Awkwardly, I try to get friends Tom Naps and Brian Tebbitt to tell me how they are different from each other. Theirs is an intergenerational friendship, and the topic today is one of popular, if controversial, interest: the generations. Five generations mostly make up the country right now. They are baby boomers, born 1946-1964; Generation X, born 1965-1980; millennials, born 1981-1996; Generation Z, born 1997-2012; and Generation Alpha, born from the early 2010s to today. (Birth years vary by source, and these come from Pew Research Center, a driver of the generation conversation.)
Google searches on the subject doubled in 2016 and have remained as high. Why? Not clear, but Gen Z was just old enough to vote in that year’s presidential election. The younger cohorts—Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X—outvoted older generations for the first time. (In the next race, Gen Alpha votes, too.)
Trend pieces make us sound crowded and competitive: “Gen Z colleagues are annoyed by you,” Forbes recently told readers—“probably,” and they’re graying early, claimed Newsweek, like millennials, who are, said Business Insider, “turning into their boomer parents,” who are, warned The Economist, carrying bad habits (“sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll”) into retirement. Millennials want homes that empty-nest boomers will not relinquish. Gen Z wants their older managers to respect their mental-health days.
Do Naps and Tebbitt ever clash? “We’re both nerds,” Tebbitt offers, sitting beside Naps at a St. Paul cafe—“that accounts for a lot.” He’s clearer on ways they mesh.
If the generations are legit, let’s see if you can guess Tom Naps’ generation from a brief description. As a student at Marquette University, he sat out of protests. Naps has never enjoyed big groups, apt to “hibernate in the library and do math.” Finishing graduate school—without debt—he got married and now has two kids. He recalls being one of the only math professors interested in shifting to computer science.
Let’s see: Baby boomers and Gen Z are the young activists—but Naps sounds too old to be Gen Z. Not marrying until after grad school? That suggests the “slow life” strategy of Gen X and millennials. Then again, no college debt…?
Born in 1947, Naps is a baby boomer—but it’s not a perfect, or even good, fit. “Probably not a lot of baby boomers—not a lot of people in general—are fascinated by things in mathematics,” he says. “I maybe think about the world differently than a lot of other baby boomers.”
There are other discrepancies: Boomers mostly married in their early 20s, whereas Naps was going on 30. Boomers are the generation of divorce, but Naps didn’t. Since the start of a generation can differ significantly from its end, it’s worth noting he’s a “cusper,” too, nearly of the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945).
Tebbitt teaches philosophy at the University of Minnesota and is also a cusper—Gen X by a hair, born in 1980. Naps, post-retirement, volunteered as Tebbitt’s teaching assistant, and they hit it off. They bond over their lives of the mind, over their adult children. They are iffy on generational labels. Does it make sense to say their friendship is boomer-Gen X, or Silent-millennial—or anything like that?
A “growing chorus” would say no, according to Pew’s director of social trends, Kim Parker. Parker, in a release two years ago, described generational analysis as thriving—but not in a good way. “The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology,” she warned. The National Library of Medicine, in 2020, went further: Talking about generations at all promotes “modern ageism.”
Detractors have likened generations to horoscopes: anecdotal, made up, potentially harmful. “OK, boomer,” an eye-roll phrase, marked “the end of friendly generational relations,” The New York Times intoned in 2020. Generalizations go something like this: Gen Z, ruling TikTok and “cancelling” their elders, have decreed millennial tastes “cheugy,” a word millennials had to look up when they weren’t blowing their incomes on avocado toast and blaming every garden-variety woe on boomers, who point the finger back at millennials and wonder why young people are taking so long to grow up. Gen X, stuck in middle-child syndrome, barely registers except to also get called “boomer.”
Generational conflict “is at a level not seen since the 1960s,” according to generations expert Jean M. Twenge, who adds, “separating the myths from the reality of generations is more important than ever.”
Twenge teaches psychology at San Diego State University (and happens to have Minnesota roots). Her 2023 book, “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials,
Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future,” taps into our “era of Big Data.” No longer must generational researchers rely on small samples and personal observations, she writes. That’s the stuff of myth, whereas her book taps 24 datasets including 39 million people. (This article relies on decades-long surveys—such as the American Freshman Survey, Monitoring the Future, and the General Social Survey—analyzed by Twenge in her book, unless cited otherwise.)
The generations are imprecise. They unscientifically lump together large, diverse groups of people. But there are differences, Twenge shows, controlling for factors like age and cross-generational trends. Her goal? It’s simple: to help us understand one another better, using imperfect labels that we already claim, proudly or abashedly. Also, perhaps: to foster more Naps-Tebbitt connections.
Reverberations
As happens sometimes, it all started with a boom. Generational bounds are ultimately arbitrary, but baby boomers’ are at least recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau—because they’re mostly based on demographics.
World War II ended, and the birth rate nearly doubled. (Naps was born right after his dad came back from Europe.) That “baby boom” ended with the birth control pill, bringing forth Gen Xers in a so-called “baby bust.” Millennials, largely children of boomers, created an “echo boom.” Gen Z broke with reverberations, defined largely by smartphones. And Gen Alpha’s birth years sync up with tablets, COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter.
Birth dates, though, are dry. Where does generational flavor come from? Some point to major events, such as 9/11 and COVID-19. But Twenge says all differences go back to technology.
Individualism Begins: Boomers and Gen X
Along with TV, home appliances—microwaves, washing machines—made “down time” more of a thing. In the ’60s, computers tilted work toward desk life, upping demand for social and verbal skills. Women could start building careers, thanks,
in part, to the newly approved birth control pill.
Technological progress sped through boomers’ early lives. It made life easier and independence more attainable—and outmoded the previous generation’s milieu of collectivism, Twenge argues. Instead, individualism was in. All about self-focus and self-determination, less interested in traditions and social rules, individualism seems only to have grown.
“Previous generations had rarely questioned the military draft,” Twenge writes—but boomers protested it away. Individualism rejects identity-based prejudice, and boomers became the first to live their whole adult lives with the Civil Rights Act outlawing job discrimination based on sex, race, and religion. On TV, they saw—along with toy commercials—the world: “There was more than one way of doing things.”
The ’70s brought rebellions of drugs and premarital sex. As ’80s “yuppies,” the college-educated won the “knowledge economy” while manual-labor jobs vanished, jacking up the income gap. Pop culture swirled around greed (Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” Madonna’s “Material Girl”).
And Gen X was paying attention. While their moms worked, these “latchkey kids” experimented with after-school freedom. TV defined Gen X, too, flaunting opulence in shows like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” Twenge points out. This is possibly part of why high school seniors’ expectations for the future (to have a professional job, a graduate degree) climbed steeply between the early ’80s and late ’90s.
Self-esteem caught on, with Gen X college students more likely than boomers to see themselves as above average. They embraced materialism in college, joining late boomers in rating extrinsic goals, such as finances, as more important than intrinsic goals, such as a meaningful life philosophy. (Twenge guesses the income gap was inspiring angst over middle-class prospects.)
In the end, Gen X was more confident, more educated, and more money-hungry than the average boomer. By 2000, they were poster children of the “internet millionaire.” It largely worked out: Their median income in 2019 surpassed what boomers’ had been at the same age.
Conversely, Gen X is known as cynical. See: grunge, gangsta rap, the movie “Slacker.” As high school seniors, they kicked off a decline in reported trust in others—by the early ’90s, half of what it had been for boomers, who remained about as trusting as Silents. This trend has continued among millennials and Gen Z. For Gen X, Twenge points to dog-eat-dog individualism, an early ’90s crime wave, and perceptions of an unequal, “rigged” economy.
Gen X was more open-minded, though. Support of homosexuality was growing, and more college students believed in the importance of racial understanding. “Growing up in an increasingly individualistic and cynical culture, Gen Xers of every race were taught to question everything,” Twenge writes—including, by the way, the idea that we can all be summed up by generations.
Screens Multiply: Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha
Boomers raised their kids with individualism practically in the water supply. As millennials grew up, phrases like “believe in yourself” flooded U.S. books. (Twenge shows this using the Google Books database.) Their generation would take Gen X’s rising self-esteem to new heights. As college students in 2008, ’80s-born millennials scored the highest yet on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. (Twenge shows neither Gen X nor millennials could match SAT scores to rising self-evaluations.) The same year, the Great Recession set in. Narcissism scores plummeted.
Popularly told, the millennial story involves a rise and fall, expectations inflated and then burst—along with the housing bubble. If they have put off, or shrugged off, traditional milestones, millennials have still done well for themselves lately. By 2020, millennials born in the early ’80s owned nearly as many homes as young-adult boomers had. That year, median individual income reached a record high for young adults, mostly millennials.
So, why has the idea that millennials are “screwed” proven sticky? College loan debt, Twenge suggests, and recently high housing prices. Boomers, the first outsize generation, 
went through something similar: This “echo boom” is a little too big, with The New York Times recently pointing out that the bulk of millennials (born in the early ’90s) strain resources as they age, from college enrollment and housing stock.
Then, consider millennials’ defining technologies: social media and online news. Studies suggest negativity gets more clicks and more social media engagement. Social media
enables upward comparisons, as do shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” Mix in millennials’ happy teen years, known for participation trophies and grade inflation—and maybe it’s a recipe for disappointment, Twenge suggests.
In young adulthood, millennials showed growing rates of depression. Before them, boomers had outstripped the Silent Generation in signs of poor mental health. (Gen X adults have shown slightly lower rates of depression than boomers.)
As one might guess, Gen Z (labeled “the anxious generation”) has continued this mental health decline. If millennials were optimistic, Gen Z is pessimistic: They reversed those long-climbing future expectations—for a professional job, for a graduate degree. They’ve furthered other, superficially less worrying millennial trends: They vote more, they’re less likely to try alcohol as teens. But their mental health amounts to something like an epidemic.
Twenge finds 2012 important in this regard. The year most people own smartphones, and 3 out of 4 teens begin using social media daily, trends emerge: Teens begin getting less sleep, spending markedly less time with friends in person, and exercising less. Teens’ reported loneliness, life dissatisfaction, and depression symptoms spike. Preteen, teen, and young adult suicide rates begin to skyrocket. Twenge supposes TV heralded an age of screen-lit unhappiness. Gen Z has been struggling, and she isolates smartphones and digital media as the main cause.
At the same time, Gen Z is an active force in the world. They have pioneered gender fluidity and led the way in LGBT acceptance. All generations have shown greater racial awareness in the wake of recent police killings, but Gen Z leads the way. (Pew has suggested major events shape younger folks more, as they’re still forming identities and values.) Protests picked up in the mid-2010s, as Gen Z became high school seniors. Since then, seniors have far exceeded prior generations in reporting they consider it important to correct inequalities. In the racial justice protests of 2020—packed with millennials and Gen Zers—some seasoned protesters said they saw more diversity, with more white people, than in the racial protests of the ’60s and ’90s.
Gen Z is a generation of safety, too. As teens, they have shown declining interest in taking risks, and they grew up as the phrase “safe space” increasingly appeared in U.S. books. They share safety with the youngest cohort, Gen Alpha. (Twenge refers to Gen Alpha as “Polars”—for the melting ice caps and for political polarization.) Theirs will be the first generation with a non-white majority, per U.S. Census projections. As tablet babies, Gen Alpha follows Gen Z into screen life. Safer than ever, they’re also the likeliest yet to get little exercise and be overweight. COVID-19’s Gen Alpha legacy so far includes learning deficits but only light mental health turbulence from late 2020.
Many trends have seemed worrying. But Gen Alpha is not doomed, Twenge says. They’re like Silents, “another low-birthrate generation born in times of calamity.” The Silents had
prosperous lives, and they led the civil rights and women’s movements, setting the stage for boomers—and for everyone else.
Shaping Tomorrow
That’s some of how we got here. But how are we doing now, with Gen Z building careers? With millennials wading into their 40s? Gen Xers, into their 50s? And boomers, staring down retirement? Moving forward, it seems, will mean adjusting expectations.
Last year, in a class on civic deliberation, University of Minnesota students voted on a topic to discuss with a small group of visiting boomers from the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), part of the U’s College of Continuing & Professional Studies. They landed on gun control. During the class, pre-law sophomore Melia Lachinski (born 2004) says her fellow Gen Zers were determined to be heard, sometimes leaning into debate “even though that’s not really what this experience was about,” she says. Dennis Donovan, the boomer professor running the class, says that’s so Gen Z: “They don’t want to be told.”
The boomers were mostly absorptive, Lachinski says, and she wanted to hear more from them. “They might have a lot of knowledge already about a subject, but they’re not going in and trying to change what people think.” Her idea of their generation expanded. Kim Kvale (born 1952) was one of the boomers, a retired public health nurse and educator. “[Gun control] wasn’t even a topic when I was growing up,” she reflects, noting her roots in a Western Montana hunting family. She listened to the students: Is the problem gun sales? Mental health? She recognized their outspokenness from her youth. “I remember … the protests and the marches and the sit-ins,” she says. “Oh, my goodness gracious—just, angry. I mean, we were ticked.”
“Some older adults are realizing they can’t afford to retire, or they don’t want to,” says Kate Schaefers, who does career development with OLLI. Kvale was part of the so-called Great Resignation, retiring at the start of the pandemic. She turned to OLLI because, without work, she felt her brain “sort of flatlining.”
Boomers, living longer than prior generations and working jobs of less wear and tear, have delayed retirement or chosen to work through it, especially part time. The 65-and-older segment of the workforce nearly quadrupled between the mid-1980s and 2023, according to Pew. And the country ages with them. By 2034, there will be more older adults than children. (The birthrate hit an all-time low in 2020, and Gen Z parents seem unlikely to counter that downward trend, Twenge writes. Later, this will pose another challenge for 
younger generations: Who will pay into social security as they retire?)
Gen X, meanwhile, hasn’t moved into C-suites, Twenge shows, using Fortune 500 companies as an example—possibly because boomers in business never left. As more retire this decade, the country faces a major worker shortage. Millennials and Gen X will step up.
Until then, office culture has already changed. Entry-level positions have shifted from millennials to Gen Z, and “that means a transition from optimism to pessimism,” Twenge writes, “entitlement to insecurity, and self-confidence to doubt.”
Work ethic rebounded with Gen Z, after having slid in the ’70s—but COVID-19 apparently reversed that. “Quiet quitting” became a Gen Z buzzword about doing the minimum. “A stereotype is that young people aren’t loyal,” Schaefers says. “But what does ‘loyalty’ mean?” It’s a mistake, she says, to assume a lack of shared values.
Research suggests generations define values differently. Younger workers, for instance, may see loyalty as more reciprocal: How will a company invest in them? (It’s worth noting: Such a concern expresses individualism, which Twenge would say boomers originated.)
So, what does motivate Gen Z? “Empathy is making a comeback,” Twenge writes—they like work that helps others and is worthwhile to society. Think: medicine, therapy, and public health. Possibly, COVID-19 and heightened political activism will further this trend. Companies, meanwhile, may feel mounting pressure to speak out on hot-button issues. For Gen Z, it’s normal for everything to be political.
And, by the way: What is your company’s mental health coverage? “I’d say conversations about mental health are something that [Gen Zers] do really well,” says Lachinski. If her obsessive-compulsive disorder is acting up, she feels comfortable asking a friend to, say, check her grades. Managers should take note: At-work openness about mental health may become only more acceptable.
The work-life divide, in turn, may increasingly blur. Twenge points to individualism again, as it stresses authenticity. Such blurring may explain why the past year has seen headlines about millennials craving the “soft life,” a kind of detachment from nine-to-five stresses and expectations.
“I really grew up in the high-optimistic, late-20th century,” says Briana Smith (born 1983), program manager for OLLI. Her millennial adulthood has involved sharp perspective on early confidence. Finishing grad school, she craved the homeowner life her parents had. But the market is tight, and past decisions were feeling impractical: a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and an expensive chosen city. She moved from Boston to Minneapolis this past summer—and is on the hunt. “I absolutely feel that dissonance,” she says, “that comes from shifting expectations and realities.”
What about communication? In intergenerational households, we may imagine battles of texters versus callers. But University of Minnesota researcher Jodi Dworkin has hopeful findings. “I think we all text a lot,” she says—but we adjust, too. “I had young people say, ‘Well, my grandma wants me to write her a letter, so I write her a letter.’” Asking young people and parents how they prefer to communicate, she says both groups largely responded, “in person.”
Still, young people in recent years have been online more, face-to-face less. More regulations may crop up for digital platforms, Twenge says—for instance, requiring identity verification, to discourage faceless aggression. “Probably most people I know have had experience with cyberbullying,” Lachinski says. But TikTok, she adds, gets unfairly maligned. “It’s cool to be connected to other people your age, who you might not even have a language connection with, through things like social media.” Donovan, the professor, pushes his students to find in-person time. “Get off your couch and get out and sit down with people and have coffee, get to know them,” he says—especially if those people have differing political views, “which is a foreign concept.”
Gen Z appears to reflect the politically polarized nation around them. High school seniors identified at the extremes of political ideology at the highest rates yet in 2021. Gen Z is the most likely generation to see U.S. society as unfair and in need of a ground-up overhaul. Along with millennials, they break with Gen X and boomers on free speech. Twenge goes back to dissatisfaction. “Gen Z’s general sense of negativity about the world and their own lives, fueled by their anger and disappointment, may be the spark
that ignites a new youth movement for social change,” she writes. “Their power has not been fully tapped, and older generations underestimate Gen Z at their peril.”
In U of M classrooms, Kvale notices stereotypes dissipating. “We listen to each other, and we realize that we have a lot more commonalities.”
It may sound obvious, but “when you bring people together with different perspectives and
experiences, it enriches the conversation,” Schaefers says. This includes the generations—although “researchers are really moving away from using [generations] as a lens to describe what’s going on,” she adds. “It can lead to a lot of stereotyping.”
We do, she admits, seem to claim those labels. And Twenge shows data analysis can reveal 
apparent differences. If we’re giving in to generational thinking, Schaefers would like it to help us understand and connect. “When we think about living communities, we often are somewhat age-segregated”—which partly informs OLLI’s goal, bringing boomers to undergrads. Meeting with a nursing student, Kvale says she realized the tech was different from her own days in nursing school, but “the worries, the concerns, the stresses, the dreams, the enjoyments were all the same.”
And where the generations don’t meet? Boomers can tell Gen Z about community organizing; Gen Z can tell boomers about trans rights. “Some of the research in this space has found that generations are much more similar,” OLLI’s Schaefers says, “especially when you look at things that they value.” Or, potentially: challenges that they face. And perhaps that’s the key—by focusing on our collective similarities, values, and challenges, each generation has a great deal to learn from each other.
Illustrations by Adobe/Moremar and Natalie Messer
