The American story of the last century is a paradox: Our liberty has increased along with our misery. Our lives have gotten longer but much of the meaning has been stripped away.
Technology, individualism, politics, money, sex, and parenting contribute to the major themes in the dramatic narrative of cultural evolution. The plot of the story is that societies, like individuals, can gain the world but lose their souls.
Jean Twenge’s new book Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future is a landmark achievement, as thorough and thoughtful an analysis of America’s living generations as anything I’ve read. Twenge is professor of psychology at San Diego State University. She has specialized in research about cultural changes in the United States across generational lines.
This book is a serious work of sociology that should interest pastors, corporate leaders, teachers, and anyone else who cares about understanding their neighbors. Generations is filled with illuminating and often surprising data, alongside Twenge’s incisive commentary and warm style.
And yet appreciating the book as a collection of important information isn’t sufficient. Generations is more than that. It’s a story, not ultimately about six disparate groups of people but about one country and the transformations from without and within that have reshaped it.
Categories That Make Sense
Twenge’s book begins helpfully with an apologia for studying generations. As critics have pointed out, there are good reasons to be skeptical of the practice of sorting people into generational categories. It isn’t clear how accurately they describe the individuals in any given cohort.
Our liberty has increased along with our misery. Our lives have gotten longer but much of the meaning has been stripped away.
Twenge responds that the possibility of reading too much into generational differences—for example, blithely dismissing someone as a “clueless boomer” or “lazy millennial”—doesn’t negate the value of categories. “No one has a choice in the year they were born,” she writes. “Thus we belong to a generation whether we like it or not.”
Generational tendencies aren’t surprising when we consider that human beings are affected by factors outside our individual control like macroeconomics, technology, and demographics. To study generations is really to study how groups of Americans responded collectively to the world they inherited and how that response in turn shapes the world inherited by their children and grandchildren.
Eliminating Moral Blind Spots
Reading Twenge’s observations helped me realize a personal blind spot: I was too often assuming that differences between older and younger generations were arbitrary and mostly character driven.
While individual character matters greatly, the things we often identify as generational differences are more often connected to external, objective factors, such as historical events, economic shifts, and technology. What makes a boomer a boomer, a silent a silent, or a millennial a millennial aren’t virtues and vices but different experiences of a culture that has often changed dramatically in a short amount of time.
How might this realization change the way Christians talk about and minister to people across generational divides? How might our assumptions and judgments look different if we thought of each other as shaped (not definitively, but truly) by our different experiences?
And how different those experiences are.
Twenge’s book captures, with precise data points, just how astonishing the changes to American life have been in the last century. There’s far too much in Generations to capture in a single, brief review, but thanks to Twenge’s clear organizing structure and incisive comments on the data, it’s easy to identify the fundamental areas of cultural transformation from silents (born 1925–45) to polars (born 2013–29).
The book reveals three main points of conflict driving the narrative of culture change: technology, family life, and mental health.
Technology Marches On
Technology is a primary source of conflict in the drama of the last American century. Twenge points out that technology isn’t just a material symbol of social life but a fundamental shaper of it.
Smartphones weren’t the beginning of technology’s influence. Twenge connects mass media in the first half of the 20th century to the surge of individualistic attitudes that culminated in events like the sexual revolution:
TV allowed people to see others’ perspectives and experiences, jet and space travel made the rest of the world seem closer, and the shift away from manual labor opened up more job opportunities for women. Gradually, an emphasis on individual rights began to replace the old system of social rules organized around race, gender, and sexual orientation. (39)
Expressive individualism, according to Twenge, is made far more plausible by technology that disrupts a sense of place and givenness. Oprah Winfrey’s empire of self-esteem and therapeutic spirituality makes sense in a talk-show habitat where “everything was worth discussing out in the open.” (85)
Technology isn’t just a material symbol of social life but a fundamental shaper of it.
As communication technology becomes more sophisticated in each successive generation, so do its effects. Television creates a world of high expectations due to its glamorous staging of the world. The architects of internet culture were born into this kind of world and apply its assumptions to how they design their technologies.
Twenge’s emphasis on how technology teaches the conscience is a remarkable insight. The radical changes in every area from education to dating to politics in the internet age seem utterly predictable by the time she arrives at millennials and Gen Z. The chain of effects began long before the first teen ever held a smartphone.
Family Becomes More Demanding
Most recognize that the boomer generation oversaw the sexual revolution. Surprisingly, Twenge argues the result wasn’t primarily “free love” culture but what she calls a “slow-life strategy.” This entails a lifestyle of extended adolescence, delayed marriage, and intense investment in the few children Americans do have.
The slow-life strategy isn’t necessarily a simplistic refusal to accept responsibility or practice sexual temperance. It’s a total mindset shift in how Americans define the quality of their lives because of technological and economic factors.
Twenge shows that material prosperity—with the power it brings to order our bodies, our work, and our homes as we wish—is an intrinsic element of individualism. As material prosperity increases, so does the plausibility of structuring life around individualistic desires.
The trend that begins with boomers becomes unmistakable with millennials: fewer than 50 percent of millennials aged 25–29 are married. The average millennial woman has her first child at age 27, despite the economic prosperity of millennials by just about any objective metric.
The slow-life strategy is about more than narcissism and self-absorption, a fact Christians concerned about the low birthrates among emerging American adults must reckon with. Economic and philosophical dimensions of cultural change intersect in profound ways. Twenge points out that the twin phenomena of low birthrates but intense, helicopter-style parenting have a logic to them. Society’s baseline expectation has risen for the lifestyle that parents are supposed to give their children.
These demands create a bottleneck, with prospective parents not eager to absorb the pressures of contemporary child-centered lifestyles. As Twenge observes, “Contrary to the idea that mothers spend less time with their kids now, they actually spend more—which makes having kids more challenging.” (287)
Crushed Spirits Result
These cultural shifts help explain the free-falling mental and emotional health of young Americans. The empowerment of technology, the insulation of individuals from family, and the slow-life strategy’s role as a plausibility structure for expressive individualism have added up to a historic for American well-being.
The turning point lay with millennials. While boomers in particular struggled with depression and (at the time) shockingly high suicide rates, Gen X was somewhat stable, giving the impression successive generations raised in this new world would experience great emotional health as limits disappeared. This didn’t happen.
Many millennials report happiness in their teen years (the mid-1990s to early 2010s), but at some point in the mid-2010s, the bottom fell completely out for millennial mental health. The percentage of adults aged 26–34 who had reported “major depression” in the prior year increased from about 7 percent in 2010 to 11 percent in 2018. Twenge notes,
Most tragic of all, the suicide rate for young people skyrocketed after 2007, exceeding the previous highs of the 1990s. The teen suicide rate nearly doubled between 2007 and 2019. . . . Perhaps even more shocking, the suicide rate of 10- to 14-year-olds—most of whom are elementary and middle school students—tripled overall, and nearly quadrupled for girls. (399)
Generations is rich with charts presenting empirical data. Nearly every chart in the chapters on millennials and Gen Z bears out the same narrative: among these youngest American adults, anxiety is at historic highs, happiness is at historic lows, and the epidemic of poor mental health doesn’t appear to be slowing.
Interpreting the Story
What do we make of this story?
For her part, Twenge lays out compelling evidence that the smartphone and ambient internet have played a major role in making teens and young adults much more anxious and depressed. The correlation between the dominance of the smartphone in American culture (beginning around 2012) and the steady rise of serious mental health problems is too clear to ignore.
The smartphone and ambient internet have played a major role in making teens and young adults much more anxious and depressed.
The key insight of Generations is how technology and economics create plausibility structures that deeply shape our values and behaviors. Individualism—the assertion of what Justice Anthony Kennedy once called “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”—makes much more sense when our experience of life is mediated through tools that can change the channel or that can download and delete at will.
Could it be that our technology, our family lives, and our mental health are intimately connected? Could it be that the common thread in all three sources of radical cultural transformation is individualism and that we’ve constructed devices and households and careers that reinforce this lonely liturgy to our conscience on a daily basis?
This, then, is the great contribution of Jean Twenge’s book. Without apology, without agenda, and probably without intending to, it weighs our post-Christian age in the balance and finds it wanting. Anyone intending to even make an effort to comprehend the challenges and gospel opportunities of the present moment should read it carefully. It’s a story we need to understand.
The Gospel Coalition