The only problem is, as Bobby Duffy argues in his new book, it’s simply not true. Duffy’s research shows that on key social issues such as climate change, the attitudes of younger and older people in the UK are fairly well-aligned. When you analyse the data, as he has, it turns out that people don’t fit the generational stereotypes that have been assigned to them.

For example, when it comes to ideas about gender roles, attitudes have changed across every generation. Back in 1983, the view that a woman’s place was in the home was shared by four in ten British people; by 2018, fewer than one in ten held this view. It is not generational identity that determines such attitudes, but changes in the wider social and cultural context that frame them.

This will not surprise researchers who have spent years investigating the existence of generational conflict in the UK and US, only to find the evidence elusive. Policies designed to promote “intergenerational equity” in public spending are largely top-down constructions designed to justify the rationing of welfare resources. Meanwhile, even studies of generational differences, with regard to attitudes or behaviours, tend to be far more nuanced than newspaper headlines about “Millennials” or “Gen Z” imply.

Suggested reading

Nirvana's teen spirit will never get old

By Dorian Lynskey

With all the nonsense talked about generations, it’s tempting to dismiss the “tired stereotypes” that Duffy rightly criticises. But that would ignore why they retain both an appeal and some value in making sense of the times we live in.

Generations have long operated as “concepts of existence” that help us to understand ourselves in relation to the world. Laura L. Nash, writing in 1978, traced generational thought back to its Greek origins, where it was as a relative concept marking “allegiance, time of life, span of years, sameness with one group and otherness from the rest”.

From around the late 18th century, economic and political modernisation encouraged Europeans to regard themselves as part of history; both as a product of the times in which they were born and having a role to play in shaping their historical moment. Being part of the “younger” or “older” generation became symbolically attached to wider ideas about progress, the future and the past — with conflict between the “old” and “new” sometimes expressed in generational terms. By the mid-19th century, Ivan Turgenev used Fathers and Sons to depict the social changes sweeping across Russia as a clash between the conventions of the past and aspirations for the future, personified in members of the older and younger generations.

Generations, then, have a strongly cultural dimension — and, as a result, can influence the way we think about the world around us. This was the central argument presented by the sociologist Karl Mannheim in the Twenties, whose influential essay The Problem of Generations drew on philosophical, historical and sociological thought to understand the impact of wider social events on the development of consciousness.

Mannheim’s theory of “social generations” was based on the understanding that periods of accelerated social change could provoke a distinct kind of consciousness within those coming of age during that time, born out of their “fresh contact” with the “accumulated cultural heritage”. Following this approach, we can see how some of the “generation labels” used today capture a shift between old and new worlds, precipitated by significant historical events.

From the “Generation of 1914”, symbolically associated with the trauma of the First World War, to the “Baby Boomers”, apparently embodying the cultural upheavals of the Sixties, a certain section of youth came to symbolise the Zeitgeist. This didn’t mean, of course, that they represented their entire birth cohort, whose experience was more profoundly framed by class, ethnicity, and where they grew up. War poets and hippies spoke to a moment in time, not a personality type.

Over the past decade, however, wild stereotyping about “selfish” Boomers and “entitled” Millennials abounds, alongside a crude determinism that casts the so-called “Covid generation” as forever victimised by the pandemic. Imagined in this way, generations become mere ciphers for wider cultural attitudes and prejudices that our society is grappling with. This is a problem, both for our understanding of generations as “concepts of existence”, and our perception of the people forced into such boxes by their birthdate.

More from this author

Lockdowns don't protect the elderly

By Jennie Bristow

Mannheim would have been horrified by the crass way in which “social generations” have become weaponised. While he theorised a relationship between wider social events and generational consciousness, he rejected the idea that generations were mere products of their time. Generational consciousness is a dynamic process, whereby “new participants” encounter the cultural heritage and shape it in their own way. The transmission of the past, through older generations embodying that heritage, was crucial for the development and renewal of society.

For generations aren’t only abstract concepts — they are embodied in people. These people are our parents, children, teachers, colleagues and fellow citizens; people upon whom we rely for understanding our world and making our own place in it, and depend for love, care, and solidarity. Research such as Duffy’s is a valuable reminder of why evidence of generational conflict is hard to find: people don’t see themselves as representatives of a particular perspective, but as individuals with their own views and experiences; they don’t regard their elders or youngers as a threat but as a relationship to be nurtured, with clashes of opinion forming part of that human experience.

Mannheim understood this when he spoke of the importance of social renewal through the “continuous emergence of new participants in the cultural process”. The continuity of generational transmission — that one dies, and is born, every minute — reduces the level of friction that might otherwise result from having to induct a whole group of people into the cultural process all at once.

The dynamic nature of this interaction, in which young and old continually learn from each other, allows society, as a whole, to retain the “elasticity of mind” that would ossify if we weren’t continually having to engage in a process of “social remembering”. Although times of accelerated change do provoke tensions, it is the conversation between the generations that allows us to weather the storm; retaining our historical memory while adapting to new events and understandings.

The upheaval provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic has made this conversation more important than ever. As we emerge from the shock, we may well see a particular kind of generational consciousness emerge, as young people begin to process and express the meaning of the “new normal” in a way that is quite different from those of us who came of age in different times.

The experience of being able to take nothing for granted — from being able to see your friends to sitting the career-defining exams you have spent years working towards — has occurred at a formative phase of life for them. What many of us may have experienced as just a few weeks or months of boredom, before resuming the pattern of our lives, meant something quite different to children for whom established rites of passage were simply stripped away, and cannot be revisited.

Suggested reading

Nightclubs won't save you

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps most significant, the effective collapse of educational assessment has brought pre-existing anxieties about the value of knowledge starkly to the fore. Put bluntly: if a cohort that has received less education than a previous one gains better grades as a result, what value do we attach to the accumulated cultural heritage in the first place? If the rules of life can so swiftly be rewritten because of an “unprecedented” situation, what do we expect our children to learn from history?

These are uncomfortable questions, to which there are no easy answers. Nobody can predict the form that a new generational consciousness may take. But we can at least take seriously our role in social remembering: ensuring that the younger generation have more to work with than a blank slate. That means, first and foremost, reckoning with our responsibility to educate young people about the past, and entering into a genuinely open discussion about what we have learned from the hiatus of the past couple of years.

Most of the discussion about the problem of education during the pandemic has focused on the failure of schools and universities to take responsibility for keeping the lessons going. But there is a far deeper issue, to do with our defensiveness, as adults, about the norms and values that we grew up with ourselves, and what we want to transmit to our children. The risk is that, in attempting to move on from the pandemic, we will deceive ourselves that we have little of worth to say to youngsters whose experience has been so novel and distinct.

But like every generation before them, today’s young need to understand the world as it was, before they can make it into the world they want it to be. They cannot do that on their own. That is why the conceit that generations exist in separate, polarised boxes is such a problem. It denies young people access to the tools used by those before them to made sense of their lives, and the resulting sense of mutual incomprehension makes conflict more likely.

It is fashionable to argue that our responsibility to the young requires greater thinking about the future — but it requires an equal commitment to the knowledge we have gained from the past.

When my name is read out, I affect a smile for the benefit of my mum. There is a wicked pleasure to feeling so removed from such a major life event. The choirboys and bagpipes add extravagance to an already surreal spectacle: beyond the screen, we are afforded no interlude from the cacophony of the present job crisis (for which the university’s emphasis on “networking” over the years has done little to prepare us). My precarious situation has, by now, clearly become a monomania, through whose filter any show of gaiety appears in bad taste.

I belong to what some unpalatably call “Generation Covid”. Just as I and thousands of other graduates were preparing to enter the job market last May, open vacancies dropped by 278,000 and two thirds of graduating students saw applications paused or withdrawn due to the pandemic. Since then, job-hunting has bordered on the farcical: an entire corpus of myths has originated from the effort by applicants to understand the dos and don’ts of the hiring process.

The practical value of university degrees has been publicly called into question, and academic career services have finally revealed their raison d’être: none whatsoever. And so CVs are handed out like flyers, in a scattershot fashion. Most of them are bound to disappear into a black hole: my couple hundred applications obtained a total of two interview invitations. Rejection letters, too, were provided only by a courteous minority.

Suggested reading

Will 'Coronnials' be scarred for life?

By Eliza Filby

Some of us young jobseekers cannot rely on generational wealth and a family home to sustain us through this crisis. My single mum raised me way beyond her financial means: though I missed nothing growing up, supporting us through her freelancing gigs was never what you’d call a breeze. A recent eviction notice has eroded the little security we had left, and made finding employment crucial to affording rent elsewhere.

Whenever applying to a role, I wish I could convey all that is contingent on the simple “yes” or “no” of my faceless correspondent. I yearn to explain that, even though my CV looks like that of countless others, a secure position means an immensity more to me than what is discernible. Yet, an unwritten rule binds me to reticence.

Indeed, I was cautioned many times against “seeming desperate” as something of an indecency, an assault on recruiters’ sensibilities. Need, and in particular, financial need, seems doomed to always achieve the opposite effect to the one desired: to repel, rather than to conjure assistance. This is informed by the very structure of job applications, and, specifically, of equal opportunities’ forms. I am asked about my ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and religion, but a crucial (perhaps, the most crucial) feature of my candidacy appears to never be of any relevance: household income. This way, a company is able to reach its yearly diversity target and give itself a good pat on the back, while those in most desperate need of work go unrecognised.

I am living proof that these questionnaires are wholly inadequate at reckoning with the complexity of personal circumstances. The “working class background” checkbox, strictly speaking, does not fit me: up to some point, I could afford traveling abroad and a private education. Now, however, a knock on the door evokes images of bloodthirsty creditors, and, by night, I dream about my adventures as the best-dressed bag lady in Covent Garden, a modern Eliza Doolittle minus the accent.

Ticking the “BAME” box, too, involves a contradiction: I may have non-white blood in me, but I was raised exclusively by a white mum. My language, education, and life experiences are entirely European. Yet, I dare anyone call me an impostor for applying to opportunities reserved to candidates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I am obliged to deform reality by a screening system that favours perception over experience.

Suggested reading

Generation corona has been handed a life sentence

By Will Tanner

The checkbox forms, the automated emails, the applicant tracking software – all accommodate a hiring process that caters to optimisation, rather than human interaction. Requests of feedback are predominantly ignored by recruiters, I suspect, not due to the “overwhelming amount of applications received”, as every single rejection email invariably recites, but to the fact that machines are, as yet, unable to express personalised criticism.

I may have been born in the digital era, but I still resent the alienating quality of modern job-hunting. Instead of it being geared to suit me, the human applicant, I am the one having to blunt my idiosyncrasies, legacy, urgencies — all that makes me me, and not somebody else — to suit the mechanised screening process.

Last November, my Zoom assessment day with a well-known social enterprise gave me a hypnotising taste of the assembly line. About twelve of us were passed over from one desensitised recruiter to another, with the job of evaluating whether our answers would align with the company’s listed “competencies”. Candidates who, even unwittingly, resisted standardisation like myself were discarded with ease.

A lot of time and emotional investment went into my prep; even so, they had the cheek to turn me down without feedback. This time I was not in for it, however: I engaged in a hunt that lasted two weeks, until, finally, a videocall was arranged. The woman on the other side of the screen, who had only her audio on, giggled as she invited me to disable my own video, clearly more comfortable addressing a disembodied voice than a feeling person just like herself. It looks like, in a more or less unconscious attempt to delay being supplanted by them, human recruiters are also increasingly adjusting to robotic modes.

The tribulations of young jobseekers are brushed under the carpet not only by all political parties, but also by those responsible for keeping them accountable for their shortcomings. As, a couple of months ago, the media were busy contending over whether Suzanne Moore’s essay from decades ago should or should not have been considered evidence of her transphobia, Rishi Sunak’s plans to cut welfare payments and ending furlough within the spring went relatively unchallenged. The amount of activistic effort that goes to waste in the realm of symbolism and semantics could be almost comical, if it didn’t end up diverting politics away from the material predicaments of large sections of society.

Suggested reading

The generation betrayed by Boris

By Louise Perry

Perhaps unemployment would earn its own hashtag if its impact on mental health — a catch-all term that nonetheless holds the power to prick ears up — was seriously explored. Unemployment does not just hurt people’s chances at wealth and stability; it also undermines their sense of self. More than 70 years ago, Simone Weil taught, in her essay Need for Roots, that, just like the body needs nourishment, the soul, too, has its own set of needs. Among them are responsibility and honour, which indicate human hunger for productivity, accountability, and public recognition for our deeds. Living on Universal Credit is not enough for me to feel whole. Instead, my labour is necessary to me — in that, when made to experience its value and utility, I also perceive myself to be useful and valuable. Without it, I feel more unsure in myself, feebler.

During this pandemic, policies have failed to reflect this common need for purpose, instead treating citizens as mere consumers. Much thought has gone into strategies for safely letting people out of their homes, straight into shops and pubs, wallets ajar, whereas none has been employed to ponder the harmful effects of prolonged economic inactivity on people’s sense of worth as human beings.

I don’t just speak for myself when I say that joblessness has made me anxious, more sad and more resentful towards institutions than ever. Though unable to progress as time progresses, I can feel myself growing old with unnatural clarity every day. Yet I, like so many other job-seekers, am not lost, let alone part of some “lost generation”. We do not want to be shut away and forgotten. What we want is to be seen for exactly what we are: the very individuals on whose strength the sound course of the rest of the century depends.