Jean Twenge on ‘Generations,’ about the silents to Gen Z and beyond

In her new book, “Generations,” Twenge is trying again. Marketers are already threatening to name the youngest among us Generation Alpha, but Twenge instead suggests Polars. Why? For one, there’s the rigid political polarization that characterizes the America into which they were born; for another, the polar ice caps are melting. Bleak to be sure, but certainly “descriptive.” It’s only for her own generation, Gen X, that Twenge endorses the alphabetical label. “We’re in our 40s and 50s, and we still feel undefined,” she said. “And X is the letter for an undefined quality.”

Twenge has been on the generations beat for three decades — and three books. Her first taste came in 1993, when she was an undergrad at the University of Chicago, studying gender differences. She gave out a questionnaire called the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and noticed that the women who took it were scoring very differently on traits related to assertiveness compared with their 1970s counterparts; they were much more likely, for example, to describe themselves as “leaders.” It turned out to be “the first generational difference I found,” she said. Twenge would soon see an opportunity in the market: Books like William Strauss and Neil Howe’s “Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069,” published in 1991, made multiple bestseller lists, “and they were really fun to read, but there was very little data,” she said. She thought she could do both.

The very idea of meaningful generational differences is a controversial one. Why is someone born on Dec. 31, 1979, associated with disaffection and black turtlenecks, and someone born on Jan. 1, 1980, with an inflated sense of self and an avocado toast addiction? “In the academic world, there’s a general skepticism that generations are real,” said social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who collaborates with Twenge on research about social media. But in her work, Haidt said, Twenge has shown “measurable and visible difference in the psychological make-up, the political preferences and in some very important behaviors across generations.”

Still, Twenge’s work has attracted a range of criticisms — and, a week before her latest book’s publication, she set off a Twitter storm for her claim, featured in an excerpt in the Atlantic, that millennials are much better off financially than they seem to think.

The controversy echoes the firestorm Twenge faced when the Atlantic excerpted “iGen” in a piece titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” “What was really interesting to me was how fiercely she was attacked by many psychologists,” Haidt said — critics who dismissed her claims about the impact of smartphones on young people as “another moral panic.” He continued, “I think it’s now clear that she was absolutely right.”

Others are less convinced. Among the critiques Twenge has fielded is that she distorted common idioms just to make a point, citing, for instance, the increased usage of the phrase “I love me” as proof of the rise of narcissism among millennials. As the critic Annalisa Quinn pointed out in her review of “iGen,” how often have you actually heard someone say “I love me”? It turned out, Quinn wrote, that there had been no rising incidence of the more natural phrase: “I love myself.”

Twenge has also been accused of overemphasizing the effects of technology at the expense, for example, of economic explanations. The Marxist writer Malcolm Harris called her “profoundly incurious” about the deeper economic dynamics at play when it came to the malaise of young American adults. Howe, co-author of a rival book on millennials and the author of the forthcoming “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” also thinks Twenge overemphasizes the power of technology, albeit for different reasons. “What’s more interesting about technology is not how technology shapes generations,” Howe said, “but how generations shape technology.”

Despite the disbelievers, technology writ large — from air conditioning to television to smartphones — is core to Twenge’s sense of what defines a generation, even down to when each one begins and ends. In fact, it is technology that has produced the two overall trends she emphasizes in her new book: an increase in individualism and a prolonging of the expected transition periods from childhood to full maturation.

One senses, picking up Twenge’s tome — 515 pages before you get to the appendix — an attempt to quell past criticisms. “I see this book as my magnum opus,” she said. “I think this is the one I’ve been preparing my whole life to write.” The jaunty humor that characterizes her previous books has been reined in here, partly, she says, to save space. This is her most evidence-heavy work, using 21 different data sets collected from places like the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the American National Election Studies, and the American Time Use Survey. Her data represents some 39 million people, mostly, but not exclusively, in the United States. Her goal was to depict all living American birth cohorts and examine some of the most prevalent generational myths along the way.

Twenge begins with the Silent Generation (born 1925 to 1945), pointing out that Silents, despite their unassuming name, represent many of the most high-impact figures in American history, including Martin Luther King Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert F. Kennedy. Yet not one of them occupied the presidency until Joe Biden moved into the White House. Their generation is in some ways a study in contradictions: As young adults, the Silents were busy conforming to an idealized domesticity, with the average age of marriage dropping compared with the Greatest Generation before them. “Nearly half of new brides in the 1950s were teenagers,” Twenge writes. But the generation also produced counterculture icons: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia — all Silents.

It is by now a cliche to describe their successors, the baby boomers, as the generation that launched the cult of the self. They were the first kids brought up on television, targeted by advertisements directly in their living rooms, whose values would shift so unapologetically toward the individualistic, the cultural mode we still accept as our default today. Less often discussed is a pattern Twenge discovered in the data: The boomers are also the generation that first saw a precipitous decline in mental health.

Ironically, when it came to her own Gen X, Twenge initially drew a blank. She leaned on fellow Gen Xer Meghan Daum’s book “The Problem With Everything” to help crystallize her perception that the latchkey kids of Gen X valued “toughness,” which members of subsequent generations (often referred to as snowflakes) tended to reject, calling instead for trigger warnings and safe spaces.

As for the millennials, Twenge continues the portrait she began in her 2006 book, “Generation Me”: the millennial as the pumped-up narcissist. This was the “most wanted generation” in history (because of birth control and legal abortion), according to Twenge, children who were praised and presented with participation trophies, who went sailing into adulthood bound for disappointment, and who met it in the form of 9/11 and the Great Recession. And while she did sense a grim reality check coming for the cohort, “I don’t think I would have anticipated the almost severe turn toward the negative that millennials took,” she said, or “just how much their optimism was going to be kneecapped.”

Yet in trying to understand why, Twenge unearthed an economic pattern that surprised her. “The data on the income, on median incomes, is extremely clear: The millennials are actually making more money than previous generations at the same age,” she said. “That’s very counter to the narrative around stagnant wages and being broke and that they’re never going to earn as much as their parents. They’re actually earning more.”

As many critics have noted, median income is only one lens on prosperity. But Twenge maintains that, even accounting for housing costs and student loans, the overall picture of how the Millennials are faring does not align with their own sense of financial stress.

It is the members of Gen Z, rather than the millennials, who are the most straightforwardly affected by the development of the internet, Twenge argues, because they never existed in a world without it. In “iGen” she portrayed this group, then mostly in adolescence, as inclined to stay home in sweatpants and post on Snapchat, and to avoid driving cars, reading books and having sex, all preferences influenced by the sudden ubiquity of smartphones (in 2012, ownership of smartphones crossed the 50 percent line). Here, Twenge follows up with a deeper dive into their mental health. Her findings align with recent, much-discussed reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of teenage distress. “The number of teens with clinical-level depression doubled between 2011 and 2020,” she writes. “There is a full-blown mental health crisis among young people, and it was building long before the covid-19 pandemic.”

And if, as Twenge argues, the proliferation of internet-enabled devices is the defining factor in Gen Z’s profile — and the main root of its problems — the Alphas, or Polars, remain an open question. The oldest are now in the fourth grade; the youngest were born into a world of Zoom calls and covid-19. They are a generation arriving at a “tenuous” time in American history, Twenge writes, “another low-birth-rate generation born in times of calamity,” like the Silents were.

Reading Twenge, I find myself sometimes nodding in recognition, sometimes numb with pessimism, rejection or denial. I’m a reluctant millennial myself (or possibly — God forbid — an xennial), stuck in the pretty common category of not identifying with my so-called generation. I’m secretly scandalized by selfies, and I wish we could return to 2004 and tell Mark Zuckerberg “No, thanks.” But I’m a millennial nonetheless, and, if Twenge prevails this time, my 3-year-old’s generation will be named after political and environmental disintegration.

The study of generations can be bleak and foreboding. “Sometimes when you talk about differences among generations, people can assume it’s about criticism,” Twenge said. “For me, it’s absolutely not about criticism. It’s about understanding.” Yet reduced to our data points, we aren’t exactly at our most compelling. My recommendation for anyone who comes away from these generational portraits less than cheered: Feast your eyes on the endlessly colorful, always contradictory details of a single person’s life.

Casey Schwartz is the author of “Attention: A Love Story.”

The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future