The Clash of Generations, with Dr. Jean Twenge

In this episode

Jean Twenge: I sometimes think about it this way that the Silent and sometimes Greatest generation, they changed the laws, and the boomers changed hearts and minds. They changed the lifestyles. They changed the way people actually lived.

Intro:

Fred:

Society used to change a lot slower than it does today. 

For the longest time, our stories, our art, our values – stayed pretty much the same from the time a person was born to the time they died.

Everyone had a shared sense of what life was. Each generation had a clear connection to those that came before it, and to the next ones.

For better and worse, we’ve lost this cultural stability in this fast twitch 21^st century. Fads and fashions pop up and consume one another almost daily, and technology keeps remaking work and life in unpredictable ways.

As a result of this, every new generation grows up with a completely different and unique set of cultural references that hits them differently in their life cycle. These differences aren’t just superficial – in many ways, they’ve become different ways of looking at the world.

Maybe this is one of the reasons it feels like our society’s slowly becoming a tower of babel – the more we talk the less we actually understand each other.

This makes the broad, negative clichés about other generations even more attractive – we dismissively say OK, Boomer, implying they’re self–centered and out of touch – my generation, Gen X is often called lazy and cynical; there’s the well-known view of Millenials as entitled and thin-skinned, and Gen Z is seen as wasting away on screens and expecting others to fix all their problems.

Are these even true? If so, to what degree? And do they mask deeper trends we’re failing to grapple with?

My guest in this episode of the podcast – Dr. Jean Twenge – is one of the most highly cited psychology researchers in the world, and she took these questions to a completely different level of analysis in her latest book, called Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future.

 

It draws from 24 national datasets, includes data from 39 million people, and uses over 200 charts to track how generations measure in matters like life goals, education, political views, sexual attitudes, income, and social values.

It’s the ultimate deep dive into not only the data, but also into the competing explanations for generational differences.

As you’ll see in this interview, she debunks commonly held misconceptions (for example – Boomers are genuine idealists and were the driving force behind a lot of the social progress we take for granted today; Millennials are far more hard-working and successful than the earlier views on them suggested, but growing up with so much social comparison has made them very anxious; Gen X is secretly quite materialistic, and still dreams of political relevance, and Gen Z are still figuring things out, and are already showing signs of advanced social engagement. And maybe most surprising of all are the things we can learn from the Silent generation, that we hear very little of today, but who had way better mental health, and stronger families than we do today.

In taking the analysis of generations to this next level, she identifies the real reasons why Generations think and act the way they do, and provides a rich set of clues on how this knowledge can help us solve the mental health crisis that’s silently consuming us, especially our youth.

and better understand where we’re headed as a society.

I think her book is required reading for anyone who wants to better understand where we are and where we’re headed as a society.

Also to anyone who’s building teams or communities, as better group dynamics often requires better understanding people from different generations.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this interview – this is Dr. Jean Twenge

Fred Pinto: Dr. Jean Twenge, welcome.

Jean Twenge: Thank you.

Fred Pinto: For people who may not know, you’re a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of dozens of highly cited scientific publications and many thought-provoking, deeply researched psychology books, including “Generation Me”, “Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable Than Ever Before”, “The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement” and most recently, “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silence, and what they mean for America’s future”.

So, Dr. Twenge, thank you so much for joining me. It’s a real pleasure and honour to have you here with me.

Jean Twenge: Great to be on.

 Chapter 1 – Today’s Mental Health Epidemic

Fred Pinto: So, I’ve been reading your work for years, and I find that it really helps shed light on the strange psychological issues that we’re facing in the West today. And I say strange because over the last 50 years or so, our psyches seem to be getting better at many of the things we value.

We’re wealthier, we’re more permissive and diverse, we have more access to information, we have better technology, including in things that really matter like medical technology. We worry a lot about giving people high self-esteem and a positive self-image. And yet, all this progress hasn’t necessarily translated into better mental health.

When you look at, you know, the anxiety and depression rates. When you look at substance abuse and suicide attempts, even just generally the cultural climate with the culture wars and polarization and the news, and it’s often just awful. And it’s almost like something dark and unhealthy seems to have been welling up right underneath our noses as we’ve made all this progress on one hand.

And it’s hard to pin down exactly what the problem is or what the problems are. Let alone how to, how to fix them. Based on your work and research, which seems to really address this, this kind of paradox in the West, do you think it’s true, first of all, that we’re actually going through some sort of a mental health crisis?

Could it just be a matter of maybe we track these things better these days? We measure them, we diagnose them more today. And if so, if we are going through a kind of a mental health crisis, from your perspective, what is it that’s really driving it?

Jean Twenge: So, yes, we are experiencing a mental health crisis right now, particularly among young people, so particularly among adolescents and young adults.

And we know for sure it’s not due to better diagnosis, or people being more willing to seek help, or it being more noticeable. Because we’ve got data that goes back in time that’s used exactly the same methods, and they’re screening studies. They’re not looking at people who seek help. They’re not relying on, you know, diagnosis from a doctor or anything like that.

We also have data from, um, objectively measured behaviors. And they all show the same thing. So, big increases starting usually around, at least for young people, around 2011 or 2012, in anxiety, in depression, in loneliness, in self harm behaviors, in suicide. And they all go up right around that same time in the early 2010s.

And that is the question, why? You know, what was special about that time? Well, it wasn’t the Great Recession that was finally over by that point. When I first started to see these trends, you know, I really had no idea what could be causing them. And then realized that there was a turning point.

Among other things, the end of 2012 is when the majority of most people in Western countries had a smartphone. It’s around the time that social media use among high school students moved from optional to almost mandatory. Phones got front-facing cameras. Facebook bought Instagram. Like, around that period of the early 2010s, a lot of these things were changing.

And it had these downstream effects, too. So, it wasn’t just that teens and young adults were spending more time online, they were also starting to spend a lot less time with each other, socializing face to face, and a lot less time sleeping. And you put those trends together, a lot more time online, usually alone, less time with friends in person, less time sleeping, that’s a terrible formula for mental health.

Fred Pinto: Definitely. So, you subscribe to sort of the view that, that it’s when the combination of the smartphone and social media together. I know Jonathan Haidt and his work, really kind of zones in on specifically when Facebook and Instagram started enabling a lot of commenting features and a lot of “like” features and got people a lot more engaged.

And then slowly, slowly, you know, the algorithms starting to kind of lean towards, negative emotions like outrage, like anger. Because it seems to be more sticky and seems to lead to more engagement. And so that to you is really – at least a big part of, the driving force.

Jean Twenge: Yeah, I think all those things, you know, play a role.

And, it’s one of the reasons that I and John and others are confident that these changes in technology have something to do with the mental health crisis; it’s because there’s so many different mechanisms. There’s not just one. So it’s not just the algorithms on social media, it’s also the body image content leading to more appearance concern and social comparison.

It’s the cyberbullying, it’s the algorithms and the spending so much time on social media, and thus having less time for sleeping and less time for face to face interaction. Like, there’s – you know – it increases, disengagement when you are with people in person, because you never know when someone’s going to pull out their phone.

There’s just all of these different mechanisms.

Fred Pinto: Very complex and very impactful on people’s lives. And so, okay – so there’s a technology piece and there’s another major theme in your work, around the whole effects – let’s call it – of the self-esteem movement, and positivity, and generation “Me”, and the narcissism, which [are] the first two books where I got very acquainted with your work.

You break down how a focus on self-esteem, which sounds good, sounds positive, “you’re amazing just the way you are”, “everyone gets a medal” – like that kind of thing, can easily become a slippery slope towards narcissism: so thinking that you’re better than you actually are, or just generally being self-absorbed and self-centered.

And that’s kind of like a prelude to kind of going into generations where really all of this comes together in this generational analysis that’s really brilliant and super, super, fascinating. But, just relating to that one point of the self-esteem movement and the positive, how did we go from ‘self-esteem’, which sounds good in theory, making people feel good about themselves, into more, maybe distorted forms of individualism? Which seemed to also be affecting our mental health today.

Jean Twenge: Yeah, and I think it started with good intentions. You know, perhaps, with boomers who wanted to try to figure out kind of the internal life. So that was a lot of what they were exploring in the 60s and 70s. Then they had kids in the 80s, the millennials.

And they started trying to figure out self-esteem. And it started to be this kind of speculation that was the key to everything, that was the key to success, and we better start making sure that kids have a high self-esteem. But it backfired because, of course, you can’t teach somebody to have true deep seated self-confidence and self-worth. That has to come from doing things and performance and relationships. From real things. And so, they went about it in this way of just basically pumping up self-esteem for no particular reason. And then, expecting that to lead to good outcomes. And it didn’t. It didn’t work.

Its primary result was that you ended up with self-confidence without a basis. And then it becomes over-confidence. And then once you get to over- confidence, then sometimes it can cross over into narcissism.

Fred Pinto: It’s, funny. There’s, there’s the concept of like, intrinsic dignity or inherent dignity of the human being, right? Which is a really good thing. Which is – I mean, every human being has intrinsic value and inherent worth.

And it’s funny. It’s like, it’s almost like we have that idea. It’s a great idea, but we can’t stop there. We kind of have to keep, keep growing it and growing it. And now it becomes: “Well, you’re actually amazing, and you’re actually really good at it”. So now it gets into competence, and competence, of course, is earned.

And so, if you have a growing self-worth without the merit and the competence, then you start having a delta between your theory of yourself and your actual self. And that’s kind of what your work implies happened, um, in the last, in the last couple decades or so.

Jean Twenge: Yeah, I think that’s a good explanation for it.

Yeah, there’s, there’s that gap, between the view of the self and then reality, and that can be a problem.

Chapter 2 – The Rise of Individualism

Fred Pinto: So, I find that many of the questions you raise force us to take this broader, kind of more cultural look at the different values, lifestyles, and goals that people have in different generations.

And so in your latest book, “Generations”, you analyze the results of Generational analysis spanning 24 data sets and 39 million people. So, an extremely rich data set. And, what I wanted to do with you, with your permission, is maybe take a quick view of each generation based on your book, and maybe have you comment on each one.

But before I do, I just generally, you know, when people talk about generations, we love, just in regular pop psychology and regular parlance, we talk about different generations. There’s this view that’s very common, I find. That history is just circular, that it’s always the same thing.

That people have always been saying these things, that, for example, like, old people have always said that young people are too permissive or selfish, or they’re losing the valuable things of the past. But I realized in reading your book that our sample size of generations, when we say this, is usually very, very small, right?

It’s usually no more than, like, two, three, maybe four generations. And maybe there’s also linear change. In other words, it’s entirely possible that across three or four, uh, successive generations, that each generation is actually getting more individualistic, actually getting more materialistic.

And that seems to be a blind spot in the way people think about generations.

Jean Twenge: It definitely is, because I hear that argument a lot : “You know, older people have always said this”. So there’s a couple problems with that argument. So, one is, as you described, I’m drawing from this big data set, virtually none of which is about what older generations are saying about younger generations. It’s what people say about themselves. And that really has changed. Um, and that has nothing to do with, you know, older people complaining. It’s just things actually have changed. People do see themselves differently. They spend their time differently. They have different views of themselves. And that is pretty different, that’s a pretty different statement than saying : “Oh, you know, older people are complaining”. And then other part is exactly what you said. That this idea that : “Oh, you know, but –  wait, haven’t people always said that the next generation is more individualistic? Haven’t they always said that they’re more focused on themselves? You know, haven’t they always said that, you know, they’re, they’re, um, lazy or whatever the idea is?” Well, with individualism at least, it is linear. It, each generation actually has been more individualistic. Sometimes they put their own spin on it or their own flavor, but, you know, that idea of like, oh – I mean, that criticism like really makes no sense when you actually take it out and examine it, because it basically is saying: “Oh, because somebody said something before, it has to be wrong”.

What? That doesn’t really make any sense. And it ignores the idea that there is linear change. And that it is true that every generation is softer because our technology helps us out so much more with labor saving devices and time saving and everything like that. That’s true. I mean, it’s hard to deny that, that every generation gets a little further away from, say, being able to survive if dropped in the woods.

Um, you know, unless you’ve done military training or something. Yeah, that’s true. Every generation has gotten further away from that. Every generation has become a little bit more individualistic in one way or another. So, um, and I think that, that argument just completely ignores the possibility that change can be linear, which of course it can.

Fred Pinto: That’s why I loved your book so much because as lawyers, we’re trained to look for logical flaws and fallacies and argumentation and it just struck me when people make that argument – “Well it’s always been” – They never consider, it’s a total blind spots that maybe within the limited – you know, sample size of the three generations you’re analyzing, would it not be possible that it’s actually true that people got more individualistic and materialistic?

And what I love with your book is that it actually proves that with data and with the actual views and all the survey evidence and so forth. And when I read it, I was like, oh, yes, like finally, you know, the hunch is confirmed.

So in “Generations”, you describe technology as the mother turtle. So the main thing driving the change between generations and the mother turtle has two daughters.

And the daughters are “Individualism” and then the “Slow life strategy”. So the slower – you know, having slower and slower lives, accessing adulthood later and later, and so forth. So – and this is also another I’ve had when I read your book. I was like: “Okay, like, this actually puts, like, numbers and analysis behind this hunch” – is that there seems to be almost like a Tower of Babel phenomenon between generations as technology changes our society faster and faster.

It’s almost like the common ground between generations is getting slimmer and slimmer. And we speak radically different languages, and we understand each other less and less; the values are changing really, really quick. Is that something that you find as well, that the gap between generations, culturally, seems to be getting wider and wider as technology gets faster?

Jean Twenge: I think that’s true. Um, I think that’s why, you know, when we get to talking about the generational, birth year spans that they’ve gotten shorter. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s because the technological change, you know, has sped up. And I think the generation gaps now are just as big as they were between, say, the boomers and their parents, where there was based more on individualism and values and freedom and social rules.

And now a lot of it is because the generations don’t even communicate using the same mediums anymore. You know, they, I mean, how many baby boomers are on TikTok? Very few. And yet, almost all Gen Z is. And there’s been a couple of fun articles in the last couple of weeks about Gen Z slang. And you know what? Every generation of young people has their slang that tries to exclude the older generation. It’s next leveled with Gen Z. You know, they’re talking about a lot of things that they usually pick up online, and if they didn’t pick it up online, then they picked it up from, you know, a friend or a peer who was online.

That older generations, even millennials, right, just a little older than them, have no idea what they’re talking about. And some of that is just slang phrases, but there’s also one example I’ve noticed particularly as a Gen Xer with Gen Z kids – Gen Zers talk about gender using terms that, as of, you know, five years ago, a lot of people had never heard of.

And a lot of Gen Z, Gen X parents with their Gen Z kids are like, I have no idea what you even said. Um, because they not only have the labels and they have the shorthand for the labels and there’s just – there’s a big generation gap in communication right now.

Fred Pinto: Like what kind of labels are you talking about? Like, like emojis or like symbols or like actual slang and words that are maybe coined or invented?

Jean Twenge: Just one example around gender, is that there’s a conceptual one and then there’s this kind of the slang part and it’s in both levels that my concept of someone being non binary.

Ten years ago, hardly anybody had heard of that. And for Gen Z, it’s just, that’s Tuesday, you know, it’s something they take for granted that a lot of older generations are like, wait, what are you even talking about? Plus, a lot of Gen Z, they don’t even say nonbinary. They say it’s abbreviation NB, and they pronounce it NB.

And so they’ll be like: “Oh, my friend who’s NB and like a Gen Xer be like, what? I don’t even know what that means”.

Fred Pinto: Well, thank you Gen Xer to Gen Xer. Thank you for teaching me that today because I had no idea if I’d heard that. It’s almost like this entry into this parallel universe of social media and screens almost like creates this possibility of the gap between generations.

I just came back from the Mediterranean and one of the things I like there is that people come together in person in shared spaces. So you’ve got either the beach or the town square. And you just naturally see people from different generations encountering each other in a physical space. And by necessity, that sort of creates the conditions for a common vocabulary, common concerns, common references.

But it’s like, the more we virtualize, the more there’s this possibility of creating these kinds of silos between generations.

Jean Twenge: Yeah, it ends up very atomized. I mean, the online world is very atomized, and it does that for political views, you know, and other types of viewpoints. You can find – no matter how crazy your idea is, you can probably find somebody that agrees with you online. That’d be a lot harder to do, you know, in the physical world.

And it’s the same with generations, that they end up talking to same age peers. or similar age peers much more in the online space and, you know, of course that happens in the physical world as well, but as you point out, there are those spaces where the generations can interact in the physical world and there aren’t as many of those online.

Fred Pinto: It’s very interesting because I find your work really kind of nails the central issue that a lot of us Gen Xers saw as, you know, we remember a world, I literally remember the summer pre-Facebook, post-Facebook, right? And then how some of our friends got, you know, caught up in the, sort of, rabbit holes of Facebook political arguments, and then new generations coming up.

It was a very conscious change that we saw. We saw all the different layers of it. And it’s this paradox of – it’s a technology that was created to connect people, but then, we all felt that culturally and psychologically, the effects were that it was pulling people apart. It was creating these different filter bubbles, it was creating these different communities. It was leading to people spending more time in front of screens as opposed to Human interactions, and I find in your work that that really becomes very clear, that this kind of – the whole purpose of social media is to connect people. Zuckerberg, Facebook, I forget what the tagline, literally is like : “Connecting the world”. But psychologically and culturally it seems to be doing the exact opposite.

Jean Twenge: In many ways yeah. It’s really a central irony that that’s what social media was intended to do. And it can do that, it’s just that – what do you give up? And that’s the problem, that too often, that time goes into being on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and then you’re not spending the time in person.

And that what I found in, you know, in analysis after analysis for teens and young adults that they spend less time just hanging out with each other. They spend less time going to parties. They spend less time going to the mall, anything that is, you know, being with friends in person, has declined by a lot, in the past couple of decades.

Chapter 3 – The Silent Generation

Fred Pinto: Okay, so let’s, let’s dive into generations. Let’s start with the invisible generation to us, the Silent generation, right? So people born roughly from the late 20s to the mid 40s, the parents of the baby boomers, right? They’re hard for us to –

Jean Twenge:  And the parents!

Fred Pinto: And the parents. True. A lot of parents of Gen Xers as well.

So, typically they married young, they had lots of children, they built the stable suburban lives that we associate with the 50s and 60s.

We see them as old fashioned and boring almost, compared to the boomers and, you know, the whole cultural revolution of the 60s and so forth. But Silence were also the most mentally healthy generation that you’ve surveyed. There was a real dip in suicide rates. And they experienced way less mental distress than even their parents, even the greatest generation before them.

I mean, we’re a generation, obviously, we can understand. But even if the boomers were much wealthier and more individualistic and so forth after them. Out of all the generations you cover in the book, Silence are the ones that seem the most different, let’s say, from the rest of us. Like, we can draw a contrast, right?

There’s the silence, and then there’s like, you know, the boomers, Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, who kind of all seem to be part of a, kind of a trend together. Their circumstances were obviously different. They built their lives during a post war boom. They weren’t as influenced by mass media as the rest of us. But is there anything you feel that we can or should maybe learn from them? Especially considering their track record of like, stable families, wealth creation, excellent mental health.

Jean Twenge: Well, you know, some of that mental health piece is admittedly the good luck of being born when they were. That they weren’t drafted into World War II.

And then, uh, most were – at the tail end, some were drafted to Vietnam. But not, uh, not as many. So, they, some of them went to, serve in the Korean War, but they, they kind of missed out on some of the more tumultuous times when they were young. However, I think there is a lesson to be learned in terms of the importance that they placed on relationships.

And that, yep, they did get divorced at a pretty high rate, but still, you know, they got married, they had kids, they built those relationships, and they also had childhoods where they had some responsibilities, they learned independence, um, they were definitely non digital childhoods, often, you know, not even TV – that for them, their childhood was playing outside and being with friends.

That’s a good basis for mental health. So I think that that’s another thing that distinguishes them. I think we do have to acknowledge though, that even though Silence have this reputation in the name for being ‘silent’, not making any trouble, it’s really a misnomer because a lot of the, changes of especially the late sixties, early seventies, that was the silence. That was not the boomers.

Fred Pinto: I was very surprised! I was surprised to learn that!

Jean Twenge: Yeah, I know, and that surprises a lot of people because they associate those times with being led by boomers and they were not. The leaders were mostly Silent generation. I mean, two examples that illustrate that – two of the most famous silence, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a leader in – because she wasn’t just on the Supreme Court, she also was a leader in getting laws changed to meet for gender equality; and Martin Luther King Jr, the most revered civil rights leader. So, you think about that? About the civil rights movement for the the rights of African-Americans and then the feminist movement for the rights of women. The leaders of those.

I mean, that’s just two examples. Lots of other names come to mind as well. That that was a Silent generation

Fred Pinto: That was very, very surprising when I when I read that in your book, and it makes sense, because when you have these this kind of movement, the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War and so forth – it kind of became mainstream. It was part of Woodstock and you know, the Rock-and-Roll revolution and so forth. But they had to be led at the level of ideas by older figures, who were actually Silent.

And, and so the thought revolution around civil rights, individual rights and so forth – it’s logical, it makes sense, but it was surprising to read in that sense because it’s true that the boomers, took the credit for all of that.

Jean Twenge: You know, we do have to acknowledge that the boomers did play a role in this really getting cemented into the culture. The boomers meant they – I sometimes think about it this way that the Silent and sometimes Greatest generation, they changed the laws, and the boomers changed hearts and minds. They changed the lifestyles. They changed the way people actually lived.

So, you know, we got the laws changed, or not “we”, but the Silent generation, Greatest generation, you know, got laws changed. So, for example, women had more equality at work, and it was the boomers who actually took advantage of that and were, in many cases, the first to, at least in masse, try to figure out how to do that.

Chapter 4 – The Baby Boomers

Fred Pinto: Okay, so on to our boomers, that everybody loves to talk, even today, they’re still controversial, they’re still talked about. So it’s a massive generation. You write between 1957 and 1964, 76 million babies are born in the U. S.

Jean Twenge: From 1946 to 1964.

Fred Pinto: 1946 to 1964? Okay, so 46’ to 64’. Surprise, big surprise, because before this the birth rate is declining for 200 years.

You call them a demographic bowling ball, a generational tyranny. That’s an interesting choice of words.

Jean Twenge: I don’t think I can even take credit for the bowling ball piece. But, yes, those are two things that have definitely been said.

Fred Pinto: So they bring a lot of the values and trends that we still see today. You know, they’re the first to experience a world outside of theirs via television. The birth control pill allows people to have sex without worrying about having children. They’re much more individualistic than their parents. They have fewer kids. They’re more divorced. Women wait longer to have children, building their careers instead. They’re much more comfortable with drug use. But this is also where we kind of start seeing the upswing in mental health issues. So twice as many boomers as Silence suffered from depression

Fred Pinto: So, we often see the boomers as the real start of today’s modern Western culture, you know, the rebellious individualism, the holding onto youth, the materialism, the pleasure seeking. But in light of your findings, there also seems to be a bit of a cautionary tale there, and it’s maybe some clues to better understand some of the challenges we’re facing today.

So what would, what is the cautionary tale do you think that we can learn from the boomers?

Jean Twenge: Basically that, I think they were at the start of this, and this was linear, and this continued. That, individualism and freedom are great, but that they also have downsides. That if relationships are not as stable – bad things can happen. That expectations that are too high, bad things can happen. That, I think the boomers may have thought that, you know, getting rid of all of the old-fashioned social rules was purely good, and they may have overall been a net positive – I think most people would see it that way. But that there are some downsides.

Fred Pinto: So the wholesale, dedication to progress as replacing what we’ve received from the past, that approach. You think eventually maybe took that took it too far.

Jean Twenge: Yeah. So Silent generation rather than boomer, but Janice Joplin: “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”. So it’s really poignant when you think about it that way that freedoms all well and good But if you don’t have anybody to share it with – then what’s the point?

Fred Pinto: Okay. So the impact on relationships is you think like the big one there?

Jean Twenge: I think it’s a big part of it. And, if you know from reading the book – I tried very hard to not, have it be about my personal opinion because I think there’s different viewpoints on these things. But I think we have to acknowledge that, you know, the idea – that things like no fault divorce and it’s fine to have a kid out of wedlock and all of these things have great advantages.

Nobody wants to go back to the time, you know, before we had those things. Yeah. Very few people anyway, maybe some people on the extreme right, but it’s pretty rare. Most people agree that those are net positives. We have to acknowledge there’s downsides to it as well in family instability in, just, you know – there’s more instability when you have more freedom.

Chapter 5 – Generation X

Fred Pinto: Gen X is next. We are both Gen X, so this one is personal to both of us. Um, we are a smaller generation, stuck between two larger ones. So the boomers on one hand and the millennials on the other. We’re a cynical generation. Cynicism is a feature that a lot of people associate with Gen X.

We’re bombarded with advertising from the moment we’re born, so we tend not to trust people and companies who try to sell us stuff. Um, we’re also the first generation with maybe parents who are as materially ambitious and absent as they are, as opposed to, you know, the boomers, who are raised, most of them, by the Silence.

TV and pop culture are a lot more central to our upbringing. We have really much higher self-esteem, but social capital is also declining, during our upbringing. We’re also, I was surprised to see, that we’re quite materialistic when you compare it to even the boomers. In surveys from the 60s, having a meaningful philosophy of life was way more important than being well off financially.

By the 90s, it’s the opposite. Fewer Gen Xers than boomers valued finding purpose and meaning in life and more valued having lots of money. It almost seems to me, when I read this, this kind of, these deeper kind of analyses of the views of Gen X, it seems that our cynicism wasn’t driven really by any kind of great sense of idealism, but almost by a sense of resignation to the values of individualism and materialism that we were sensing around us.

And so, the question I ask myself, and I’m curious to see what your thoughts are, Is, did we end up becoming the things we were cynical about in many ways?

Jean Twenge: Well, I think this is a great, really interesting question that you’re posing, because there’s a disconnect between the way Gen X is often portrayed and remembered in pop culture versus what young people were saying at the time say on some of these big studies big national surveys So, you know, I’ve read a bunch of articles just in the last year about this saying, you know Gen X is cynical and I think that has some truth to it.

There is less trust. Trust has gone down. So I think that piece is true for cynicism, but there’s also this Gen X reputation of the cynicism coming with, that it’s anti materialistic, that you should be anti-establishment, that you should, you know, defy the rules that you should, not give into advertising.

So, like, “Reality Bites”, the 1994 movie, is often used as an example of this because the kind of message in that movie is, like, don’t sell out. I think that that message of like, don’t sell out, that’s much more boomer. I think that’s the last gasp of the boomers. That’s actually not a Gen X thing when you really dig into what young Gen Xers are saying at the time.

What they were saying at the time, as you mentioned, is they were more likely to say being well off financially is important. They’re more likely to say, you know, “I really want to own a vacation home and a boat”, compared to boomers before them. Some of it was that time, it’s not just unique to Gen X, it was also, I mean, come on, it was the 80s, you know, that was a pretty materialistic time, and Gen X was reflecting that, and that kind of bled into the early 90s as well.

Then it’s true, you know, like, by the time you got to 94, things kind of turned a little bit darker and more cynical. But I think that wasn’t so much of, you know, we’re going to reject selling out. It’s more things kind of souring in the culture, especially as the crime rate went up and things just in the economy wasn’t doing as well and things just looked more negative.

So it was that kind of twist on it of: “Oh, you know, I wanted all this stuff and now I can’t even get it”. And I think that’s where some of the cynicism came from, not necessarily, you know, the supposedly Gen X idea of you can’t sell out, which is actually a boomer idea.

Fred Pinto: Right. And it’s funny because also a lot of us came up during the dot com boom.

Jean Twenge: And then that changed again, right? Yeah, because that’s the funny thing if you look back at that stuff from like 1993, 1994 and it’s all so negative and everything is terrible and Gen X is never going to do well economically. Just three years later, guess what happened? You know, then you got the dot com boom, then there were lots of Gen Xers making plenty of money. Because it was like, so what is it? Is it the Gen Xer who’s the slacker that’s in 1993? And just three years later in 96’ in the image of the generation is the Silicon Valley Billionaire. Pick one. Those are two pretty different things,

Fred Pinto: Right. And even the slacker, even like the whole grunge movement, the whole Seattle grunge movement, even the slackers are actually pretty hard-working rock stars making millions and millions of dollars, right? And they dress up kind of like lower middle class, but they’re actually multi-millionaires flying in private jets.

Jean Twenge: And, you know, some of them were not comfortable with that, Kurt Cobain being a great example. But a lot of the rest of them were perfectly happy to be able to make a career out of it and, probably got criticized for quote selling out but well frankly laughed all the way to the bank.

Fred Pinto: Pretty big sellouts. Because the cynicism another expression of it is less political engagement or maybe less desire to be involved in politics generally and so how do you read that? It’s almost like okay, like we kind of accepted like we’re gonna get our victory in the marketplace, not in the political world.

Jean Twenge: You know, that was kind of my theory going in that that’s what it was about. That it was, you know, Gen X was kind of checked out of politics, which is true. If you look at some of the survey data and voter participation, you know, in the 90’, when young adults were Gen X, those were low. It was lower than the boomers before them in the millennials after them. So there’s some truth to that. There’s also truth to, if you look at politicians, say senators and governors, Gen Xers have not reached the level of boomers at the same age, say, in their 50s. They just haven’t. And some of that is because people live longer and the boomers are a big generation and they kind of held on to power longer. But some of it is Gen X just maybe didn’t want to do that as much.

But where it falls apart is I originally thought, okay, but they’ll probably be really successful in business given the survey data.

Same thing happens when you look at the CEOs of the Fortune 100 companies. Gen Xers should not retain those positions, at the same age as boomers as much. And so, I think that, that a good amount of that with politics is just boomers blocking the way for Gen Xers to move up. Although it’ll be very interesting to watch in the next five to ten years, I think that’s increasingly going to happen.

Fred Pinto: And I know one of the questions you raise is: “Is Gen X going to assert itself ? Or is it going to be leapfrogged by the millennials, who are also a much larger generation, who took over kind of, culturally and even politically”.

Jean Twenge: Yeah. And millennials have – at least as young adults, did vote at a higher rate than Gen Xers.

They have retained, they have met or been elected to positions in, say, the House of Representatives at a higher rate. So it is possible that that might happen. And some of that is due to the, the size of the generations. But even when you take that into account, there’s still that difference.

So I think that, that remains to be seen. But I have certainly noticed in the talks that I give on generations in the workplace, for example, that there’s a lot more Gen Xers in my crowds now of managers. So, it is happening, and it, at least in the business world, it looks like that leapfrogging is not happening as much.

Maybe it will some more in politics, but Gen X is, Basically, finally, at long last really entering a lot of those leadership positions in business.

Fred Pinto: But as you gave me the, the, the breakdown on the CEOs, um, uh, front as well, I started thinking of, David Brooks, had a book, I believe in the nineties called Bobo’s in Paradise.

This bourgeois bohemian kind of thing and I find it kind of captures something about Gen X where, you know, we wanted to be bourgeois and kind of well off, but we also didn’t want to work too hard. We also wanted to enjoy life a little bit, and I wonder if that is even compatible with like, let’s call it success, as a CEO of a fortune 500 company, which involves a lot more work, a lot more sacrifice for that extra money.

I wonder if there’s something there in the ethos of Gen X, maybe playing, playing a part in that.

Jean Twenge: I think it very well could be. I mean, if you look at the survey data, Gen X was less likely to say they thought work was going to be a central part of their lives, less likely to say they were willing to work overtime compared to boomers at the same age, you know, 10 years before.

So there, there may be some of that too, that they looked at that and said: “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to kill myself at work. Um, I want to have work life balance.” I mean, the whole idea of work life balance basically started with Gen X.

Fred Pinto: Very interesting. It’s interesting how, when you look at the data, it kind of sheds light on certain blind spots in your thinking. When I heard about Gen X, I have a generally positive view of it, but then you see this materialism, but also this, “I don’t want to work as hard”. Right?

So, there’s a bit of disingenuousness there.

Jean Twenge: Yep. Negatives and positives to every generation. And yeah, you know, you have to go where the data leads you on that. You can’t go, “Oh, I’m a Gen Xer. That’s negative. That can’t be true.” You’re never gonna’ find the truth that way.

Chapter 6 – Millennials

Fred Pinto: Okay, on to Millennials.

Millennials were a very planned generation, a very wanted generation. They were raised with a lot of optimism, a lot of positivity – the, you know, self-esteem movement in psychology, as we discussed at the beginning. They raised the bar on the individual self. They were – kind of see themselves as awesome.

So you can, you can measure that statistically. So by 2010, 70 percent of people believed they would be in the top 20 percent at work. Today, 80 percent of incoming college students believe they’re above average leaders. You can kind of say that they’re, in a sense, their sense of self is a statistical impossibility.

There’s also grade inflation. So teachers start giving higher grades, but the hours of homework are, are going down. So, more self-esteem, more telling that they’re awesome, meanwhile, maybe less competence, more of an illusion of competence. And as adults, now that millennials are starting to age a little bit, the plot is kind of thickening for them a little bit because, you know, maybe their expectations are not being met. Maybe, their expectations were too high. Their depression rates skyrocketed compared to, you know, even Gen X and boomers before them. 22 percent of millennials say they have no friends, compared to only 9 percent of boomers. They’re very tech savvy, but technology also makes them judge each other a lot, and, you know, all the social comparison.

Millennials are very central to the West today. Their predicament as a West – so, very high expectations, a lot of technology, a lot of social comparison, and so forth. I guess what I got from your work is, it really made it clear how stuck in the middle of a generations long trend they are.

And how a lot of people will judge millennials. It’s very, it’s very trendy with other generations to kind of, you know, blame individual millennials. But can you really expect them to be any different, looking at how powerful these trends are that they’re inside? It kind of made me almost have more empathy for them when I read your chapter on millennials.

Jean Twenge: Well, I’m glad to hear that, you know, because that was a real goal in this book – for the generations to try to understand each other better and to try to start from that place of empathy; because I think it’s really counterproductive when it becomes: “Oh, but whose fault is it?”

Is it the Millennials fault or is it the boomers who raised them? It’s nobody’s fault. These are big cultural changes We’re all participating in them. We’ve all been shaped by them and I think it just – makes more sense to say: “Let’s just start with the premise that there are some differences”. People have different perspectives. Generations are one of those perspectives and let’s try to understand each other better and some of the changes are good. Thus, you know, we’re going to argue about whose fault those are too, when the changes are positive. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, I think to focus on that. So, it’s also – I think it does have to be put in that context, in general with generations that they are shaped by these things that happened before they were born.

But at some point – at what point are you going to take responsibility? So it has to be that both things are true, that generations are shaped by those who come before them, but then you have to, at some point say: “Okay, this is who we are and let’s move forward.”

Fred Pinto: And do you feel in your research and your studies that – that is happening among millennials? Or perhaps what strategies are millennials employing that might be productive towards that end?

Jean Twenge: Well, that’s a little hard to tell from the survey data that we’ve got. I mean, one thing that’s really encouraging is that millennials have done much better financially than anybody ever expected.

So, there was the expectation when they were young adults, it’s the same thing that played out with Gen X of – there’s a recession. And so, this generation is never going to be able to do as well as their parents. That was said about Gen X in the early nineties. It turned out to not to be true. It was said about millennials during the great recession. And it also turned out not to be true. That they, um, particularly those who bought houses before 2020, have done extremely well for themselves. And the most recent analysis from, the St. Louis Fed shows that millennials actually surpassed the wealth of Gen Xers and Boomers at the same age, which nobody would have expected 10 years ago, even five years ago, even a year ago, when an excerpt of “Generations” was, was published in the Atlantic, I just used census data to show that median incomes for young adults were at all time highs, that the home ownership rate of millennials was only a percentage point or two behind Gen Xers and Boomers at the same age. They were actually doing really well. The main two reactions I got was: “Oh, you must not have adjusted for inflation.” Yeah, it was already adjusted for inflation. The Atlantic never would have published it otherwise; And, “you’re wrong”.

Well, now the St. Louis Fed has shown, actually, yeah that millennials, not just – it’s not just that they have higher salaries, their wealth building has actually surpassed previous generations.

Fred Pinto: It’s funny because that was a narrative for a very long time.

Jean Twenge: Very long time.

Fred Pinto: Millennials are growing up poor and that, you know, it was much easier for boomers and it was much easier for Gen X and we’re left on the outside looking in. Of course with 2008, but it’s funny how you see like a lot of these things, the way they play out over the long term. You have to kind of wait and see, right? For people to graduate college and get into the workforce and then buy their first home. And it takes time to kind of really get the full picture. In a sense, it’s funny. I’m thinking about this for the first time as you say this.

Maybe all those high expectations and maybe all that positive self-esteem and so forth, maybe it ended up paying off in the end, no? For the millennials?

Jean Twenge: Yes and no. So, I think some of the overconfidence, probably not. However, them having the high expectation, for example, that they – which is just, just skyrocketed from boomers to Gen Xers to millennials of: “I’m going to go to college and actually I’m going to go to grad school and I’m going to, you know, have a professional job.”

Well, those expectations were definitely unrealistic. However, they do have a little bit of an advantage, that let’s say you’re aiming to get a graduate degree. Well, maybe you don’t do that because that’s going to be a smaller percentage. But maybe you do finish college because that is one of the main reasons why millennials have done so well economically is because more of them have a college education compared to Gen Xers and Boomers. And people who have college education tend to make more money. So that is one of the keys to their salaries and their wealth building. So, in that way, it may have had that, that benefit.

Fred Pinto: Very interesting. How the data really, really adds to the typical narratives and the typical kind of impressions we have of different generations.

Chapter 7 – Gen Z

And then you look at the fuller picture and it’s a lot more complex and a lot more multidimensional. Very, very interesting. Great. Okay. And finally, we have Gen Z. Gen Z are younger. We don’t have as much data on them. Obviously, we have to wait for the full picture to sort of emerge. But we already see some trends.

They’re okay, apparently, growing up even more slowly than Millennials. I know, I have a Gen Z son, so I’m kind of following that reality. They have a big concern for safety, apparently. They don’t enjoy taking risks as much. There, there seems to be a trend towards, you say, an external locus of control.

People perhaps, you know, believing they’re more likely to be discriminated against, even though there’s, arguably, I mean, we talk about that, but less discrimination than before. They seem to be growing up in a bit more of a grievance culture, where victimhood is more emphasized. Voter turnout is also going up among them. Perhaps that also goes with an external locus of control of “Maybe the government will fix this”, or the expectation is “the institution will fix this”, “the school will fix this”, “the parents will fix this”. So, this trend, towards an external locus of control, of course, in the psychology literature is associated with negative mental health measures.

Given this, do you see this as a worrying trend for Gen Z? And how can, and I know this is also part of Jonathan Haidt’s work – how can we go about fostering, maybe more of an internal locus of control and getting them to engage more with the real world?

Jean Twenge: Yeah, so the locus of control piece, just recently on my sub-stack, I looked into this more deeply, cause there’s some seemingly paradoxical trends here that – it is true, Gen Z is more likely than Millennials or Gen Xers or Boomers at the same age to say, every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me. They’re more likely to agree with that. A lot of things around kind of personal locus of control, it’s a one-time surveys – are more likely to say that America is an unfair society. That we need to, you know, completely change government. And, you know, anecdotally, I think many people can see that with Gen Z and their narrative online, which many people call doomerism of, you know: “Everything is terrible, discrimination is worse now than ever and nobody can ever get ahead.” And it’s all just very, very negative stuff, which is partially because social media algorithms pull for that.

So we have that on the one hand, but then on the other, voter participation’s up. Young people are more likely now, especially young liberals, to say: “I think voting makes a difference”. They’re more likely again, especially young liberals, to say: “I think citizen action groups and things like protesting will make a difference”.

That’s really upticked in the last like 10 years or so. So – there is the doomerism, but then there’s, “what are we going to do about it?” If you have Doomerism, you know, one, one strategy would be to do nothing and so for a while, I was like: “I wonder which direction this is going to go. Or is it going to be, we’re just going to complain online? Or is there going to be any action involved?”. And I think now my opinion’s shifted on this a little bit with this new data analysis. I think there’s going to be more of the action piece. I think there’s going to be more that voter turnout – at least if – they do what they say they’re going to do. More voter turnout, a continuation of protests, which I think we’ve already seen that on college campuses last year, for example. And I think that’s going to continue, at least by what we can tell from the survey data that Gen Z is like, they’re not just negative, they’re not just doomers, they want it –  they think it needs to be changed.

And so that’s a more internal locus of control. You know, older generations may not always agree with their methods or what they’re doing, but they are doing something. And it’s just a matter of channeling that in a productive way. I think.

Fred Pinto: Very interesting. So even the external locus of control could just be like one of their chapters as they sort of evolve psychologically.

Maybe they start with, they don’t have a lot of power, they don’t have jobs, they don’t have, right? So they’re kind of seeing everything as – which is kind of is, right? Determined by external forces. But, but maybe at least a voter turnout is indicating maybe there’s a – they want to take responsibility and they want to sort of do something about it. So, you have this continuation.

I’m just very curious, the way, the way you guys measure these datasets on external and internal locus of control, how good do you believe the data is? And how do you go about actually tracking those views? Because, I know it’s a body of psychology that has quite a bit. It’s very voluminous and has a lot of history behind it.

I’m just curious to see how you sort of – you seem to have your finger on the pulse. And how do you figure these things out? Where do you find that information?

Jean Twenge: Yeah well. you know, the big data sets that I draw from. That’s really the strength of it. I mean, we live in the age of big data, and it’s much more accessible than it ever used to be.

And that’s true for people who say scrape social media posts, but it’s also true for survey data and data on behaviors. That just makes it much easier to be able to have your finger on the pulse. And I think that I’ve been able to do that at a few points. Particularly with Gen Z because of the accessibility of that data.

It’s just, you have to do the work of downloading it all and merging it all, but you know, it can be laborious at times, but that’s what I like doing. And then again, it’s about listening to what young people say themselves and that’s what they do. And these data sets are very, very solid. You know, most of them are – A lot of them are either administered by government entities or they are funded by places like, say, the Department of Health and Human Services and so on. Many of them, you know – they’ve been going on for decades. You know, the people who administer these data sets really know what they’re doing and they know how to get representative samples and they know how to make sure things are anonymous and get that across to participants.

They’re very, very solid. And that makes my job a lot easier because then that data is there and we can be confident in it and we know that it comes from a reliable and neutral source.

Fred Pinto: Very interesting. So I’m really interested in how these different generations communicate and cooperate with one another.

After all, that’s what a society is, not just politically at the level of a government, but that’s what a business is, that’s what a family is, and so on and so forth. But if we have this sort of mother turtle, you know, that keeps accelerating, and keeps kind of increasing the gap between generations; Are we not headed towards more fragmentation and less understanding across generations? And I understand that one of the purposes of your work, and it’s extremely, extremely helpful in that regard, is making different generations aware of what the other, you know, actually is, and what they think, and what their values are, and the reasons why. And it kind of points to an underlying humanity that, you know, it’s very hard to sort of peg, a character trait that’s shared across a generation to strictly individual responsibility when you notice that we’re all part of these much larger social and cultural trends.

What do you think concretely are some of the things we can do to improve – sort of harmonize the generations, bring us more together, understand each other a little bit better? Because we need that at all levels of social coordination.

Jean Twenge: Yeah, we do, and I think it’s in many ways harder than ever.

I do think, as you said, starting with understanding and empathy and knowing that someone might have a different perspective because of when they were born, great place to start. That we can set, set aside that language around blaming and fault. I think that’s a fantastic place to start.

And, you know, listen to each other, whether that’s on surveys or in person and try to tune out a lot of that social media noise where you’re getting – it feels like – when you’re on social media that you’re getting a cross section of what people think and you’re not – you’re getting often the angriest and the most negative.

And then it’s also, the people who have particular grievances who are going to spend the most time. And, you know, you’re not really getting a cross section on what people think. And it’s tempting to believe that, but you’re not. So, trying to have those conversations in person as much as possible is certainly one way to go.

Fred Pinto: Amazing. Really, really, really, really helpful and very interesting. Dr. Twenge, I’d like to thank you for your work, not just for the interview, but more generally. Your work is really, really, fantastic, very educational, very, very, packed with insights. This approach that you have, using really data driven, analyses of these issues, brings all of these different insights much more into focus than when we have, kind of, more general conversations that are not as educated by the data.

So really, thank you very much for your work. I’m curious, are you working on another major project? Is there another major book? I know “Generations” came out pretty recently – but do you have anything else on the horizon that might be of interest to us?

Jean Twenge: Well, you know, we talked a little bit about the adolescent mental health crisis and how it looks like it’s due, you know, to smartphones and social media.

And what that’s meant is that parents, like you and me, are in the position of trying to help our kids have a better balance and spend some real world time and not just be on the phone or the gaming console all the time. So that’s probably going to be my next book is a book for parents on trying to set some rules and limits around technology. So our kids can be happier and healthier.

So working title at the moment is Future-Proof Parenting.

Fred Pinto: Very nice. And I realized I follow your sub-stack lately, you’ve been writing a few articles around that topic. Where can people find you? Where should they follow you if they want to be up to date with your work?

Jean Twenge: I usually put my updated analyses on my sub stack, which is the Generation Tech sub stack. And then, I have – there’s a lot more information about all of my books and speaking engagements and things like that on my website, which is jeantwangy.com.

Fred Pinto: Excellent. Dr. Twangy, thank you so much. It was a real honor and pleasure.

Jean Twenge: Great to talk to you as well. Thank you.

 

GOAT 5

 

GOAT 6