This book focuses on changes among young Americans—and on trends that have arrived at different times, or not at all, in many other cultures. However, many of the changes here can be generalized to other nations, particularly other Western nations such as Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and Germany. These cultures have also experienced the movement toward focusing on the needs of the self, as well as the dark flip side of increased depression and anxiety. Developing countries might well be next. Like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, American individualism is spreading to all corners of the globe. If current trends continue, Generation Me boomlets might soon be arriving around the world. The more exposure kids get to American culture, the more they will rebel against the family-first, group-oriented ethos of many cultures around the world.
The accelerated pace of recent technological and cultural change makes it more important than ever to keep up with generational trends. A profound shift in generational dynamics is occurring right now in the 2010s. Baby Boomers (born 1943–60) have dominated the culture since they were born because of their large numbers. But with many Boomers now in their 60s, they have already lost their grip on the marketers and advertisers of the world. As early as June 2000, Time magazine announced the “twilight of the Boomers.” Marketers have already moved on to GenMe, which is now the entirety of the lucrative 18-to-35 age group. These are the young workers who will replace the Boomers, now retiring at a rapid clip. They are also the consumers everyone wants to reach, and it’s time to understand them.
And I do mean understand, not change. I do not, for example, believe we should return to the supposedly ideal days of the 1950s (which were ideal only for some people). Nor am I suggesting that these trends are this generation’s “fault.” Instead, young people today are products of their culture—a culture that teaches them the primacy of the individual at virtually every step, and a culture that was firmly in place before they were born. Asking young people today to adopt the personality and attitudes of a previous time is like asking someone raised in the United States to instantly become Chinese. Morris Massey, for years a popular speaker on generations, put it this way: “The gut-level value systems are, in fact, dramatically different between the generations. . . . The focus should not be so much on how to change other people to conform to our standards, our values. Rather, we must learn how to accept and understand other people in their own right, acknowledging the validity of their values, their behavior.” As Massey points out and research supports, our value systems are set in childhood and don’t change much thereafter. Massey’s favorite question is “Where were you when you were ten?” Put another way, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
The empirical research on generational differences in personality and attitudes provides the backbone to this book: it shapes the chapter topics and provides the basis for how GenMe differs from previous generations. This makes the book unique among those that discuss generations because it summarizes a large amount of psychological and behavioral data collected at different times. We haven’t surveyed the generations as they are now, with Boomers middle-aged and GenMe in youth and rising adulthood. Instead, we’ve found data on what Boomers were like when they were young in the 1960s and 1970s, and what GenX was like in the 1980s and 1990s, and compared it to data on young people in recent years. That means the differences aren’t due to age or to people’s misremembering what they were like when they were young (how many parents have fudged a detail or two about their own teenage years?). I’ve provided more details about this method in the next section and in the appendix.
I have also gathered a large amount of supplemental data from various sources. The Statistical Abstract of the United States is a gold mine of statistics going back decades (I often joke that it is my favorite book: what it lacks in plot it more than makes up for in information). Many other surveys, polls, research studies, and books reveal the feelings of today’s young people. I have tried to bring to life a wide range of research on generational differences in personality, attitudes, and behavior—my own research and that of others, and from both academic and popular sources.
I have supplemented this numerical data with more qualitative opinions. Over 200 of my students at San Diego State University shared their stories through written essays. This diverse group included students of every ethnicity and background, ranging from first-generation college students to upper-middle-class kids. Another 100 young people from around the country contributed stories and thoughts through my websites, www.generationme.org and www.jeantwenge.com. In all cases, I have changed names and, in some instances, identifying details; stated ages reflect the person’s age at the time of the quote.
I also include ample references to popular culture, including television, movies, music, and magazines, without which a book on young people today would not be complete. This is where the culture lives and breathes, especially for a generation that has always enjoyed cable TV with one hundred channels. American pop culture refers constantly to the self and individuality. I was astounded at how often I heard the word self from so many different sources. I had never noticed it before, as most of us haven’t: like fish swimming in the ocean, we don’t notice the water because it is all around us and has always been there.
These examples from pop culture are not meant to replace the hard data on generations, but instead to illustrate them. I present the results showing how the generations differ, then use examples to show how these trends appear both in real people’s lives and in the media that shapes their worldviews. No, the characters on Glee aren’t real, but their words both reflect and shape the views of Generation Me. (In the online survey, for example, several said they first learned about gays and lesbians from watching Glee). Since the last edition of this book, new technology has allowed researchers to more systematically examine popular culture. Now there’s actual proof that phrases such as you are special and I love me were rarely used before the 1970s—but are much more common now.
Even the most innocuous TV comments now catch my attention. During an episode of her eponymous talk show, Ellen DeGeneres said that the most important thing is “how you feel and being happy.” It’s a statement most young people take for granted. Dan Atkins, 17, says in Growing Up Digital, “My basic philosophy toward life is, do whatever makes you happy.” But when I asked my mother (born in 1943) about this, she said, “In the early 1960s, most people would have said the most important things were being honest, hardworking, industrious, loyal, and caring about others. I can’t even remember thinking about whether I was ‘happy.’ That’s not to say we weren’t happy—we just didn’t focus on it.” We do now. Here’s Mario, a recent college graduate quoted in the book Quarterlife Crisis: “I just try to do whatever will make me happier, and think of myself first.” Welcome to Generation Me.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
The idea for this book began when I was a 21-year-old college student at the University of Chicago in 1992, working on my BA thesis. Unfortunately, and unknown to me at the time, my thesis was a rather undistinguished project that would ultimately be rejected by four journals and never published. However, an intriguing tangent of this work led to the 22 years of research and 33 scientific-journal articles that form the basis of this book.
One of the questionnaires I used in my ill-fated BA project was the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which measures personality traits associated with one sex or the other. For example, “assertive” and “acts like a leader” are items on the “masculine” scale, and “compassionate” and “yielding” are items on the “feminine” scale. I had always been fascinated by how gender shapes our personalities and still had a copy of the scale I’d received nine years before at a Texas Tech University program designed to show middle school students what college was like (the program bore the clumsy name “Shake Hands with Your Future,” and now that I’ve been to college, I think it would have been more accurate if it had included beer).
For my BA thesis, I gave this questionnaire and one
about appearance choices to 150 college students, mostly by hijacking people everywhere I went. People filled out questionnaires at loud parties, during particularly boring classes, and between bites of barely edible food in the dining hall. Several questionnaires bore water stains from being penciled in at a swim meet. Most people were willing to help, although as word got around, the occasional potential victim would duck around a corner if I appeared carrying pencils.
I went about analyzing the data on my ultimately doomed project, looking for correlations between things such as hair length, earrings, and—yes—that test of gender-related personality traits. That’s when I noticed something interesting: about 50% of the women in my sample scored as “masculine” on the gender-roles test, meaning that they had endorsed significantly more of the stereotypically masculine traits (such as “assertive”) than the feminine items. When the test was written in 1973, only about 20% of women scored that way. This was completely tangential to the main question of my amateurish thesis, but interesting nevertheless.
I immediately thought that this might be a difference between generations—being a woman in 1973 was surely quite different from being one in 1992. On the other hand, my sample was far from random and consisted of students at the University of Chicago, a group not known for its normality: the school is intensely intellectual and proud of its asocial nerdiness. In his popular syndicated column, The Straight Dope, Cecil Adams once wrote that U of C undergraduates, like insects that eat book paste, developed their “intellectual predilections as the consequence of an unhappy sex life.” So what if he was a biased Northwestern grad—he was basically right. So I didn’t think much of it. Besides, I had a BA thesis to write, and it was going to change the world! (Insert ironic eye-rolling here.)
By the next fall, I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, collecting more data on my gender-role project. This time, participants from an undergraduate class filled out questionnaires in a large classroom over a few evenings. The generational difference popped out again: more than half of the women in the sample had high scores on the scale of stereotypically masculine personality traits. I couldn’t write it off to campus this time—the Michigan undergraduates were distressingly normal—and these differences were even more interesting than the main results of my thesis (did you know that college women, on average, own fifteen pairs of shoes, compared to five for men?).
But what did I have? Two recent samples to compare to the original one in 1973. What had happened in between those years? Were my samples just a fluke? Fortunately, this scale had been used by a large number of people over twenty years, so the data had to be out there. One spring day in 1994, I decided I just had to find out if women did embrace more stereotypically masculine traits now, and I developed the method I ultimately used for many of the studies in this book. (As for the results of the “masculine” traits study, you’ll find them in chapter 7.)
The method is fairly straightforward, though labor-intensive. I begin by searching computer databases for journal articles, master’s theses, and dissertations that used a particular scale. I keep only those that used a normal population of a specific age—usually children or college students. Then I search to find them at the library or in full-text databases online, since only the entire article or thesis will have what I’m looking for: the average score of the sample on the questionnaire. Once I find all of the data, I can then graph those scores by the year the data were collected, showing how scores changed over a range of years—not just from one year to another, but across the entire period. Because the samples are roughly the same age, this shows how young people differ from one generation to the next. No one had ever done this type of analysis before, so I started from scratch, developing a way to find and analyze the data.
I did most of these searches in the labyrinthine stacks of the graduate library at the University of Michigan, a building so vast and confusing that red and yellow lines are painted on the floor to help people find the exits. The university had added on to the library in 1970, smushing two buildings of different styles and heights together with limited access between the two. The older building ended up with floors such as 4A, connected by narrow, apparently randomly placed staircases. The tall shelves filled with books created a nerdy form of a Halloween cornfield maze. I would often sit looking through journals only to see some poor soul walk past me, double back again, and then stand under the dim lights with a look of utter confusion on his or her face. During those years, I probably helped more people escape from the Michigan library than anyone else. I imagined these rescued students stumbling gratefully into the thin winter sunlight, relieved that they weren’t going to wander around the library for hours until someone finally found them, weak and dehydrated, on floor 1A between HM and HQ.
During those years, I probably pulled half a million journals off the shelves. (“I hope you’re not allergic to dust,” my dissertation adviser quipped.) When I left one section of the library to move to another, I would leave behind several teetering stacks of colorfully bound journals, each about four feet tall. I felt sorry for the work-study students who had to reshelve my looming piles of discarded books, many of which were twenty or thirty years old. The workers must have thought someone left them as a joke, or that a book monster was loose in the library, pulling down old journals from the rusty shelves to create random stacks in scattered carrels. But there were perks as well. One of my favorite finds was an advertisement in a 1920s journal that announced a contest with a $20,000 prize, an enormous sum in those days. The money would go to anyone who proved he or she could perform telekinesis (moving an object with only the force of your mind). I was amused to see that one of the judges for the contest was Harry Houdini. A few issues later came the unsurprising conclusion: no one won the prize.
I also used the Interlibrary Loan Department to obtain endless dissertations and master’s theses, another great source of data. I requested so many that the staff began to grimace when I walked up to the desk. I couldn’t get every thesis that way, but I soon found out that the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, has a copy of every American doctoral dissertation on microfiche. I made many trips there, usually staying with friends in Baltimore, where I slept under a comforter that, despite my friends’ best efforts, was their cat’s favorite alternative litterbox. Fortunately, the data I got during the day and the great conversations with my friends in the evenings more than made up for it—what’s a little cat pee when you’re finding out how generations differ?
The dissertations were a study of change in themselves. The earliest, from the 1940s and 1950s, were on transparently thin, onionskin paper, with blurred typewriter print—there were no photocopiers, so documents had to be typed on carbon paper, with the copies made as the typing was done. Apparently, the library copy was never the original, and the type blurred as the typewriter keys struck through several layers of paper and carbon. Who knew? Certainly not a child of the computer age like me.
A little later, after copiers became more common, dissertations were still typewritten but clearer. In the 1950s and 1960s, almost every male student thanked his wife for typing his dissertation. I could just see those poor women, tired from a day in the secretarial pool, coming home to struggle through their husbands’ scribbled sentences. By the late 1970s and 1980s, dissertations almost always appeared in the then-ubiquitous, straight-serif font of the IBM electric typewriter. Slowly, computer fonts began to appear; someone had bought one of the first Apple Macintoshes and would get overly creative using more than one font in a document. By the 1990s, almost every dissertation was in Times New Roman. No one thanked his wife for typing his dissertation anymore, and many of the dissertations were written by the wives themselves, who were now getting their own PhDs. The modern age had arrived.
After years of library searches, I overloaded on the tedium. Fortunately, by then I had wonderful and enthusiastic graduate students to help. In recent years I’ve also drawn from large databases I can wade
through right on my computer. But I still feel a misty wave of nostalgia when I remember the library stacks I frequented in just about every place I lived and visited, including Iowa, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington, DC, and California. Every time I went to the library, it felt like a treasure hunt: somewhere amid those dusty books was the answer, and all I had to do was find it. I imagined the numbers I sought flying off the candlelight-yellow pages, swirling into the air between the metal shelves of the stacks, drawing a picture of change across the generations. (What can I say? I was an overeager graduate student.) Even as the years passed and I started new projects, I knew that those dusty books I mined contained a rich vein of information from which to reassemble the remarkable story of past and future generations. This book tells that story.
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You Don’t Need Their Approval: The Decline of Social Rules
Getting dressed in the morning is a fundamentally different experience today than it was fifty years ago. For all of Generation Me’s lifetime, clothes have been a medium of self-expression, an individual choice in a range of alternatives and comfort. Contrast this to past decades, when men wore ties most of the time and women did not leave the house without crisp white gloves and a tight girdle. Pictures of crowds in the early 1960s show quaint sights such as men wearing three-piece suits at baseball games and ladies lined up in identical-length skirts. To GenMe, these images look like those of people on an alien planet—who wears a suit to a baseball game?
Generation Me--Revised and Updated Page 3