Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  For many in GenMe, the instability in close relationships began at an early age with their parents’ divorce. In Prozac Nation, her memoir of adolescent depression, Elizabeth Wurtzel describes her father’s departure from her life and her mother’s subsequent struggle to raise her. When Wurtzel told her therapists about her background, they would say, “No wonder you’re so depressed.” She was not as sure. “They react as if my family situation was particularly alarming and troublesome,” she writes, “as opposed to what it actually is in this day and age: perfectly normal.” And she’s right: almost half of GenMe has seen their parents divorce or have never known their father at all. This has a clear link to the rise in depression, as children of divorce are more likely to be anxious and depressed. Beyond the statistics, the personal stories of children of divorce—painted in such books as The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce—vividly illustrate the lifetime of pain, cynicism, and uncertainty that divorce can create among young people. Ashley, now 24, attended a group counseling session at her elementary school, unofficially known as the “divorce club,” where she and the other kids would “share our feelings of anger, sadness and confusion and listen to our peers who were sharing the same.”

  GenMe’s own romantic relationships often don’t go much better. Although a little extreme, the situations faced by the four characters on Sex and the City (or, more recently, HBO’s Girls) are right on the mark; the young women I know describe similar dating pitfalls of strange behavior and dashed hopes. Even when the date goes well and becomes a relationship, there is no guarantee it will last. The cycle of meeting someone, falling in love, and breaking up is a formula for anxiety and depression. Although previous generations also went through these relationship ups and downs, they did so for a much shorter time. GenMe’s lengthened adolescence has led to a lengthened time for heartbreak. As Emma Koenig puts it in her 2012 book F*ck! I’m in My Twenties, “There should be some kind of loyalty rewards program for getting hurt over and over again.”

  Some young people think there has to be a better way. One day in a graduate class on cultural differences, I was surprised when the students—almost all Americans from the Midwest and West—expressed their approval of arranged marriage. Two women in their mid-20s were particularly adamant: they hated dating, living alone sucked, and they wanted to settle down. The men in the class agreed. Arranged marriage is probably not the solution, but the students’ attraction to the idea is telling—young people clearly feel that something is missing in the current dating scene. The Broadway musical Avenue Q includes a song that sums up dating in the modern era pretty well: “There’s a fine, fine line between love—and a waste of time.” The book Motherhood, Rescheduled tells of the ups and downs of the romantic lives of four women who choose to freeze their eggs. Although all want to have children, none was able to settle into a stable romantic relationship before 40.

  A record 28% of US households are headed by a single person. Though later marriage has some advantages, it also means that many in GenMe spend their 20s (and sometimes 30s) in pointless dating, uncertain relationships, and painful breakups. Many relationships last several years and/or include living together, so the breakups resemble divorces rather than run-of-the-mill heartbreak (as if there were such a thing). By the age of 24, my friend June had been in five serious relationships. All had lasted more than a year, and all resulted in a wrenching breakup (often because she or her boyfriend was moving to a new city for college, graduate school, or a career). Other friends dated or lived with someone for seven years or more before breaking up. Divorce after only a few years of marriage has become so common that Pamela Paul wrote a book called The Starter Marriage. Only the rare member of GenMe has not experienced the breakup of a serious romantic relationship (or two or five or ten).

  The deadline for having children— generally somewhere between 35 and 40—makes life extremely anxious for many single women. They constantly perform the calculation I call “woman math”: “If we get married next year, I’ll be thirty-four; we’ll want a year or two to be married without kids, so I’ll be thirty-six or thirty-seven before I’m pregnant and probably thirty-eight when the child is born. Then if we wait until the first kid is two years old before we try for another one, I’ll be trying to get pregnant at forty. Crap.”

  Even—or especially—women who are living with their boyfriend hear the loud ticking of the biological clock as years go by and no proposal is imminent. The new equation of premarital sex and living together before marriage might be liberating, but it has major downsides. Waiting for a guy to pop the question can be almost as anxiety-producing as being alone. Laurie, interviewed in Emerging Adulthood, says that during the five years she lived with the man she eventually married, “I was really stressed because I didn’t know exactly whether or not I was going to be with him or if I was wasting that much time in my life.” Another couple described in the book has been living together for eighteen months. Jean, 26, wants to be engaged by Christmas. When the author interviews her boyfriend Trey, 28, however, “it becomes clear that Jean can forget about getting engaged by Christmas. . . . Trey says he might get married—‘possibly someday . . . I’m not ready to settle down yet.’ ” Men have the advantage of a biological clock set at a later time. As Jake puts it, “I could be thirty-five and marry someone who’s twenty-three. I mean, I’ve got all the time in the world.” (Women have a word for guys like this, and it ends with hole.)

  But plenty of lonely guys are out there too. Thousands more young men than women are single—between the ages of 25 and 39, for every unmarried woman there are 1.2 unmarried men. Even when you look only between the ages of 35 and 39, thousands more men are unmarried. I can hear women immediately yelling that all of the good ones are taken, but single men should be the ones anxious and complaining. Men get lonely too, though we rarely see that addressed on TV or in the movies. (For a noteworthy exception, check out the great movie Swingers, which features a fairly realistic look at young men talking about loneliness and their anxiety around dating.) For GenMe, loneliness is an equal-opportunity experience.

  As a result of modern dating, later marriage, and the higher divorce rate, a lot of people spend a great deal of time living alone. In 1950, only 9% of Americans lived alone. By 2010, 28% did. Almost half of all households in Washington, DC, and Manhattan consist of one person. A recent in-depth study found that Chicago residents, on average, spend half of their adult lives single. Being single does not have to be lonely, but for many people it often is, especially if they have been moving around and don’t have friends who live close to them.

  That’s the other sad reality: not only is GenMe single for longer, but they often don’t stay in one place long enough to make friends. More than 1 out of 4 people aged 25 to 29 moved in the last year. It is shocking to consider the number of professions that require frequent moves for advancement. This is definitely true in academia: I have lived in six states, my friend Kathleen has lived in all four North American time zones, and few of my friends live within 500 miles of where they grew up. Doctors must move to medical school and to a residency before looking for a city in which to practice. Even professions that don’t require an advanced degree often involve frequent moves. I recently met a group of people who work in sales for a hotel chain. All had worked at more than four locations, requiring them to move every few years. Author Chris Colin summed it up this way when he was in his late 20s: “Since high school I’ve had five lines of work . . . eight street addresses, two bad trips, and one cat. I had a lousy breakup with doors slamming—house doors, car doors. I lived in New York and California and Chile. . . . I worry, but really I’m happy, though I worry.”

  Even if you stay in the same place, just having time to date and make friends is difficult. With the workweek expanding from relatively sane nine-to-five hours into countless evenings and weekends, it’s often impossible to find the time and energy to be with other people. “A decade after high school, that which most impacts my classmates
’ love lives might be busyness,” says Colin. Seventy-five percent of women aged 25 to 35 say that their work lives interfere with their personal lives, and 35% say that the conflict is extreme. This goes for men as well—in the first years of his career, my brother worked so many hours that when I visited him, his refrigerator contained nothing but a bottle of water (“I bought that for you,” he said helpfully). I started to make a grocery list and then stopped short, wondering if I needed to buy more than food. “Do you even have any bowls?” I asked. “I have bowl,” he quipped, opening the cabinet to reveal his lone dish.

  Friends of mine who are lawyers and accountants often find it difficult to spare the time for a movie, a phone call to a long-distance friend, or a casual chat with a neighbor. In The Costs of Living, Barry Schwartz describes a former student who says his friendships “were not that close. Everyone was too busy. He thought twice about burdening friends with his life and his problems because he knew how consumed they were with their own, and what a sacrifice it would entail for them to spend the time required to listen to him and to help him out.” I put a Post-it note on that page and wrote, “This is a very familiar story.”

  Is this better in the age of Facebook? That’s unclear. Some studies suggest that using Facebook leads to more happiness; others suggest it leads to less. It may depend on whether social networking takes the place of in-person interaction or enhances it. It remains to be seen whether social networking helps build true and healthy social connections or whether these online interactions are too shallow to be helpful.

  Isolation and loneliness readily lead to anxiety and depression. A mountain of scientific evidence links loneliness (and being alone) with negative mental health outcomes. Single and divorced people are significantly more likely to become depressed or suffer other mental health problems. Even people in unhappy marriages are happier than those who divorce. In many situations divorce is necessary and best in the long run, but even then it is painful and can lead to depression. When you consider the loneliness felt by many young people today, it’s surprising that a larger number aren’t depressed. Many in GenMe are one breakup or one move away from depression—their roots are not deep enough, their support systems too shallow.

  The sadness of being alone is often the flip side of freedom and putting ourselves first. When we pursue our own dreams and make our own choices, that pursuit often takes us away from friends and family. An independence-minded society such as ours would never accept rules that encouraged arranged marriage or multigenerational households. Even marriage before a certain age—these days, around 25—is viewed as unwise and overly restricting. There is nothing wrong with individual freedom; this is the advantage of the social change of the last few decades. But there are consequences, and loneliness is often one of them. Janis Joplin presciently captured the GenMe dilemma when she sang in 1971, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

  One of the strangest things about modern life is the expectation that we will stand alone, negotiating breakups, moves, divorces, and all manner of heartbreak that previous generations were careful to avoid. This may be the key to the low rate of depression among older generations: despite all the deprivation and war they experienced, they could always count on one another. People had strong feelings of community; they knew the same people all their lives; and they married young and stayed married. It may not have been exciting, and it stymied the dreams of many, but this stable lifestyle avoided the melancholy that is so common now.

  STRESS IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS AND JOBS

  We live in an increasingly competitive world, and nowhere is this more evident than in college admissions. Many high school students determined to attend an Ivy League university strive for perfect grades, perfect SAT scores, and a long list of extracurricular activities. But even perfection is not enough these days: most Ivy League schools admit less than 10% of applicants overall. Each year, Harvard rejects between 25% and 50% of applicants with perfect SAT scores. This stringent selectivity extends beyond the Ivy League: Duke University rejected 60% of high school valedictorians who applied. Public universities have become more discerning as well. In recent classes, the majority of freshmen at the University of Wisconsin graduated in the top 10% of their high school class. San Diego State University, where I teach, used to be a party school almost anyone could get into, but these days the average undergraduate earned a 3.8 GPA in high school and scored around the 70th percentile on her SATs.

  At the same time, young people and their parents are increasingly aware that a college education—sometimes the right college education—is a virtual necessity for securing a good job. Erica, 18, felt this pressure during high school: “I have gotten down on myself for not trying as hard or doing as well as I should have. I put all the pressure on myself. I knew I needed to do well to get into a good college. It seems to be very difficult to get a decent-paying job nowadays without a college education.” And although the local state university might be fine for most jobs, for others only the right school will do. Many New York investment banks, for example, focus their recruiting on Ivy League universities, and many graduate schools favor applicants from prestigious schools.

  The new level of competition means that more and more high school students are going to great lengths to stand out. Two million high school students took Advanced Placement (AP) exams in 2012, four times as many as in 1994. Time magazine interviewed Marielle Woods, 17, who participates in twelve extracurricular activities and keeps up a 4.0 average. This can lead to a lot of stress. Jill, 23, describes her overachieving family as “a recipe for quiet terror.” Although she’s done well in school, “always, always before those grades come out, I struggle under the weight of a cloud of fear and depression,” she says. “Every year I’m silently convinced that this will be the one—this time I’ll actually screw it all up. It’s a scary way to live.”

  The battle is not over after college, either. Medical schools and law schools, especially the prestigious ones, admit only a small fraction of applicants. Yale Law School lets in only 8% of applicants; the University of Virginia law school, 9%. Medical schools are even more competitive—Harvard Medical School admitted only 4% of applicants in 2010; UCLA, 4%; and the University of Wisconsin, 10%. Most years, more than half of medical school applicants are not admitted to any program. Other fields are fiercely competitive as well: graduate schools in clinical psychology often admit less than 10% of hopefuls. For example, the SDSU/UCSD joint doctoral program in clinical psychology at my school lets in only 4% of those who apply. One of my brightest, hardest-working master’s students applied to six PhD programs in counseling psychology, which are usually easier to get into than clinical programs. Nevertheless, she wasn’t admitted to a single program. MBA acceptance rates are a little higher, though at the best schools they hover around 10% to 15%. And these decisions are crucial: many economists say that a graduate degree is now the key to “making it,” in the same way a college degree used to be.

  Young college graduates often find the job market difficult even during boom times, particularly if they majored in the liberal arts. “I spent four months crashing on a friend’s couch and looking for a job—every job from technical writer to bellhop,” writes Kevin, 25, who graduated from college with a degree in English. “Flash forward a year later and I’m working in a warehouse. Then the boss cut our hours. Eventually I quit and moved into my grandfather’s basement at the age of 24.” Even business graduates can have a hard time. “When I graduated from college, I thought getting a job would be a snap, because that’s the impression we got from the career counselors and everyone around us. Boy, was I wrong,” says Kristina, interviewed in Quarterlife Crisis. “For the first six months after school, I couldn’t even get an administrative position.”

  Academia is also not a guaranteed career path anymore. The majority of people who earn PhDs in English and history cannot find a university teaching job and consequently drop out of the field. Those in scientific fi
elds must often complete several two- or three-year-long postdocs (temporary research jobs) after obtaining their PhDs—and then might still not find a job. A recent New York Times article described a Harvard physics PhD who had four postdocs in ten years and could still not find a faculty position. At 43, he finally left the field. He’s not unusual; many young scientists are 35 or 40 by the time they’ve finished enough postdocs to get a job. One friend of mine was a postdoc for six years before he had a nervous breakdown that landed him in the university medical center. He did eventually find a faculty job, but it was a long road.

  There is also a pervasive uncertainty about finding the right profession. It’s great to have the freedom to be whatever you want, but what exactly is that? I remember making a list of all the possible college majors and crossing them off one by one, as if the process of elimination would help me figure out what to do with my life. Settling on a career goal is even more challenging, and many people continue to struggle with this question throughout their 20s. It’s particularly difficult because good information about professions is hard to come by—it’s hard to know what being a lawyer, an accountant, or an engineer is like day-to-day. So you might go through four or seven years of school only to find out you hate your profession. Or you might settle on a lucrative one but then wonder if you’re doing the world any good by practicing it. GenMe’ers worry about making the right choice and have no one but themselves to blame when their choices go wrong. Personal freedom, the hallmark of our times, is glorious, but too often GenMe’ers stand alone with their self-doubts about their choices.