They were told, in short, that they were awesome. Continuing trends originating when late Gen X’ers were in school, the number of high school seniors with A averages soared, and the number with C averages plummeted among Millennial high school seniors (see Figure 5.7). This was also the era when parents began pressuring teachers to give high school students better grades, suggesting grade inflation wasn’t just the teachers’ idea.
By 2019, households headed by Millennials actually made more money than Silents, Boomers, and Gen X’ers at the same age—and yes, that’s after the numbers are adjusted for inflation
Just as the dire prediction for Gen X’ers’ economic futures in the early 1990s didn’t come true, the prediction of Millennials’ economic demise were premature. Both predictions were made when the economy was in a recession, and neither was true once the economy rebounded.
Well, a lot of Millennials must have forgone brunch, because their home ownership rates are only slightly behind Boomers and Gen X’ers at the same age.
This small difference also has a very logical explanation: More Millennials went to college and graduate school, so they started their careers later than Boomers and Gen X’ers. They are also likely to live longer. With the entire trajectory of adulthood slowed down, it makes sense that Millennials took a few more years to buy houses than previous generations.
In other words, Millennials overall have not gotten screwed by the economy, but those without college degrees have.
Millennials actually make more money than previous generations did at the same age, and that’s true across all racial and ethnic groups. But that obscures a startling fact: Every single penny of the rise in younger adults’ incomes is due to women’s incomes.
However, men’s incomes have fallen since 1970 (see Figure 5.26). Because the income gain for women is larger than the income loss for men, the net result is higher incomes for Millennials overall than previous generations at the same age.
The classic formula says that happiness equals reality minus expectations.
As Derek Thompson (b. 1986) put it in the Atlantic, a “popular template of contemporary internet analysis” is “If you experience a moment’s unpleasantness, first blame modern capitalism.”
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.
4 out of 10 Millennials are Republicans—a fairly high number considering this generation is often stereotyped as uniformly Democrat.
In a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 37% of young adults agreed that “because they are fundamentally biased against some racial and ethnic groups, most U.S. laws/institutions need to be completely rebuilt.” Only 16% of people over 65 years old (Boomers and Silents) felt the same.
The culprit is “deaths of despair” such as drug overdoses, suicide, and liver disease. Compared to Gen X’ers at the same age in 1999, 25- to 34-year-old Millennials in 2019 were nearly six times as likely to die from a drug overdose, mostly due to opioids. Suicide rates in this age group increased 38%, and fatal liver disease more than doubled (see Figure 5.72).
So, after an adolescence of positivity and happiness, Millennial adults were more likely to be depressed and more likely to die deaths of despair.
1 out of 18 young adults identified as something other than male or female in 2021 and 2022. With 39 million 18- to 26-year-olds in the U.S., about 2 million American young adults identified as trans or nonbinary—more than the population of Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the country.
So 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.
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).
In many ways, 18-year-olds now look like 14-year-olds in previous generations. For example, only about half of 12th graders date, about the same as 8th graders in the early 1990s.
Thus Gen Z’ers and young Millennials are navigating a world where they are both more likely to think that other people should be fired for their political beliefs, and more concerned that they themselves will be fired for their political beliefs.
The number of teens and young adults with clinical-level depression more than doubled between 2011 and 2021 (see Figure 6.35). There is a full-blown mental health crisis among young people, and it was building long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
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,
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in 2017 in iGen
This is like the 80th reference shes made to her own book
“Social media isn’t like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone. It’s more like alcohol: A mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.”)
By early 2020, nearly half of 8th graders spent 3 hours a day or more using social media. The average teen spent more than 8 and a half hours a day with screen media in total in 2021, according to Common Sense Media.
Contrary to the idea that teens are reluctant to blame their generation’s high levels of depression on smartphones and social media, nearly all said so in studies conducted by the largest social media company in the country.
In other words: Not all screen time is created equal. Social media and internet time are the most strongly linked to self-harm and depression, and those links are more pronounced among girls. Electronic gaming and watching TV and videos may not play as big a role in mental health.
The cost of the digital age isn’t just mental—it’s physical. Around 2012, just as smartphones became common, the number of teens who said they rarely exercised increased, reaching all-time highs among both 8th graders and 12th graders by 2019 (see
By 2016, more than half of American young adults were overweight. A full 1 out of 3 young adults in 2019 was not just overweight but clinically obese, up from 1 out of 4 as recently as 2014.
