Jean Twenge's New Book Takes Readers on a Data-Driven Tour of Six Living Generations

Jean M. Twenge is the scholar who introduced us to Millennials in Generation Me (2006) and Gen Z in iGen (2017). The defining feature of her work is that she doesn’t rely on mere generational stereotypes—she mines long-running surveys to sort out how each new crop of young people truly differs from the last.

And yet, as often as not, her findings tend to align with the patterns we all notice in everyday life. Stereotypes, after all, can be rooted in some semblance of truth. And while generational cutoffs are arbitrary, people born around the same time do share a common set of experiences and, to an extent, psychological traits as well.

Now Twenge is back with Generations, which, rather than debuting the next round of young adults, covers the lives and traits of all the living generations to reach adulthood: Silents (born 1925 to 1945), Boomers (1946-1964), Gen X (1965-1979), Millennials (1980-1994), and Gen Z (1995-2012). For good measure, Twenge also takes a stab at naming the next one—she goes with “Polars,” a combination of “polarization” and “polar ice caps” that seems highly unlikely to capture the cohort’s essence when they start hitting adulthood in a decade or so, but we’ll see—and makes some predictions.

At more than 500 pages, Generations is a lot to take in, especially when many readers will have personally lived through most of the history it addresses. But it can be fun to revisit previous eras, and for those who want to check their impressions of different generations against hard data, the book is an invaluable resource.

Perhaps most importantly, Twenge frames her narrative in a theory of recent generational shifts. "Technology has completely changed the way we live,” she writes, “and the way we think, behave, and relate to each other.” From television and labor-saving appliances to smartphones, new technologies have led to greater individualism and longer lives—and in turn slower lives as well, with the boundaries of childhood and adolescence expanding. On some metrics, Twenge notes, “18-year-olds now look like 14-year-olds in previous generations.”

Twenge starts with the Silent Generation, awkwardly trapped between the fêted Greatest Generation that won World War II and the massive Baby Boom generation conceived afterward. They weren’t so silent after all—they got a lot of social changes rolling before the Boomers took over, and indeed led the various countercultural and civil-rights movements of the late ’60s (Jimi Hendrix and all four Beatles were Silents, for instance)—but they were traditional in a lot of ways. Coming of age before easy access to effective birth control, they married early and had kids and didn’t make too much of a fuss about it.

Does much more need to be said about the Boomers, who have dominated American culture and government for decades? Maybe not, but in her chapter on the group, Twenge explains how Boomers took the cultural changes pioneered by Silents and made them mainstream—and how they evolved over the course of their lives, from the rebellious ’70s to the capitalistic Reagan era, with an individualistic streak being a consistent factor. The Boomers did drugs, got divorced in record numbers, and suffered worse mental health than Silents.

Next up is cynical Generation X, like the Silents trapped between two generations that tend to get more attention, though they had their moment with ’90s pop culture. Here, perhaps the most interesting point Twenge makes is that Gen X bucked the general trend toward living life slowly. Gen Xers grew up fast, having sex and trying drugs with little supervision—they didn’t have the stay-at-home moms of previous generations or the “helicopter parents” of later ones. But then they got married and had kids late. "In short,” Twenge writes, “Gen X extended adolescence beyond all previous limits.”

When it comes to Millennials and Gen Z, Twenge largely covers topics that have already been much-discussed, including in her own previous books. We Millennials, for instance, took all that “self-esteem” nonsense we were taught as children to heart, to the point of having high levels of narcissistic personality traits in our college years. We took an especially big hit from the Great Recession—which for many of us occurred right at the transition from education to the job market—but we’ve recovered since and are doing as well economically as previous generations. Of course, that hasn’t stopped us from whining about it. Meanwhile, we took forever to grow up and aren’t having many kids.

Thankfully, Gen Z is looking even more ridiculous than we do. To overgeneralize a tad, they are growing up in prosperous times but are depressed about it; smartphones seem to have broken their social and sex lives; opinions they disagree with make them cry; a sixth of them claim they’re some variant or other of non-heterosexual; and they see oppression everywhere. Women have outnumbered men on college campuses since the early 1980s, but since the mid-2010s, a majority of 12th graders have said they think women are discriminated against in getting a college education. This number has roughly doubled since the 2000s.

Generally, one gets the sense that lives have gotten easier, people have gotten softer, and young adults have only grown more and more obsessed with themselves. As a Millennial who types his opinions for a living, I can’t decry these trends too much, but one wonders what happens if this country faces a threat requiring the typical able-bodied adult to do something more than stay home, watch Netflix, and collect free money.

Generations escorts readers on a data-filled tour of the various age groups we find in our daily lives—and it’s full of ammo to deploy against your stubborn Boomer relatives, your useless Gen Z coworkers, or whatever cohort you may need to complain about.

Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.