Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  Jean M. Twenge

  San Diego, California

  April 2014

  Introduction

  * * *

  Linda was born in the 1950s in a small town in the Midwest. After she graduated from high school, she moved to the city and enrolled in secretarial school. It was a great time to be young: Free Love was in, and everybody smoked, drank, and had a good time. Linda and her friends joined a feminist consciousness-raising group, danced at the discos, and explored their inner lives at est seminars and through meditation. The new pursuit of self-fulfillment led Tom Wolfe to label the 1970s the Me Decade, and by extension the young people of the time the Me Generation.

  Compared to today’s young people, they were posers. Linda’s Baby Boomer generation grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, taught by stern, gray-suit-wearing teachers and raised by parents who didn’t take any lip and thought that Father Knows Best. Most of the Boomers were well into adolescence or adulthood by the time the focus on the self became trendy in the 1970s. When Linda and her friends sought self-knowledge, they took the ironic step of doing so en masse—for all their railing against conformity, Boomers did just about everything in groups, from protests to seminars to yoga. Their youthful exploration also covered a brief period: the average first-time bride in the early 1970s had not yet celebrated her 21st birthday.

  Today’s under-35 young people are the real Me Generation, or, as I call them, Generation Me. Born after self-focus entered the cultural mainstream, this generation has never known a world that put duty before self. Linda’s youngest child, Jessica, was born years after Whitney Houston’s No. 1 hit song “Greatest Love of All” declared that loving yourself was the greatest love. Jessica’s elementary school teachers believed that they should help Jessica feel good about herself. Jessica scribbled in a coloring book called We Are All Special, got a sticker on her worksheet just for filling it out, and did a sixth-grade project called “All About Me.” When she wondered how to act on her first date, her mother told her, “Just be yourself.” Eventually, Jessica got her lower lip pierced and got a large tattoo on her lower back because, she said, she wanted to express herself. She dreams of being a model or a singer, takes numerous “selfies” a day, and recently reached her personal goal of acquiring 5,000 followers on Instagram. She does not expect to marry until she is in her late 20s, and neither she nor her older sisters have any children yet. “You have to love yourself before you can love someone else,” she says. This generation is unapologetically focused on the individual, a true Generation Me.

  If you’re wondering what all of this means for the future, you are not alone. Reflecting on her role as a parent of this generation, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joan Ryan wrote, “We’re told we will produce a generation of coddled, center-of-the-universe adults who will expect the world to be as delighted with them as we are. And even as we laugh at the knock-knock jokes and exclaim over the refrigerator drawings, we secretly fear the same thing.”

  Everyone belongs to a generation. Some people embrace it like a warm, familiar blanket, while others prefer not to be lumped in with their age-mates. Yet like it or not, when you were born dictates the culture you will experience. This includes the highs and lows of pop culture, as well as world events, social trends, technology, the economy, behavioral norms, and values. The society that molds you when you are young stays with you the rest of your life. These kids didn’t raise themselves: they are doing exactly what they have been taught. Generational differences are the clearest manifestation of cultural change.

  Today’s young people speak the language of the self as their native tongue. The individual has always come first, and feeling good about yourself has always been a primary virtue. Everything from music to phone calls to entertainment is highly personalized, enjoyed on a cell phone instead of with the whole family. Generation Me’s expectations are highly optimistic: they expect to go to college, to make lots of money, and perhaps even to be famous. Yet this generation enters a world in which college admissions are increasingly competitive, good jobs are hard to find and harder to keep, and basic necessities such as housing and health care have skyrocketed in price. This is a time of soaring expectations and crushing realities. Joan Chiaramonte, head of the Roper Youth Report, says that for young people “the gap between what they have and what they want has never been greater.” If you would like to start an argument, claim that young people today have it (a) easy or (b) tough. Be forewarned: you might need referees before it’s all over.

  I have researched generational differences for more than 20 years, since I was a 21-year-old undergraduate working on my BA thesis in the early 1990s. Back then, most of what had been written about generations was based on an amalgam of personal experience and educated guesses: it speculated about possible differences, but had little proof they actually existed. I read book after book that said such things as young people now are more likely to come from divorced homes, so they are more anxious and cynical (but were they really?). And, people born after 1982 entered a more child-centered society, so they would be more group-oriented (but was that really true?). It was all interesting, but vague and nonscientific. I kept thinking, “Where’s your proof? Has anyone ever found the real differences among the generations, instead of just guessing?”

  The next year, I entered a PhD program in personality psychology at the University of Michigan. I soon learned that academic psychologists measure personality traits and attitudes with carefully designed and validated questionnaires. Best of all, many of those questionnaires had been used thousands of times since they were first introduced (usually between the 1930s and the 1970s), and most people who filled them out were college students and schoolchildren. That meant I could compare scores on these measures and see exactly how young people’s personalities and attitudes differed among the generations. To my surprise, no one had ever done this before.

  As my colleagues and I continued with this work, we also drew from several large annual surveys of young people, such as the Monitoring the Future study of 500,000 US high school students, conducted since 1976; the American Freshman Survey of 9 million college students, conducted since 1966; and the General Social Survey of 50,000 US adults, conducted since 1972. All three are nationally representative, which means the results are more likely to apply to an entire US generation. We also started to consider how the culture was changing—for example, trends in baby names, song lyrics, written language, and TV shows, using new technology such as the Google Books database of 5 million books. These “cultural products” are a vitally important piece of the puzzle, as generational change is, at essence, cultural change. Young people do not raise themselves—they absorb the culture around them. As that culture shifts, so do the generations. Young people today may not have invented the culture they inhabit, but they absorb its messages from parents, teachers, and media until they begin to shape it themselves—and the cycle continues. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans in 2010 if they thought there was a large generation gap, 79% said yes—even more than had said so at the height of the Boomer youth wave of 1969.

  This book presents the results of more than 30 studies on generational differences, based on data from 11 million young Americans. Many of the studies find that when you were born has more influence on your personality and attitudes than the family who raised you. Or, in the words of a prescient Arab proverb, “Men resemble the times more than they resemble their fathers.” When you finish this book, you’ll be ready for an argument about which generation has it easy or tough and why—you might even want to start it.

  I focus here on the current generation of young people, born in the 1980s and 1990s. Right now in the 2010s, GenMe ranges from high school kids to thirtysomething adults. They are sometimes called GenY or Millennials. I don’t expect the Generation Me title to replace these other labels, but it does nicely capture the group of people who grew up in an era when focusing on yourself was not just tolerated but actively encouraged. This t
rend has been building for a long time—I was born in 1971, right in the middle of Generation X, yet was exposed to plenty of GenMe ideas, experiencing the first stirrings of the hyperindividualism GenMe would come to take for granted.

  A neat twist on the Generation Me label is iGeneration. The first letter is nicely packed with meaning: it could stand for Internet (as it does in iMac, iPhone, and iPad) or for the first-person singular that stands for the individual. Its pronunciation also appropriately suggests vision, either the things inside young people’s heads, which are usually glued to their cell phones, or the vision of young people in shaping a new world. It’s an appropriate name for a generation raised with on-demand “iMedia,” such as DVRs, the Internet, iPads, and iPhones. Maybe iGen will catch on as the label for the next group of youth, those born after 2000 (I have three kids in this group—maybe if I named their generation they would listen to me when I ask them to put on their shoes). The first edition of this book in 2006 marked the first appearance of the iGen label—we’ll see if it endures.

  Another issue: of course, any birth-year cutoffs for generations are necessarily arbitrary, drawing a sharp line where none actually exists. Someone born on December 31, 1981, was exposed to the same culture as someone born on January 1, 1982, yet the first is usually called a GenX’er and the second a Millennial/GenMe. And who’s to say the cutoff isn’t 1980 instead? In general, the data back up this commonsense logic, showing gradual changes with time, not sudden shifts that cleave one generation from the next. It’s also problematic to assume that someone born in 1982 was exposed to the same cultural influences as someone born in 1999. The data support this observation as well: because many trends are linear, those born later will express higher levels of the GenMe traits. Think of Generation Me as a broad description of cultural influences, not a rigid definition of a set of people, and remember that the year you were born—not necessarily your generational label—is a better indicator of the culture you’ve absorbed.

  Just to make it easier, I employ the most common generational cutoffs and labels: Baby Boomers (roughly 1943–60), Generation X (1961–81), and Millennials (1982–99), whom I call Generation Me. But I do so under duress, and because no other easy solution has presented itself. These cutoffs are a switch from the first edition, when I defined GenMe as those born 1970 to 1999. The post-1982 cutoff conforms to that used in previous books and articles, many of which have a different perspective on this generation. Some wondered if the 1970 versus 1982 cutoffs were the cause of those different perspectives. I was fairly sure that was not the case, but this change removes that possibility. However, that decision was also made under duress, because in many cases those born in the 1970s and 1980s look fairly similar to each other. GenX and GenMe have a lot more in common than most people realize—the transition from Boomers to GenX’ers was the more profound shift, and GenMe has built on those trends. In some cases I present the studies showing the shift from Boomers to GenX and then describe further shifts with the transition to GenMe.

  Many people comment that older generations have “always” described the next younger generation as too self-focused. There’s no definitive proof that’s true—the quote from Socrates often used to illustrate that belief (“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority . . .”) is apocryphal, penned by a British graduate student in 1907. But let’s assume for the moment that older generations have “always” seen youth as more self-centered. If so, that doesn’t undermine the Generation Me findings in the least. First, the research presented here is based on what young people say about themselves—not what older people think of them. Second, perhaps people have “always” observed more individualism among the young generation because younger generations have indeed “always” been more individualistic. Individualism has been increasing steadily for several decades now—perhaps even several centuries—so that observation may indeed “always” have been true.

  Of course, generational differences are based on averages, so some people will be the exception. But those exceptions don’t seem to occur systematically in certain groups: the generational trends are very similar across regions, racial and ethnic groups, social classes, and among men and women. In most cases, the changes have reached all segments of the generation, and we’re even more certain of that now that we’re drawing from nationally representative samples. Because the differences are based on data, they are not stereotypes. Yet they are generalizations, like any scientific study of groups. However, these shifts in averages are important. Marketing studies, for example, find that generational styles influence purchasing decisions as much or more than sex, income, and education.

  Why the label Generation Me? Since GenMe’ers were born, they’ve been taught to put themselves first. Unlike the Baby Boomers, GenMe didn’t have to march in a protest or attend a group session to realize that their own needs and desires were paramount. Reliable birth control, legalized abortion, and a cultural shift toward parenthood as a choice made them the most wanted generation of children in American history. Television, movies, and school programs have told them they were special from toddlerhood to high school, and they believe it with a self-confidence that approaches boredom: Why talk about it? It’s just the way things are. This blasé attitude is very different from the Boomer focus on introspection and self-absorption: GenMe is not as much self-absorbed as self-important. They take it for granted that they’re unique, special individuals, so they don’t need to think about it.

  This is not the same as saying that young people are spoiled, which would imply that they always got what they wanted. Although some parents are indeed too indulgent, young people today must overcome many difficult challenges that their elders never had to face. Once, families could achieve middle-class status on the earnings of one high-school-educated person, but it now takes two college-educated earners to achieve the same standard of living. The recession of the late 2000s only made that problem more acute, with unemployment hitting GenMe the hardest. But it started long before that. Many teens feel that the world demands perfection in everything, and some are cracking under the pressure. Many GenMe’ers in their 20s find that their jobs do not provide the fulfillment and excitement they had anticipated, and that their salary isn’t enough to afford even a small house. An acronym describes how this growing self-reliance can be stressful: YO-YO (You’re On Your Own).

  GenMe believes that people should follow their dreams and not be held back by societal expectations—not necessarily a selfish viewpoint, but definitely an individualistic one. Taking a job in a new city far from one’s family, for example, isn’t selfish, but it does put the individual first. The same is true for a girl who wants to join a boys’ sports team or a college student who wants to become an actor when his parents want him to be a doctor. Not only are these actions and desires not considered selfish today (although they may have been in past generations), but they’re playing as inspirational movies at the local theater.

  This is the good part of the trend—GenMe’ers enjoy unprecedented freedom to pursue what makes them happy and to look past traditional distinctions based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. But their high expectations, combined with an increasingly competitive world, have led to a darker flip side, in which they blame other people for their problems and sink into anxiety and depression. Perhaps because of the focus on the self, sexual behavior has also changed radically: these days, sex outside of marriage is not the main story—the focus is on hooking up, or sex without the benefit of a romantic relationship at all.

  My perspective on today’s young generation differs from that of Neil Howe and William Strauss, who argued in their 2000 book, Millennials Rising, that those born since 1982 will usher in a return to duty, civic responsibility, and teamwork. Their book is subtitled The Next Great Generation and contends that today’s young people will resemble the generation who won World War II. I agree that in an all-encompassing crisis today’s young people would likely rise to the
occasion—people usually do what needs to be done. But there is little evidence that today’s young people feel much attachment to duty or to group cohesion—high school students in the 2000s and 2010s are significantly less civically engaged and less trustful of government and other large institutions than Boomers were in the 1970s. Instead, young people have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves. This attitude is not conducive to following social rules or favoring the group’s needs over the individual’s. Fewer young people are interested in joining the military now than when the Boomers and GenX’ers were young; this generation is no more inclined than Boomers were to get killed in a war. Even the subtitle, The Next Great Generation, displays the hubris fed to the young by their adoring elders. When the World War II generation was growing up during the 1920s, no one was calling them the Greatest Generation and telling them they were the best kids ever. That label was not even applied to them until 2001, more than fifty years after their accomplishments during the 1940s.

  Strauss and Howe also argue that today’s young people are optimistic. This is true for children and adolescents, who have absorbed the cheerful aphorisms so common today (chapter 3 of this book, for example, is titled “You Can Be Anything You Want to Be”). Yet this optimism often fades—or even smashes to pieces—once Generation Me hits the reality of adulthood. If you are a Baby Boomer or older, you might remember the 1970 book Future Shock, which argued that the accelerating pace of cultural change left many people feeling overwhelmed. Today’s young people take these changes for granted and thus do not face this problem. Instead, they face a different kind of collision: Adulthood Shock. Their childhoods of constant praise, self-esteem boosting, and unrealistic expectations did not prepare them for an increasingly competitive workplace and the economic squeeze created by underemployment and rising costs. After a childhood of buoyancy, GenMe is working harder to get less.