Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  Dangers and threats are nothing new. Previous generations faced world wars without suffering from high rates of depression. Perhaps uniting against a common enemy inoculated that generation against depression; people knew who the enemy was and set about saving scrap metal and planting victory gardens to stop it. Now the violence is much more random, the enemy unseen: children are shot because they went to school; adults die because they went to work on a Tuesday morning in September. The random violence of crime and terrorism is somehow more frightening.

  CONCLUSION

  In some ways, the shift toward melancholy in young people seems paradoxical: Generation Me has so much more than previous generations—they have been better protected, enjoy countless modern conveniences, and are better educated. But Generation Me often lacks other basic human requirements: stable close relationships, a sense of community, a feeling of safety, a simple path to adulthood and the workplace. Our grandparents may have done without television and used an outhouse, but they were usually not lonely, scared by threats of terrorism, or obsessing about the best way to get into Princeton. As David Myers argues in his book The American Paradox, the United States has become a place where we have more but feel worse. Technology and material things may make life easier, but they do not seem to lead to happiness. Instead, we long for the social connections of past years, we enter a confusing world of too many choices, and we become depressed at younger and younger ages.

  5

  * * *

  Yeah, Right: The Belief That There’s No Point in Trying

  Seventeen-year-old Caitlin begins her day early, with a quick check of her e-mail to see if there’s any news from the ten colleges she applied to. She hopes to be admitted to an Ivy League school, but with acceptance rates at less than 10%, it’s a long shot even with her stellar grades and numerous extracurricular activities. After a long day at school and soccer practice, she makes it home in time to watch some TV with her family. Flipping between CNN and FOX News, she watches coverage of the most recent shooting at a mall interspersed with news of the latest government shutdown. Her parents get online to file their protest with their congressman. “Why would you do that?” Caitlin asks. “It’s not going to do any good.” Her parents try to convince her otherwise, but Caitlin replies with the universal teenage expression of cool cynicism: “Yeah, right.”

  Most of Generation Me’s days are like this: filled with events and circumstances they can’t control. So why should they try? Perhaps as a result, older people complain that the idea of personal responsibility has faded, that young people blame others for their problems, and that apathy is rampant. They’re not just Generation Me; they’re Generation Whatever. The young are the new cynics.

  The days when young Americans marched in the streets to change the world are, for the most part, gone. Although some protests (such as 2011’s Occupy) still draw crowds and collective action, the young person who believes that she can make a difference in world events, national politics, and sometimes even her own life is more and more rare. Despite the recent talk about young people getting involved in political campaigns through the Internet, the vast majority of young people couldn’t care less about politics. Based on his extensive 2008 survey, Christian Smith concluded that 94% of 18-to-24-year-olds were politically and civically disengaged.

  THE DATA ON CYNICISM AND FEELINGS OF CONTROL

  I became interested in youthful cynicism after I had been doing research on generational differences for several years. I had concentrated on personality traits, such as anxiety or self-esteem. But I suspected that generations also differed in how they saw the world and what they believed. I came across a popular psychological scale that measures a fundamental belief: Are you in control of what happens to you, or do other people, luck, and larger forces control your fate? People who believe they are in control are “internal” (and possess “internality”); those who don’t are “external” (and have “externality”). When I read the internal items of the scale, I had a strong feeling that there would be big generational differences. Some of the items:

  • By taking an active part in political and social affairs, the people can control world events.

  • With enough effort we can wipe out political corruption.

  • The average citizen can have an influence in government decisions.

  Even though I was in my late 20s at the time, I reacted to these items the way a teenager would: I snorted sarcastically and said, “Yeah, right!” I thought, “Who believes that pie-in-the-sky crap anymore?” It sounded like the kind of stuff Boomers believed in when they thought they could change the world, and not at all like my generation or anyone younger.

  Then I read some of the items on the external side, which measure the opposite beliefs:

  • The world is run by the few people in power, and there is not much the little guy can do about it.

  • Getting a good job depends mainly on being in the right place at the right time.

  • Who gets to be boss often depends upon who was lucky enough to be in the right place first.

  “No kidding,” I thought. These items sounded a lot more truthful to me than the idealistic statements measuring internality.

  But this was just my own opinion. I wanted to know if college students’ responses to these questions actually changed over the generations. Liqing Zhang, Charles Im, and I found 97 studies reporting data from 18,310 college students who filled out the control questionnaire between 1960 and 2002.

  The results showed a remarkably clear change: college students increasingly believed that their lives were controlled by outside forces. The average GenX/GenMe college student in 2002 had more external control beliefs than 80% of college students in the early 1960s. External control beliefs increased about 50% between the 1960s and the 2000s.

  What’s happened since 2002 and the full transition to GenMe/Millennials, supposedly a much less cynical and more engaged group? The nationally representative high school survey includes several locus-of-control items, and they suggest that GenMe has continued the trends toward disengagement begun by GenX. In the late 1970s, when Boomers were in high school, 33% agreed that “people who accept their condition in life are happier than those who try to change things,” but by 2012, 42% of GenMe’ers agreed. Agreement with items such as “planning only makes a person unhappy since plans hardly ever work out anyway” also increased. Most of this increase took place after 2000—when GenMe’ers born in the 1980s entered the samples—with an especially large upswing during the late-2000s recession years.

  These results also gel with polling data collected by other researchers. From the 1950s to the 1990s, adult Americans were increasingly likely to agree with cynical statements such as “the people running the country don’t care what happens to people like me,” “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” and “what you think doesn’t count very much anymore.” In contrast, they were less likely to agree that “hard work always pays off.” More recently, a Pew survey of adults found that agreement with “hard work offers little guarantee of success” rose from 29% in 1999 to 35% in 2012. The percentage of who agreed there are few “limits to growth in this country” sank from 67% in 1987 to 51% in 2012. The perception that “the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer” jumped from 65% in 2002 to 76% in 2012.

  What’s even more disturbing is how early in development these changes begin. After finding the large change for college students, I wondered if children would show the same results. Maybe only adolescents had become more cynical. As it turned out, kids were just as jaded—41 samples of 6,554 children aged 9 to 14 showed that kids in the 2000s were more likely to believe that things are out of their control. The magnitude of the change was about the same as it was in college students, with the average GenMe child scoring more externally than 80% of his or her counterparts in the early 1970s. Kids as young as 9 caught the rising wave of apathy and cynicism.

  The items on the children’s form of the control
scale are particularly telling. Many speak in general terms about trying hard, or studying. But others hint at the kind of bad behavior I mentioned in chapter 3, exemplified by the People magazine article “Kids out of Control.” The scale asks:

  • Are you often blamed for things that just aren’t your fault?

  • Most of the time, do you feel that you have little to say about what your family decides to do?

  • When you get punished, does it usually seem it’s for no good reason at all?

  More kids now agree with these statements, suggesting that they are more likely to blame their parents or teachers when things go wrong. I can just hear millions of kids yelling, “But it’s not my fault!”

  POLITICS ARE BORING, CONGRESS SUCKS, AND WE MIGHT AS WELL LET THE EARTH ROT

  The trend in control has two parts: First, there’s the declining belief in personal responsibility and the efficacy of hard work and sacrifice—I’ll talk about that later in this chapter. Then there’s the fading idea that collective action will have an effect on politics, society, and the world.

  Some commentators—particularly those who label GenMe “Millennials”—argue that those born after 1980 are “the most civic-minded since the generation of the 1930s and 1940s,” as Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, the authors of 2008’s Millennial Makeover, opine. William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of 2000’s Millennials Rising, introduced this notion, predicting that this generation would be civically engaged, highly interested in politics, and focused on helping others. The 2008 book Generation We—perhaps intended as a counterpoint to this book’s first edition—made a similar argument.

  Most of these books relied on a few select survey items and some one-time interviews with young people to make their points. I wondered what would happen if we analyzed all the items on life goals, concern for others, and civic orientation from the two largest over-time surveys of young people. That’s what Keith Campbell, Elise Freeman, and I set out to do, using the nationally representative high school and college surveys of 9 million people. Going in, I wasn’t sure what we would find. Perhaps part of the generation was more civically oriented and the other part narcissistic, or perhaps the narcissists were trying to seek attention through public activism.

  But that’s not what the data showed. Out of 30 items measuring civic orientation, not a single one was higher among GenMe than it had been among the Boomers when they were young. Twenty-eight were lower among GenMe than among the supposedly more disengaged GenX; only two were higher. GenMe/Millennial high school students were less likely to “think about the social problems of the nation and the world,” were less likely to say they trusted government, were less likely to be “interested in government affairs,” and were less likely to participate in political affairs such as “writing to a public official.” GenMe/Millennial college students were less likely to say it was important “to keep up to date with political affairs” and less likely to vote in a student election, though they were slightly more likely than GenX’ers (though not Boomers) to discuss politics.

  In later analyses, we found that some of these trends had turned around with the late 2000s recession—for example, more said they thought about social problems. But GenMe/Millennials’ responses were still less civically engaged than Boomers’ were at the same age. Three times as many GenMe’ers in 2010–12 than Boomers in 1976–78 said they “never” thought about social problems. Sixty percent of college student Boomers said it was important to keep “up to date with political affairs” in 1966, compared to 35% of GenMe in 2012. And many of the other civic activities, such as being interested in government affairs or writing to a public official, continued to decline through the recession years. Another study comparing generations of young workers found that GenMe was, contrary to popular wisdom, less interested than Boomers were in working for socially conscious companies. “These young adults are not the revolutionary environmentally and socially conscious beacons of light we had hoped they would be,” Rena Rasch and Brenda Kowske concluded.

  In Lost in Transition, sociologist Christian Smith summarizes the results of his large survey and in-depth interviews of young adults. He found that only 4% were civically or politically engaged—even though his survey was conducted in the summer of 2008, when youth enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s campaign was supposedly at its height. The vast majority of young adults, 69%, said they were not at all interested in politics. Twenty-seven percent expressed only a weak interest. Many described politics as “boring.” Even among the minority who said they paid some attention, that usually meant occasionally watching TV news. When the interviewer asked, “Do you pay attention to politics and world and national events?” one young man said simply, “No.” “What would you say your own political position is?” “I don’t have one,” he replied. One young woman summed up her apathy this way: “I’m really bad at having invested forethought to things that aren’t happening around me.”

  Smith concludes, “The idea that today’s emerging adults are as a generation leading a new wave of renewed civic-mindedness and political involvement is sheer fiction. The fact that anyone ever believed that idea simply tells us how flimsy the empirical evidence that so many journalistic media stories are based upon is and how unaccountable to empirical reality high-profile journalism can be.” And why is GenMe this way? Smith found that young adults have “extremely low estimations of anyone’s ability to make a positive impact on the world.” Just as we found in our analyses, Smith’s respondents believe things are beyond their control.

  But what about concern for the environment? Surely that’s one place where today’s young people are interested in taking action. But are they more interested in environmental issues than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age?

  The high school survey has a long list of questions on taking action to help the environment and save energy. These, I guessed, would be the exception to the trend toward disengagement. However, I was wrong. GenMe’ers were significantly less likely to say they did anything to help the environment than Boomers and GenX’ers, across a wide variety of questions, even those asking about specific behaviors. Three times as many Gen Me’ers (compared to Boomers) answered “none” to the question “In your own actions—the things you buy and the things you do—how much of an effort do you make to conserve energy and protect the environment?” Sixty-eight percent of high school age Boomers in the 1970s said they made an effort to cut down on electricity use to save energy, but only 51% of GenMe did. Seventy-eight percent of Boomers said they tried to reduce heat use in their house in the winter, but only 56% of GenMe did. In a later analysis, we found that environmental action rose during the recession years of 2008–10. Once again, though, it was not enough to bring environmental interest back to the levels of the 1970s or 1990s, and interest in the environment went back down when the economy began to improve in 2012. So even on concern for the environment—the issue purported to be of special concern to this generation—GenMe expresses little interest in getting involved.

  Although at first this conclusion seems unbelievable, it has consistently been confirmed by other polls. In a Pew Center poll, 43% of Americans agreed that “people should be willing to pay higher prices in order to protect the environment” in 2012, down from 67% in 1992. In 1992, 90% of American adults agreed that “there need to be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment,” but that sank to 74% by 2012. Between 2000 and 2013, twice as many Americans described themselves as “unsympathetic” to the environmental movement, and fewer described themselves as “sympathetic but not active.” (The number who say they are “active” has stayed steady at about 17%, suggesting the number of die-hard supporters has stayed the same while the opposition grew and the number of those mildly supportive shrank.) More say the government is doing “too much” to protect the environment.

  The return of the youth vote has also gotten a lot of press in recent years. Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012 presumably brought large
numbers of excited, engaged young voters to the polls. That’s partially true—youth voter turnout was higher in 2008 than in the three previous elections, though at 49% it did not exceed the high-water marks for previous generations (52% among 18-to-29-year-old Boomers in 1972, and 49% for GenX in 1992). However, young people’s voter turnout went right back down again in 2012, to 45%. The most comprehensive and fair comparison might be to combine the turnout data for the presidential election years for each generation when they were young (so 1972–80 for Boomers, 1984–2000 for GenX, and 2004–12 for Millennials/GenMe). In this analysis, 51% of Boomers voted when they were 18-to-29-year-olds, 46% of GenX’ers, and 48% of GenMe/Millennials. A 2-percentage-point increase in youth voter turnout is certainly a good thing, but not quite the “Millennial Makeover” some predicted. So voting—arguably the civic activity that requires the least effort—has a slightly more encouraging trend. Instead of declining precipitously, it has stayed about the same from one generation to the next.

  With the disinterest in politics comes a deep distrust in government and other large institutions such as the national news media, religious organizations, medicine, and schools. In the high school survey, confidence in institutions reached an all-time low in 2012—lower than in the late 1970s after the Watergate scandal, lower than during the 1980s government and religious scandals, and lower than in the mid-2000s during the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In the late 1970s, 31% said Congress was doing a good job, which sank to 20% in 2012. “I have been lied to all my life,” says Ana, 17. “My government is corrupt and evil.”

  But the distrust goes far beyond government. Sixty-two percent of high school students thought the news media were doing a good job in the late 1970s, compared to only 37% in 2012. Students also had a more negative view of churches and religious institutions, large corporations, colleges and universities, public schools, the Supreme Court, and the president and his administration. Adults are not far behind—in the General Social Survey, confidence in virtually every large American institution has declined since the 1970s. Confidence in the press and in medicine show some of the largest decreases. Apparently nobody else knows what they are doing anymore—we only trust ourselves.