Why is it considered okay to judge people based on the fact they were born within the same 15-20 year period? Is it the appeal of the cutesy cohort names? Is it the fact that avocado toast and the phrase “OK Boomer” were, for a brief period, quite funny? How did we get here, asks Greg Bruce, and is it time we stopped?
We know there are differences between the generations. Of course there are. Take Generation Z, also known as "Zoomers", who were born roughly from the late 90s to somewhere around 2010. These are people that have never known a world without the internet, which is the most radical technological and social change in history, and which has altered their minds and behaviour in ways we cannot fully understand, but which we know to be enormous.
Except we don't. In a 2017 study in Psychiatric Quarterly, Professor Christopher Ferguson found that screen time, even at high levels of six hours or more per day, makes little difference to the likelihood of bad behaviour in young people.
"There's no evidence that kids spending time in front of a screen —whether computer, television, game console, or smart phone — has been a catastrophe for society," he told online publication Bold. "There's little evidence to say that screens have pervasive, long-term influence on children's behaviour. If we're looking at long-term influences, parents have far more dramatic influence than do screens."
In 2019, a large-scale Oxford University study found technology use to be about as strongly associated with wellbeing as eating potatoes, and much less strongly associated with wellbeing than wearing glasses. It also found the state of research into the area to be muddled and problematic, with researchers "torturing" data, to give them statistically significant results.
In 2020, an Ohio State University study titled "Kids These Days" assessed the difference in social skills between kids starting kindergarten in 1998 and those starting in 2010. "Overall," it concluded, "we found very little evidence that the time spent on screens was hurting social skills for most children."
We've consistently overstated the impact of new technology. In an editorial in 1884, The New York Times wrote: "There is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania." Six years earlier, in the same newspaper, the moral panic had been about the phonograph: "Our very small boys will fear to express themselves with childish freedom, lest the phonograph should report them as having used the name of "gosh," or as having to "bust the snoot" of the long-suffering governess. The phonograph was, at the time of its invention, the most terrible example of depraved ingenuity which the world had seen." By the 1920s, the leading object of fear was the radio. The Charlotte News wrote that it was "keeping children and their parents up late nights, wearing down their vitality for lack of sleep and making laggards out of them at school."
We can keep going back, forever if we need to. Several hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Socrates was gnashing his teeth regarding the advent of writing, which he believed would irreversibly weaken people's memories. Presumably he was right, because a generation later, his student Plato, whose writings are the reason we know what Socrates said, wrote: "What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the laws. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?" A generation after that, Plato's student Aristotle wrote: They overdo everything - they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else."
And so on.
Yes, I hear you say, but things are different now. The internet is the greatest technological upheaval in history. It is self-evident that its impact on young people will exceed not just those of writing but of TV, radio, video games, cycling, jazz and even crosswords, which, the Tamworth Herald wrote in 1924, have "dealt the final blow to the art of conversation, and have been known to break up homes".
To take just one obvious and terrifying example of the internet's impact on the younger generation, the prevalence of – and easy access to – online porn is definitely messing up their behaviour in ways we've never seen before.
Except we have. In 1954, in the wake of a nationwide moral panic flowing from revelations young people were having sex in the Hutt Valley, omnipresent and easily available smutty comics, magazines and books copped most of the blame. Hilda Ross, the Minister for the Welfare of Women and Children spoke passionately in Parliament of the "unclean literature which [was] flooding the country". She described the comics of the day as "powerful stimulants to sadism.
"If minds are fed with lustful images flowing from trashy magazines and unclean reading matter," she told the chamber, "then, as surely as night follows day, we may expect the degradation which the police statistics reveal."
The upshot of the collective terror her speech both represented and fuelled, was radical and strict new censorship laws, which were repealed less than a decade later.
The children and young people of that period are now known as Baby Boomers.
One of the most easily identifiable generations in the collective imagination, in part because of their massive media representation, is the American Flower Power generation of the late 1960s, who believed in peace, free love, and marijuana.
Except they didn't. A 1969 survey showed 88 per cent of Americans aged 21-29 said they hadn't used marijuana, and 75 per cent said the country shouldn't withdraw from Vietnam. Another survey, from 1967, showed that 63 per cent of those in their 20s thought couples should wait to have sex until they were married. This was the same percentage as the rest of the country.
The Flower Power generation are now known as Baby Boomers.
What else do we know about the differences between generations? How about the decline in work ethic among today's mollycoddled, entitled, short-attention-spanned young people? As The Germantown News asked in 2014, "What has happened to the work ethic in America? Nobody wants to work anymore. It has not always been that way." As an interview subject told the St Petersburg Times in 1999, "Nobody wants to work anymore … They all want to work in front of a computer and make lots of money." As a "disgusted businessman" told the News-Journal in 1979: "Nobody wants to work anymore." As peach orchardists told the York Daily Record in 1937, "Nobody wants to work anymore."
And so on.
These examples come from Paul Fairie, a Canadian researcher who hit paydirt on Twitter earlier this year, when he collected them and many other examples from newspapers dating back to 1894 in a viral thread titled "A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore". He now has a whole library of related threads, including, "A Brief History of Kids Today Are Too Soft", "A Brief History of School Today Is Too Easy", and "A List of Things People Blamed on Bicycles".
In using the internet to both catalogue and broadcast our neverending overreactions to everything, Fairie's library of threads offers hope that it might turn out to be more than an overengineered device for turning teens into sex-crazed, phone-addicted zombies.
Of his work putting together the threads, Fairie, who is a Millennial, says, "It's almost a bit therapeutic and relaxing for me. Sometimes you think, 'Oh, the world is stressful and strange and weird in unique ways that are only happening now, and how are we ever going to deal with these things?' And when I put the threads together, I think, 'Sure, okay, we'll survive somehow.'"
Having said that, he hasn't yet done a thread on climate change.
When we compare two generations – let's say, Boomers and Zoomers – we're not comparing 20-year-olds with 60-year-olds. We're comparing those currently aged roughly 10-25 with those currently aged roughly 58-76. That's a lot of intra-generational age variation even before you factor in attributes like sex, race, class, location, religion, education, life experience and the rest of the infinite, multitudinous brew that makes us who we are.
Yet, even when faced with evidence that generational labels are useless, we seem unable to shake our collective belief in them. In a 2021 article that showed no obvious signs of self-awareness, The Atlantic reported, "Today's economic conditions are not just holding Millennials back. They are stratifying them, leading to unequal experiences within the generation as well as between it and other cohorts."
Translation: We're going to write about Millennials as if they're a group, even though this article makes explicit the fact they're not.
A huge industry has grown up around the identification and labelling of generational groups. Giant multinationals like Deloitte and Goldman Sachs, and credible research firms like Nielsen, Gallup and Pew Research frequently produce long and credulous reports about the attributes of each group for clients who are presumably hoping to use the "insights" to more effectively sell their products and services.
So what?, you might ask. If corporates want to spend a lot of time and money producing meaningless reports for other corporates, why should we care? Is all this generational stuff any more harmful than, say, taking an interest in your star sign? Take what you want, leave what you don't, have a bit of a chuckle, etc?
In 2021, together with three colleagues, Cort Rudolph, assistant professor of Psychology at Saint Louis University, published a study into the use of generational labels that concluded: "Whether a generational label is new and catchy or accepted and seemingly mundane, it is built on the back of modern ageism, and generationalism — just like other "isms" — is far from benign."
On the phone from Saint Louis, Rudolph, who's a Millennial, gives an example: "Let's say you were a manager at work and you had a supervisee who was a relatively older individual and they weren't doing their job, and you said this specific person can't do their job because they're older - that would be construed as ageism. But if you said, 'These Boomers, they're all obsolete now,' you're not necessarily engaging that ageist sentiment - it's 'generational'."
He says he understands why generational labels have persisted in the management literature and the popular press, because they're digestible, easy-to-understand concepts: "These ideas have been around for so long I would argue they're pretty fundamental to the way we define ourselves as people," he says.
Things are changing though. In 2020, Rudolph was part of a team that worked on a research report for the US Army, which was released under the title: "Are Generational Categories Meaningful Distinctions for Workforce Management?" As you would expect for an organisation as large and powerful as the US Army, the report was long and scientifically exhaustive. Its conclusion was "No." It read, in part: "Rigorous studies have shown that individuals from the same generation are just as likely to be different from one another as they are from individuals born in other generations." And: "There is no evidence to support that groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, age, or generation share the same work values or needs. Abilities, attitudes and values of individual workers are shaped by a variety of life and career experiences."
Classic Millennial research findings, amirite?!
A story of Generation Z:
A Pākehā boy is born into a poor household in Māngere in 2000. He is straight. He has undiagnosed ADHD. He is conventionally attractive and popular and sexually active from a young age. His parents are libertarians and each room in their house is hung with inspirational quotes from David Seymour, who he comes to idolise. He contracts a chronic disease in his late teens, affecting his mobility. He becomes depressed. He likes smoking marijuana and bird-spotting. He leaves Māngere only once a year, at Christmas, to stay with his aunty in Raglan. He finishes school at 15 and goes to work as a stop-go man.
A Māori girl is born into a comfortable home in Epsom in 2001. She is gay. She has ADHD, which is identified early and effectively treated. By the time she’s 18, she’s lived in five different countries. Her parents are socialists. Her home features a good deal of post-modern European literature, which she reads voraciously. In her teens, she becomes active in a pentecostal youth group. She excels at school and goes on to university, where she studies the history of science. During her holidays, she gets a job as a stop-go woman, where she works alongside the Pākehā boy in silence, because they don’t have anything to talk about.