Are Generations Really That Different From One Another?

Although not purely divided along political or economic lines,
the stratification of generations, each with their own preferences, prejudices, and peccadilloes, has never been more apparent or important than in today’s American landscape.

The assumptions made by generations before the 1960s were simply summed up by “elders and young people.” Now, with an almost holy reverence, each generation proclaims itself different and more serious than those who came before or after. The exegesis of the subject requires an almost surgical dissection of these stratifications.

Although these divisions have no official designation, they are generally accepted by sociological and educational institutions.

What are the differences between these generations besides chronological age, and how are these generations intertwined?

Laura Kennedy is a 62-year-old Longmont resident who sees women’s roles in the modern world vastly different from the world she knew growing up. “From a female standpoint, my mother and my grandmother did not have as many privileges as I have,” she said. Kennedy continued, “I think they were less better off than me, and they were more confined by culture and society.”

Kennedy is optimistic about the future for the women in subsequent generations.

“Especially for the female generations, … we do have more opportunities than my mother and grandmother had. I think my generation had more, at least I believe, we had more education and knowledge and freedom about our rights and responsibilities and opportunities.”

As for future generations, Kennedy hopes to see less racism and more socioeconomic equality. “I’d also like to see more balance between the very wealthy and the very poor.”

As for future generations, Kennedy hopes to see less racism and  more socioeconomic equality. “Id also like to see more balance between the very wealthy and the very poor.”

Glee J., 65, is a recent transplant to Boulder County from Hawaii. Although her first comment was in regards to women’s rights and how much women have gained in this area, she grew up in that narrow gap between Baby Boomers and Generation X, who had to delicately navigate between their patriotic parents — who fought in Korea and World War II — and their peers and family members — some of whom were demonstrating against the Vietnam War.

“I was pretty young when Vietnam was going on. My father was a lieutenant colonel in the Army, but he retired in’72, so he didn’t have to go. My brother protested the war, so there was a lot of friction there,” she said.

She feels badly about how Vietnam vets were and still are treated and wishes her peers would talk more about their attitudes of that conflict now as opposed to how they viewed the war back in the 60s and 70s.

In contrast, Allison Cowan, a 29-year-old millennial or what may be known as Generation Y, sees women’s roles a little differently. Interestingly, in contrast, women’s rights were not foremost on her mind.

“For me personally [the most important thing generationally], it’s the state of the planet. You know, where climate change is leading us to be in very short years,” she said. She adds when thinking about prior generations, “Everyone was dealing with their own state of the world at that point in time. You know, I always think back about how, when you call someone and leave a voicemail on their house phone and you wouldn’t expect a call back for a couple of days, and it was fine. Now in this day and age, we have cell phones where you are in constant communication with people, and they want to get a hold of you right now — and they want answers right away. Yeah, previous generations were all dealing with their own state of the world.”

Men also see a big difference in generations. Brandon Taylor, 46, is an attorney who came from Indiana to Colorado for the outdoor lifestyle, sees his generation as one whose problems are a bit more of a social challenge than other generational complexities.

“I view them as more settled, wise. I feel [with prior generations], the problems they did have to solve for were complex and difficult, but the variety and number of problems they had to solve for were a lot fewer than we have in the current generation. I feel like the place in time we’re in today, the problems are trending different than what we’ve seen historically in the United States, and what the older generations had to deal with were just different.”

He did admit that being born in 1977, he had never lived through a draft but still thinks the problems of former generations were more common and not quite the same complexity of today’s challenges.

Glee J. adds, “Yes, I’m  concerned for the next generation and the next generation [after that]. Although, we’ve always been involved with war in one way or another, it seems like.”

“I’ve got grandkids, and I almost wanna apologize to them. I’m sorry you were born during Covid and just our country with the whole situation. It’s scary,” she added.

Technology plays perhaps the biggest role in generational differences. “Let’s see, I got my first cell phone when I was in middle school. It was a Motorola flip phone,” said Cowan.

She added, “It was my sister’s phone before, and I think I was … 11?” She stated that the only time she used a rotary telephone was at her grandfather’s house when she was very young. She said it was fun.

The millennial world is vastly different than the generations that came before. There was a day when it was necessary and not just kitschy to boil water when making coffee or to make popcorn on the stove top. It is a bygone epoch when there were actual ovens in breakrooms, not just microwaves, and the streets seemed to be lined with as many pay phones as trees.

There is a darker side to what these younger generations have had to endure in their short lifetimes. Maxwell Frost is a 25-year-old democratic congressman from Florida and is the first Generation Z congressman ever elected. He spoke to the Guardian newspaper this past December and talked about the uncertainty of these more recent generations. “It feels like I’ve been through more mass shooting drills than fire drills,” Frost told the Guardian.

Taylor also has a darker view of technological advances over generations. “[The internet era]  gives us an advantage of seeing the pitfalls of other great civilizations like the Roman Empire, etc.,” Taylor said, but he is not sure we are learning from mistakes.“We’re following a similar pattern, just hyper consolidated because, in the age of no technology, it took a lot longer to destroy yourself.”

Many don’t look to science to answer any generational challenges, and they have a good point. Many in the scientific community also view these problems as unanswerable through purely scientific means. Although many of these complexities and concerns may be addressed through sociological and other cultural studies, to get a true snapshot of generational challenges, one might only hope to get valid answers locally and not across-the-board sweeping generalizations.

An article published on National Institutes of Health’s website, entitled “Generations and Generational Differences: Debunking Myths in Organizational Science and Practice and Paving New Paths Forward,”  discusses how difficult it is to scientifically cull information and data from different parts of countries and the world because no two places are exactly alike. The people who live in those places may have a commonality in background, however there will almost always be differences which render the experiments and data almost useless.

“Purported differences between generations have been blamed for everything from declining interest in baseball to changing patterns of processed cheese consumption. In the workplace, generations and generational differences have been credited for everything from declining levels of work ethic to higher rates of “job-hopping,” (Rudolf, Cort W, et al.,).

It would seem that it’s going to be up to the social sciences to make sense of generational differences and commonality within each generation and how they interact with other generations.

However difficult this task may be, there may be good news locally. University of Colorado Boulder’s Office of Undergraduate Education offers a class where students from different generations get together and concentrate on helping each other through writing.

Although developed some years ago, the class is now led by Eric Klinger, who is involved at the university in an administration role yet takes time to teach the class he sees as vital to the community.

Klinger noted that wrong assumptions are first and foremost when it comes to generational learning. He is quick to point out that although it is often said that nobody who was born before the year 2000 really knows anything about technology, much of the technology that students are using was developed by people who were born prior to that year.

Many of the women in this article cited progress in women’s rights as one of the most important issues on their mind, as do students in Klinger’s class.

“There have been some really fascinating conversations that have come out of that. For a lot of the women students, they have that same concern, especially with what’s happening in our country right now and reproductive rights. So, to be able to talk with other women who may have been marching in 1973 is pretty amazing. So that crossover of first or second wave of feminism and whatever wave we would be on now, is really neat.”

This season maybe the perfect opportunity for us together with family of varying generations, and get to those conversations which we always see in the media, as being necessary to our understanding of each other, and the world around us.

In spite of differences and similarities, one thing is for sure: Each generation has seen things the world has never seen before. However, some of the unique things we have seen in each generation have similar histories. For example, although Covid has been a game changer in worldwide life, we must remember the Silent Generation lived through the Spanish flu, which was also a worldwide epidemic.

Klinger notes, “Maybe as a culture, we practice a little bit of amnesia. Because after the Spanish flu was over, we really didn’t talk about it again. The conversation just disappeared. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, maybe that was something that happened.’ I wonder how long it’ll take [before that happens with Covid]. I mean, I think it’s already starting to happen.”

Another subject, which has permeated throughout generations, has been the question of sexuality. Although an uncomfortable topic in some quarters in past generations, today, it seems it is a conversation that many people seem to be more comfortable having.

“We have one member of the class who is transgender … a student who is transgender and a student who is non-binary. I think, [the younger students] help the older students to understand that what used to be considered taboo or that used to get you teased or ostracized, it’s no longer that way,’’ Klinger said.

Although one is tempted to believe that things may be getting better, it is very important to understand that this past November marked the first anniversary of the murders at Club Q in Colorado Springs. On this topic, older students learned much from the younger students about current attitudes and concerns.

“It has been my experience that they [older generations] are very receptive to it and, to be honest, just very curious. Things have changed so much, and I think they’re wondering simply what is it to be transgender. For a lot of them, that’s just kind of a new thing, right?”

He continues, “They grew up in an era where you called someone ‘crossdresser’ or a ‘transsexual’ or something terrible like that, but I haven’t really seen any negativity [from the class], it’s been more curiosity if anything.”

Klinger also brings up another generational difference, which is the proliferation of pronouns. It is now not only courteous, but in some places required, to respect someone’s sexuality and address them with the pronoun which is appropriate to them.

“Especially pronouns were a topic of conversation because I think it’s a big change which has been challenging for a lot of older generations,” he said.

The pronoun phenomenon has been a subject of debate for years but has not come into the forefront of conversation until recently.

“It’s become much more common where 10 years ago, maybe I’d encounter a student who would be non-binary or transgender, but now it’s very common. As faculty we’re trained to make sure we’re asking students, ‘What is your preferred pronoun?’ Don’t assume. Ask the student, and then once we know that it’s really important that we remember that and use that pronoun,” Klinger added.

Another generational difference that Klinger has seen in his classroom is that some older generational references, which some may take for granted, will go right over the heads of younger students from Generation Z and/or Millennials.

“Sometimes it’ll be pretty interesting because the students will say, ‘What’s that Eric was talking about?’ I think from the perspective of an older generation, maybe we’re not seeing just how much information saturated [younger generations] are. That there is so much competing for their attention.”

”It’s a little bit more understandable that there are gaps in their knowledge that we don’t have because overall, there was just less we needed to know,” Klinger stated.

Whether it be Laertes giving his son Polonius advice or Neil Young imploring an old man to look at his life because he’s “a lot like you were,” generationally everyone seems to have a corner on the market of wisdom. However when one takes into account all of the statements, reasons, and excuses of each generation, the most striking fact is there may be more in common than we have differences.

Although generationally, some may have fought the fight against economic royalists or in favor of civil rights while others protested that Black lives matter or against Big Pharma, both generations have seen the disillusionment in their age and tried to do something about it. Sometimes it worked and other times, the fight continued.

This holiday season may be the perfect opportunity for us to get together with family of varying generations and get those conversations started. If we can be open, honest, and forthright without fear of being hurt or minimized, we may end up with not only a better understanding of our times and our world but about ourselves and how important each and every one of us is in the world, regardless of generation.

In Ernest Hemingway’s words, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

The Generations Defined:

Generation Alpha

Born: 2013-2025

Generation Z

Born: 1997-2012  |  Age of adults in 2023: 18 to 26

The Millennial Generation

Born: 1981 – 1996  |  Age of adults in 2023: 26 to 42

Generation X

Born: 1965-1980  |  Age in 2023: 42 to 58

The Baby Boom Generation

Born: 1946-1964  |  Age in 2023: 58 to 77

The Silent Generation

Born: 1928-1945  |  Age in 2023: 77 to 94

The Greatest Generation

Born: Before 1928  |  Age in 2023: 94 to 108

From The Pew Charitable Trust,  Philadelphia