We know this, because every few days there’s a story about how they are too overprotected to be police officers (they have been “wrapped in cotton wool”, are routinely shocked that police are expected to work nights and weekends and “do not like confrontation”, apparently). They’re “entitled, spoilt and molly-coddled snowflakes”, they’re “flaky”, “self-centred”, “narcissistic” and “oversensitive”.

But as far as I can tell, it’s all nonsense. For a start: millennials aren’t that young any more. The usual cut-off point, where Generation X becomes millennial, is 1981. (I miss out by less than six weeks; I’m gutted.) The oldest millennials are now 37 years old; some of them are grandparents; many of them will be taking their own children to university this September. Even the youngest (born 1996) are now approaching their mid-20s and have probably been in the workforce for a while now. Professors and medical consultants are millennials; quite a lot of those millennials who are too mollycoddled to be police officers will be detective chief superintendents by now, which must have come as a shock.

For another: all this dividing people up into generations (boomers, Gen X, millennials, iGen/Gen Z) is at best arbitrary and at worst meaningless. I’m apparently Gen X, but I obviously have more in common with a millennial born two months after me than I do with someone born in 1965.

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Could Generation X save the world?

By Peter Franklin

The sociologist Philip Cohen argues that the categories are essentially valueless and do not line up with any useful distinctions; they’re just “irregular categories without justification”, “marketing names that promote stereotyping and confirmation bias”. Most people, when asked to give their own “generation”, get it wrong.

That’s not to say that people haven’t changed: obviously they have. Younger people are more liberal on most issues, for instance, and they are less likely to smoke, drink and take drugs. But they don’t line up neatly with the generations: actual changes in social attitudes, such as attitudes towards divorce, are unconnected to these arbitrary categories.

Here are some of the differences. Younger people are more liberal on LGBT issues – about 80% of under-34s have “no objection” to same-sex marriage, compared to 62% of 55- to 75-year-olds – and race; young people are much more likely to think that it’s racist to dislike hearing UK residents speak other languages than English or to make jokes involving racial stereotypes. They’re less likely to be religious, although slightly more likely to be of a non-Christian faith, a change presumably driven by immigration. They’re more likely to identify as LGBT themselves.

And they’re more likely to be worried about climate change – although it’s not as dramatic a difference, at least in the UK, as I’d have expected, given the constant moaning by baby-boomer columnists about Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, 94% of 18- to 34-year-olds think climate change is definitely/probably happening, 46% think it’s definitely/probably caused by human activity, and 32% are extremely/very worried about it. For over-65s, those numbers are 90, 35 and 20 respectively. It’s not huge. In fact, since Britain saw its hottest ever recorded temperature last week, I would have been entirely happy if it were greater. If the younger generation is willing to make those sacrifices that we older ones are not, then perhaps the consequences might not be quite so severe.

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What I find strange is the older generation complaining about this. Young people have always been more liberal than their parents; it’s as though the boomers have forgotten the Sixties. And being more open on sex and gender issues is hardly new either; about half of British teenagers in the Sixties and Nineties decided they were gay because David Bowie and him out of Suede were for a while. (I have this theory that most of the young men doing it are doing it to be more interesting to girls, just as lots of my contemporaries did back then, and that a large percentage of the male-bodied people who describe themselves as genderfluid now will be married to a woman and living in St Albans with two kids and a miniature schnauzer by the time they’re 40. But I have nothing to back that hypothesis up.)

And, of course, “young people are lazy and entitled” is a tale as old as — well, perhaps not the hills, but certainly as old as the United States of America. The younger generation was marvellously described as “a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles”, lacking the “manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers” in a letter to Town and Country magazine back in 1771. Their morals are “corrupted” by plays and romances (1790); their elocution is “wretched” (1780).

Incidentally, I put “millennials workplace meta-analysis” into Google Scholar, to see if there was any actual support for the idea that millennials are any more lazy and/or entitled than previous generations were when they were in their 20s. The short answer is: no.

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The first relevant result I found, which is a meta-analysis from 2012 and claims to be the first systematic review of generational differences in the workplace, looked at job satisfaction, how committed to their employers they were, and how likely they were to stick around. It found that “the relationships between generational membership and work-related outcomes are moderate to small, essentially zero in many cases”.

Another review article, from 2018, found that there is “little solid empirical evidence supporting the existence of generationally based differences, almost no theory supporting any reason behind such differences, and plenty of viable alternate explanations for any differences that are observed”.

As far as I can tell, all this “millennial snowflakes” stuff is just the same “kids today are being damaged by social media and Fortnite, and this is different from how my parents thought I was being damaged by heavy metal and teen magazines for reasons I cannot fully articulate” wine in different bottles.

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But, of course, there are some real differences between the younger generation and the older one. One is that very few of them can afford to buy their own homes; just 35% of 25- to 34-year-olds did in 2013/14, compared to more than 60% in 1981. Millennials and Gen-Zers look like they will be the first generation to have less disposable income than their parents (partly because of the increase in house prices, but partly because of stagnating incomes).

Those middle-era and younger millennials who graduated after the financial crisis will probably earn less for much of their careers than those of us who graduate before. None of this is their fault; this is the fault of governments voted in by Boomers and Gen-Xers who refused to build housing stock, who stripped back government spending and stalled the economy, and who failed to keep a grip on financial markets.

I’m pretty sceptical of stories about how the younger generations are crippled by mental health problems or how we have a suicidal generation. Generally the evidence doesn’t stack up and it’s just an excuse for someone to whine about social media or smartphones. But, actually, younger generations really do face problems that the older ones didn’t; on some really crucial issues, it is harder to be 25 now than it was 25 years ago. And yet as far as I can tell, they aren’t any lazier, any more entitled or whiny, or significantly more depressed than their parents were at the same age. To be honest, since we’re the ones who’ve screwed it all up for them, we should be more grateful that they’re not rising up to overthrow us.

The answer is that they were all born in the same year, 1946. It’s a coincidence that illustrates the enduring power of the Baby Boomers – the post-war generation born between 1945 and 1965. That makes Barack Obama (born 1961) a Boomer too, though one of the younger ones.

The next generation – ie ‘Generation X’, born between 1965 and 1980 – may have to wait some time for its turn in the White House. Even if Trump is not re-elected in 2020, most of the likely alternatives are also Baby Boomers (or even, like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, pre-boomer war babies.

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Boomer populism is a warning from the future

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Therefore, it might not be until 2024 or 2028 that a Gen Xer gets a crack at the Presidency. However, by that time the older members of the generation after X – the ‘Millennials’ born between 1980 and 1995 – will be old enough to run for the top job. This raises the alarming prospect that there will never be a Generation X President of the United States.

Why should that matter? A new book by Matthew Hennessey, deputy op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal explains what’s so special about an often overlooked generation. Entitled Zero Hour for GenX: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials it is reviewed for the American Conservative by Charles F McElwee:

“Hennessey… argues that Generation X is the country’s greatest check on a dystopian technological future. It is Gen Xers who can recall life before Big Tech’s omniscience, restores values extinguished by modern norms, and bridge the gap between Boomers’ lingering hubris and Millennials’ infectious callowness. Theirs is a generation victimized by timing—too young for the halcyon ’90s, profoundly traumatized by 9/11 and the Great Recession, and immobilized by the present turbulent age.”

The tech bit is certainly true. Gen X (to which I belong) was the last generation (in the developed world) to have an analogue childhood. There was no internet, no mobile phones and no social media. As for computer games, those were around, but on steam age storage media – like cassette tapes that would take ages to load (providing the tape didn’t get chewed up by the player and your dad’s computer didn’t crash).

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Of course, it wasn’t just Gen X who lived through the subsequent digital transition – everyone older than us did too (if they were paying attention). But I think it meant more to us because it coincided with our own transition from infancy. We literally matured with the technology.

McElwee says that Gen X grew up with “just the right dose of technology”. I’m not sure about that, but at least we know the difference between the digital and pre-digital worlds. Gen X are the first-generation settlers of cyberspace, with an appreciation of what we’ve gained as a result – and what we’ve lost:

“Baby Boomers, now seniors, seem unconcerned with Big Tech’s grip on society. After all, passively scrolling on an iPad is a leisure, not a burden. Millennials, meanwhile, have surrendered themselves to a pixelated existence. Life has become digital, told in short stories and filtered photos for hidden, dopamine-feeding advertisers.

“…In response to this rapid change, Hennessey believes Generation X must remind society of forgotten behaviors, products, and standards…”

Of course, not every Baby Boomer is disengaged from this issue, nor is every Millennial (and Post-millennial) so glued to their screen as not to notice the outside world. Yet Hennessey is on to something when he says that “the members of Generation X have an awesome responsibility to keep faith with reality”.

Admittedly, this overlooks the central role that television played in warping our ideas of reality, but at least the one-eyed monster – unlike the smartphone – didn’t follow us around. It was possible to head out into the world without a digital tether. And despite the lack of a constant connection to home, school and friends, we generally had more freedom to explore the world than today’s young people. 

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Why don't we talk about television anymore?

By Peter Franklin

I suspect we also had a greater inclination to use (and abuse) this latitude. Because diversion wasn’t available at the swipe of a screen, we lived with the ever-present threat of pure, undistracted boredom. When we couldn’t escape it, we had to put up with it – an invaluable test for any young mind; and in some cases, a spur to creativity and/or mischief.

So, perhaps, Matthew Hennessey is right. The on-coming wave of Gen X leaders could provide the refresh that our Boomer-dominated political system so desperately needs.

One word of warning though. For all, the nice things that can be said about Gen Xers, the fact is that crime rates peaked just as we reached adolescence / early adulthood. That makes us the most delinquent, and indeed violent, generation in modern history.

Perhaps we should skip to the gentle Millennials after all.