So Jean Twenge has a new book out, titled, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future. I’ve been following Twenge’s work for literally a generation now, and what she writes here is less informative for me than it is satisfying and fun. Generations feels more like a work of art or history than pure science, blending impressions and anecdotes into a melancholy overview with much less rigor than shows up in her published papers.
First, a quick summary. Twenge divides people alive today into one of six generations:
Silents: Born 1925-1945
Boomers: Born 1946-1964
Generation X: Born 1965-1979, when all the sensible people were born, instead of at some other strange, weird time
Millennials: Born 1980-1994
Generation Z: Born 1995-2012
Generation Alpha“Polars”: Born 2013-2029
Her research mostly focusses on the Anglosphere, so if you live in Bangladesh, sorry if you’re feeling left out. Also, since Silents are mostly collecting retirement and Generation Alpha still mostly thinks Among Us is a fun game, I’m not really going to discuss them so much either.1 Mostly what I do want to discuss is the way things are always, well, just the way things are.
Just The Way Things Are
If you do the math, you’ll realize these generations aren’t really generations. A generation is the average time between birth and reproduction; for most people that’s 25 years, going on 30. But the Silent window was only 20 years long. The Boomer window was 18 years, and Gen X was a mere 14 years long. So these aren’t exactly generations.
Just what are they? What Twenge calls generations are meaningful cohorts whose adolescent formative years left a specific stamp on their shared consciousness.
For example: Being a Boomer means having grown up during a period of post-war optimism, and a revolution in materials engineering and spacefaring technology which America used to fight against the looming threat of Internatonal Communism. Being Gen Z means seeing optimism as naïve, alloys as some stuff, Communism as a dead doctrine, and space as a nice place to visit, but why would you because there’s no phone coverage on Mars (also: what if I left my anxiety meds at home)? Growing up in the 1960’s means the 1960’s left an indelible stamp on you—you’re not going to forget the assassination of Martin Luther King, or Neil Armstrong’s one small step. Coming of age in the early 2020’s means you have a fresh slate to be filled with memories of COVID and Trump’s presidential gambits. For Gen Z, these are events that will never really fade away from the rear view mirror; they’ll always somehow feel like, just the way things are.
Although Twenge has done a lot of research, I don’t recall seeing anything from her that actually substantiates this crucial claim—that adolescence is a critical period when a person’s most powerful memories are formed. But I was never particularly skeptical about it. Partly, my own adolescence has always been extremely close to me, but I also learned this independently of Twenge, in a study published in 1989:
Broadly speaking, different cohorts recall different events or changes, and these memories come especially from adolescence and young adulthood.
That each generation receives a distinctive imprint from the social and political events of its youth is an old idea, most often associated today with the name of Karl Mannheim… His essay is not entirely clear on the point at which a cohort begins to develop a unique generational character, but he seems to specify "the age of 17, sometimes a little earlier and sometimes a little later."2
This is obviously part of a much broader research stream345 which more or less concluded that the idea of a “critical period” or “formative window” was correct: in some sense, adolescence lasts forever. It’s those years in late adolescence when we form our sense of self, our sense of the world, our sense of what’s interesting, of what matters. Deep emotional connections keep us rooted there, in a past that no longer exists. If we let them, those emotions make us old, by seducing us into feeling that we’re still young, that the world is still exactly the way it used to be, and somehow, some way, nothing has ever changed.
Beating Up Dead Horses
For me, that’s not as much of a problem as for many people. Partly, it’s because I hang around with young people a lot, not least because of my kids. And partly, it’s because urbanization and familial instability forced me away from my childhood home and disconnected me from my friends in my early 20’s; the last time I visited, I didn’t recognize anything, and half the people I’d have wanted to talk to were dead. But as bleak as this may sound, in many ways this has been a good thing; being totally unable to drift into a haze of sleepy nostalgia means that I don’t have the luxury of slipping into this mode of existence where the same problems that were solved when I was a kid are still around, still needing to be solved.
My Gen-Z children have the most experience with this kind of thing from their Boomer grandparents, who variously irritate and bemuse them with stern discussions about whether their teachers at school might be Communists. But for myself, I mostly run into problems from this way of thinking with Boomers and Gen Xers on the left.
For example, you may have noticed that we have a country where ethnic minorities are displayed in a positive context across the mainstream media, but we’re still fighting institutional racism (literally, from the White House). Or even better, remember when #Resist was a thing? They never thanked him for it, but for a brief and shining moment, Trump gave ageing leftists a chance to feel as though somehow they really were the poor, disenfranchised underdogs that deep down they always knew themselves to be.
The sad thing is that these frozen generational beliefs can embed themselves in the newest cohort through socialization and propaganda. This is something Twenge points out: We have a country where A) the proportion of degrees in law and medicine awarded to females now surpasses 50%, even as B) the proportion of Gen Z girls believing women are discriminated against in the professions has risen near 60%.6 Part of this may be Gen Z pessimism and cluelessness, but does anybody seriously think they’d be acting this way if someone hadn’t passed on their fossilized notions about Urgent Threats That Never Go Away And Must Be Overcome Forever?
This problem, like so many which beset us in the present era, has no solution. On the positive side, some might say it is really, really funny.
I can only hope my Gen Z readers take this piece of useful advice: a day will come, for you as it has for the rest of us, when—love them or hate them—Drake and Snapchat will lack all relevance. And while the Boomers who read this blog are probably already aware of it: Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. And there’s no getting back again, either.
No, of course Among Us isn’t a good game! Try freaking Deceit.
Schuman, H., & Scott, J. (1989). Generations and collective memories. American sociological review, 359-381.
Krosnick, J. A., & Alwin, D. F. (1989). Aging and susceptibility to attitude change. Journal of personality and social psychology, 57(3), 416.
Etchegaray, N., Scherman, A., & Valenzuela, S. (2019). Testing the hypothesis of “impressionable years” with willingness to self-censor in Chile. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 31(2), 331-348.
Szabó, A., & Déri, A. (2022). Asteroid-Effect in Society: The Formation of a Mannheim-type Historical Generation Post-COVID-19. Polish Sociological Review, 219(3), 315-330.
Twenge, J. M. (2023). Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future. Simon and Schuster.
I noticed when I turned about 30 that new music did not sink into my soul, nor even just my ears, as it had as a teenager, should I then pretend I always liked classical... Then I realised that in the long ages of the palaeolithic (warning just-so story ahead) the music that one was exposed to as a teenager was probably sung by elders (survivors maintaining the world) who may well change what they heard a bit but, basically, everyone heard the same songs at the same age and so generational differences were not entombed into cultural references, bad storms and earthquakes were probably more noticeable than songs. Songs did travel across continents, like singles, but the sacred songs that sung life into country, that sung you into adulthood at initiation, were maintained. So the openness of youth, who then becomes the maintainer and transmitter to those young, keep peeps peopling as human being, those young who survive and age then in turn pass it on. Music is thus, of course, is a medium of information and worlding responsibility, the medium is more than the message. I think the explosion of youth culture post WW2 amd mega bands who rock on, slowing down with elvis, may well represent a lost opportunity of integration, that we used to do in the palaeolithic. (please eat your greens).meika1965 (I can remember when boomers were young and annoying...)