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Contents
Introduction
WHO IS IGEN, AND HOW DO WE KNOW?
Chapter 1
IN NO HURRY: GROWING UP SLOWLY
Chapter 2
INTERNET: ONLINE TIME—OH, AND OTHER MEDIA, TOO
Chapter 3
IN PERSON NO MORE: I’M WITH YOU, BUT ONLY VIRTUALLY
Chapter 4
INSECURE: THE NEW MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
Chapter 5
IRRELIGIOUS: LOSING MY RELIGION (AND SPIRITUALITY)
Chapter 6
INSULATED BUT NOT INTRINSIC: MORE SAFETY AND LESS COMMUNITY
Chapter 7
INCOME INSECURITY: WORKING TO EARN—BUT NOT TO SHOP
Chapter 8
INDEFINITE: SEX, MARRIAGE, AND CHILDREN
Chapter 9
INCLUSIVE: LGBT, GENDER, AND RACE ISSUES IN THE NEW AGE
Chapter 10
INDEPENDENT: POLITICS
Conclusion
UNDERSTANDING—AND SAVING—IGEN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Appendix A
SOURCES, METHODS, AND SEPARATING COHORTS AND TIME PERIODS
Appendix B
CHAPTER 1 EXTRA STUFF
Appendix C
CHAPTER 2 EXTRA STUFF
Appendix D
CHAPTER 3 EXTRA STUFF
Appendix E
POSITIVE SELF-VIEWS, HIGH EXPECTATIONS, THE ERODING LINK BETWEEN HAPPINESS AND AGE, AND EVERYBODY’S FAVORITE, NARCISSISM
Appendix F
CHAPTER 4 EXTRA STUFF
Appendix G
CHAPTER 6 EXTRA STUFF
Appendix H
CHAPTER 8 EXTRA STUFF
Appendix I
CHAPTER 10 EXTRA STUFF
Notes to Appendices
Notes
Index
For Julia, the last of iGen
Introduction
* * *
Who Is iGen, and How Do We Know?
When I reach 13-year-old Athena around noon on a summer day, she sounds as if she just woke up. We chat a little about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I ask her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she says. “Do your parents drop you off?” I ask, remembering my own middle school days in the 1980s when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she says. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every thirty minutes.”
Hanging out at the mall with your mom around isn’t the only difference in teens’ social lives these days. Athena and her friends at her middle school in Houston, Texas, communicate using their phones more than they see each other in person. Their favorite medium is Snapchat, a smartphone app that allows users to send pictures that quickly disappear. They particularly like Snapchat’s “dog filter,” which inserts a cartoonish dog nose and ears on people’s heads as they snap photos. “It’s awesome—it’s the cutest filter ever,” she says. They make sure they keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they screenshot particularly ridiculous pictures of friends so they can keep them—“it’s good blackmail.”
Athena says she spent most of the summer hanging out by herself in her room with her phone. “I would rather be on my phone in my room watching Netflix than spending time with my family. That’s what I’ve been doing most of the summer. I’ve been on my phone more than I’ve been with actual people.” That’s just the way her generation is, she says. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
iGen has arrived.
Born in 1995 and later, they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet.
The oldest members of iGen were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and high school students when the iPad entered the scene in 2010. The i in the names of these devices stands for Internet, and the Internet was commercialized in 1995. If this generation is going to be named after anything, the iPhone just might be it: according to a fall 2015 marketing survey, two out of three US teens owned an iPhone, about as complete a market saturation as possible for a product. “You have to have an iPhone,” said a 17-year-old interviewed in the social media exposé American Girls. “It’s like Apple has a monopoly on adolescence.”
The complete dominance of the smartphone among teens has had ripple effects across every area of iGen’ers’ lives, from their social interactions to their mental health. They are the first generation for whom Internet access has been constantly available, right there in their hands. Even if their smartphone is a Samsung and their tablet is a Kindle, these young people are all iGen’ers. (And yes, even if they are lower income: teens from disadvantaged backgrounds now spend just as much time online as those with more resources—another effect of smartphones.) The average teen checks her phone more than eighty times a day.
But technology is not the only change shaping this generation. The i in iGen represents the individualism its members take for granted, a broad trend that grounds their bedrock sense of equality as well as their rejection of traditional social rules. It also captures the income inequality that is creating a deep insecurity among iGen’ers, who worry about doing the right things to become financially successful, to become a “have” rather than a “have not.” Due to these influences and many others, iGen is distinct from every previous generation in how its members spend their time, how they behave, and their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. They are obsessed with safety and fearful of their economic futures, and they have no patience for inequality based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. They are at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression and suicide skyrocketing since 2011. Contrary to the prevalent idea that children are growing up faster than previous generations did, iGen’ers are growing up more slowly: 18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.
Drawing from four large, nationally representative surveys of 11 million Americans since the 1960s, I’ve identified ten important trends shaping iGen’ers and, ultimately, all of us: In No Hurry (the extension of childhood into adolescence), Internet (how much time they are really spending on their phones—and what that has replaced), In person no more (the decline in in-person social interaction), Insecure (the sharp rise in mental health issues), Irreligious (the decline in religion), Insulated but not intrinsic (the interest in safety and the decline in civic involvement), Income insecurity (new attitudes toward work), Indefinite (new attitudes toward sex, relationships, and children), Inclusive (acceptance, equality, and free speech debates), and Independent (their political views). iGen is the ideal place to look for trends that will shape our culture in the years to come, as its members are very young but still old enough to express their views and report on their experiences.
I’ve been researching generational
differences for nearly twenty-five years, starting when I was a 22-year-old PhD student in personality psychology at the University of Michigan. Back then I focused on how my own generation, Generation X, differed from Boomers (more gender equality and more anxiety, among other things). As time went on, I found a broad array of generational differences in behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits that distinguished the Millennials, the generation born in the 1980s and early 1990s. That research culminated in my 2006 book Generation Me, updated in 2014, a look at how the Millennials differed from their predecessors. Most of the generational differences that defined GenX and the Millennials came along gradually, building to a crescendo only after a decade or two of steady change. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like hills slowly growing into peaks, with cultural change making its mark after a measured rollout that started with a few young people and swelled to many.
But around 2012, I started seeing large, abrupt shifts in teens’ behaviors and emotional states. All of a sudden, the line graphs looked like steep mountains—rapid drop-offs erased the gains of decades in just a few years; after years of gradual inclines or hollows, sheer cliffs suddenly brought traits to all-time highs. In all of my analyses of generational data—some of it reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
At first I wondered if these were random blips that would disappear after a year or two. But they didn’t—the trends kept going, creating sustained, and often unprecedented, trends. As I dug into the data, a pattern emerged: many of the large changes began around 2011 or 2012. That was too late to be caused by the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009.
Then it occurred to me: 2011–12 was exactly when the majority of Americans started to own cell phones that could access the Internet, popularly known as smartphones. The product of this sudden shift is iGen.
Such broad generational shifts have big implications. A whole new group of young people who act and think differently—even differently from their neighbors the Millennials—is emerging into young adulthood. We all need to understand them, including friends and family looking out for them, businesses searching for new recruits, colleges and universities educating and guiding students, and marketers figuring out how to sell to them. Members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they explain to their elders and their slightly older peers how they approach the world and what makes them different.
Generational differences are larger and more broadly influential than ever. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in worldview, with more focus on the self and less on social rules (thus the term Generation Me). But with the popularity of the smartphone, iGen’ers differ most in how they spend their time. The life experiences they have every day are radically different from those of their predecessors. In some ways, this is an even more fundamental generational shift than that which created the Millennials; perhaps that’s why the trends announcing the arrival of iGen were so sudden and large.
The Birth Year Cutoffs
The breakneck speed of technological change has created a surprisingly large gap between those born in the 1980s and those who started life in the 1990s. “I am not a true digital native,” Juliet Lapidos, born in 1983, wrote in the New York Times. “The Internet wasn’t a fact of nature. I had to learn what it was and how to use it . . . . I didn’t have a mobile phone until I was 19.” Lapidos was 19 in 2002, when texting required hitting the same key several times on your flip phone and surfing the Web meant sitting at a desktop computer. When the iPhone was introduced just five years later in 2007, all of that changed. iGen’ers are the first generation to enter adolescence with smartphones already in their hands—a stark difference with wide-ranging implications.
iGen got here faster than anyone anticipated. Until recently, most of the generational patter focused on Millennials, sometimes defined as Americans born between 1980 and 1999. Yet this is a long span for a recent generation: Generation X, immediately before the Millennials, lasted only fourteen years, from 1965 to 1979. If the Millennial generation lasts the same amount of time as GenX, the last Millennial birth year is instead 1994, meaning that iGen begins with those born in 1995—conveniently, that’s also the year the Internet was born. Other milestones fall close to 1995 as well. In 2006, Facebook opened up to anyone over the age of 13—so those born since 1993 have been able to live their entire adolescence on social networking sites. A cut in the mid-1990s also makes sense based on the hard data: in 2011, the year when everything started to change in the survey data, the 13- to 18-year-olds answering the questions were born between 1993 and 1998.
It’s anyone’s guess when iGen will end; I’d put my money on fourteen to seventeen years after 1995. That would mean the last iGen’ers were born somewhere between 2009 and 2015, with 2012 right at the middle of that range. That makes the birth year span of iGen 1995–2012. As time goes on, those boundaries might be adjusted up or down, but 1995–2012 is a solid place to start. A lot is going to depend on the technology developed in the next ten years and whether it changes young people’s lives as much as the smartphone did. With 1995–2012 as the range, the first iGen’ers graduated from high school in 2012 and the last will in 2030 (see Figure 0.1).
Figure 0.1: Time span when each generation dominated the population of high school seniors and entering college students, based on the generational birth-year cutoffs.
Any generational cutoff is arbitrary; there is no exact science or official consensus to determine which birth years belong to which generation. In addition, people born right before and right after the cutoff have experienced essentially the same culture, but those born ten years apart but technically within the same generation have experienced a different culture. Nevertheless, generational labels with specific cutoffs are useful; just like city boundaries, the demarcation of 18 as legal adulthood, and personality types, they allow us to define and describe people despite the obvious limitations of using a bright line when a fuzzy one is closer to the truth. No matter where we set the cutoff, it’s important to understand how those born after the mid-1990s differ from those born only a few years before.
The Name
As a label, iGen is concise, broad, and relatively neutral. At least one writer has described the iGen label as “bland,” but that’s actually a strength. A generational label needs to be inclusive enough to capture an extensive swath of people and neutral enough to be accepted by the generation itself and older generations. It also needs to capture something about the generation’s experience, and for iGen’ers, the Internet and smartphones have defined many of their experiences thus far. The prominent magazine AdvertisingAge has backed iGen as the best name for the post-Millennials. “We think it’s the name that best fits and will best lead to understanding of this generation,” Matt Carmichael, AdvertisingAge’s director of data strategy, told USA Today.
Another name suggested for this group is Generation Z. However, that label works only if the generation before them is called Generation Y, and hardly anyone uses Generation Y now that the term Millennials has won out. That makes Generation Z dead on arrival. Not to mention that young people do not want to be named after the generation older than themselves. That’s why Baby Busters never caught on for Generation X and why Generation Y never stuck for the Millennials. Generation Z is derivative, and the generational labels that stick are always original.
Neil Howe, who along with the late William Strauss coined the term Millennials, has suggested that the next generation be called the Homelanders, given their upbringing in the time of homeland security. I doubt that any generation wants to be named after the government agency that makes you take your shoes off at the airport. Howe also believes that the generation after the Millennials doesn’t begin until those born in 2005, which seems unlikely given the fast pace of technological change and the sudden shifts in teens’ time use and traits starting around 2011. Other labels have been suggested as well. In 2015, teens
polled by MTV chose the Founders as their preferred generational label. But: founders of what?
As far as I know, I was the first to use the term iGen, introducing it in the first edition of my book Generation Me in April 2006. I’ve been using the term iGen to talk about the post-Millennial generation for a while; in 2010 I named my speaking and consulting business iGen Consulting.
The Data
What we know about iGen so far is just beginning to take shape. Polls will announce that 29% of young adults don’t affiliate with a religion or that 86% of teens worry about finding a job. But these single-time polls could be capturing beliefs universal to young people across all generations. Boomer or GenX teens in the 1970s or 1990s may also have shunned religion and worried about employment. One-time polls with no comparison group tell us nothing about cultural change or iGen’ers distinctive experiences. You can’t draw a generational conclusion with data from only one generation. Yet so far, nearly all the books and articles about iGen have relied on minimally useful polls like those.
Other one-time surveys include members of several generations. That’s better, but even they have a major flaw: they can’t separate the effects of age from those of generation. If a study finds (for example) that iGen’ers want to make friends at work more than GenX’ers do, that might be because iGen’ers are young and single and GenX’ers are older and married. In a one-time survey, there’s no way to tell. That’s unfortunate, because if you’re capturing differences based on age, it doesn’t tell you much about what has changed—whether what worked to motivate young employees or students ten years ago will work now.
To really understand what’s unique about this generation—what is actually new about it—we need to compare iGen to previous generations when their members were young. We need data collected across time. That’s what the large, over-time surveys I analyze in this book do: they ask young people the same questions year after year so their responses can be compared over several generations.
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