Gen Z does not exist: Why phony generational labels fail us
Over the next several weeks, the very first members of Generation Beta will celebrate their first birthdays. If you’re like me, you’re probably saying, Wait, hold on: Generation What? I was just barely getting used to Gen Alpha, or the concept that there are Gen Z parents already. Who gets to decide this stuff, anyway?
The answer, in fact, is whoever the heck wants to. Gen Alpha and Gen Beta were apparently coined by social analyst and demographer Mark McCrindle, who heads an Australian-based research firm that bears his name. A cursory search suggests that most of the media just picked up his names and rolled with them. You have to give McCrindle points for creativity, because something indeed had to change after we reached the end of the alphabet with Gens X, Y and Z. I suppose the Greek alphabet makes sense, although personally, I might have gone with Gen A1 (with a shout-out to A.1. sauce) and Gen B2 (as in 2B or not 2B).
Point being, there is no inherent logic to any of this, and no scientific basis for the labels we give generations. In fact, neither the boomers nor Gen Z actually exist, in any definable way. You can call clusters of people divided by age whatever you want. It’s entirely arbitrary. Neither the federal government nor international scientific communities have a Department of Generational Epithets (and for that matter, the DOGE acronym is taken).
I will admit that on too many occasions I have personally invoked the phrase “As a millennial…” because it feels good to be part of a group, but according to sociologists, I should stop. We should all stop doing this. This isn’t just a benign misunderstanding of various human cohorts, either — these are brazen marketing terms that shroud real economic and social disparities, and treat large structural issues as personality quirks or individual failings. Maybe that’s why it always seemed hokey and gross to define oneself as a millennial — I should have known better. And there are better ways of understanding aging and trends in human behavior.
The whole idea of slapping a label on people based on when they were born is a 20th-century invention, originating in Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim’s 1952 book “The Problem of Generations.” Mannheim proposed that “generations are formed through two important elements: a common location in historical time, such that there are shared events and experiences, and an awareness of that historical location,” as summarized in a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report.
But Mannheim didn’t think of generations as concrete groupings that emerge at regularly spaced intervals, and he certainly wasn’t proposing that we could understand individual behavior or consumption trends through this framework. Instead, he was trying to grasp the winds of social change as they are shaped by major historical events. For the baby boom generation, those included the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War. For millennials, it was the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A few years ago I was buying beer in a local store and handed over my driver license per routine. The clerk behind the counter noted that we had the same birthday.
He was clearly younger than me, so I asked him when he was born. In 2003, he told me.
“Oh, so you don’t remember 9/11,” I responded. I really don’t know why I said that, but it struck me as important in the moment. He just looked at me blankly.
That incident made me feel both young and old at the same time. On one hand, why are you still carding me? Do I really look under 30 to you? And, wow, was “never forget” really that long ago?
That kind of dividing line feels real, so it’s only natural to want to map that onto a social identity, as Mannheim was proposing. But we’ve taken that way too far, turning these concepts into categorical absolutes and all-purpose explanations for all kinds of social, political and economic behavior.
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In the early ‘90s, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, who were credited with coining the term “millennials,” took generational labels deep into the realm of pseudoscience. Their book “Generations” retconned this idea all the way back to 1584 — on extremely dubious evidence — and predicted future generational waves all the way to 2069. Generations follow fixed cycles roughly every 20 years, they claimed, and move through four stages of evolution: “the high,” “the awakening,” “the unraveling” and “the crisis.” Those sound like useful titles for a YA fantasy series, but Strauss and Howe were basically making a lot of non-falsifiable claims backed up by speculation and hand-waving. Many critics noted that their work suffered from selection bias and determinism; a 1991 Newsweek article described it as “an elaborate historical horoscope that will never withstand scholarly scrutiny.”
That didn’t stop “Generations” from becoming a bestseller — Al Gore, then a Democratic senator from Tennessee, sent a copy to every member of Congress. That, in a sense, defines the problem: generational labels aren’t just cute tags we can place on someone to blame them for avocado toast. They become excuses for inaction or cowardice: Why do anything about climate change, wage stagnation, housing shortages, the collapse of health care or obscene wealth inequality — when it’s just those kids and their damn screens? At their core, generational labels turn marketing lingo into widely accepted social facts that allow policymakers to avoid accountability.
Of course, the effects of age are real, and follow familar patterns: A person is likely to behave differently at age 18 than at 36 or 72. And major historical events, like pandemics and wars, clearly leave their scars on people in different ways. But people experience their lives — and their history within the world — differently depending on a host of factors, including sex, race, religion, social class, educational status and where they were born. Age can be a significant factor, but it’s never the only one and not necessarily predominant.
In 2021, Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, spearheaded an open letter to the Pew Research Center, urging it to stop promoting the use of generational labels. Pew is a highly influential think tank specializing in public opinion polling and demographic research, so how it chooses to categorize the people it surveys can be highly consequential. More than 150 demographers and social scientists signed the letter, which included these points:
The “generation” names encourage assigning them a distinct character, and then imposing qualities on diverse populations without basis, resulting in the current widespread problem of crude stereotyping. This fuels a stream of circular debates about whether the various “generations” fit their associated stereotypes, which does not advance public understanding. …
Pew’s reputation as a trustworthy social research institution has helped fuel the false belief that the “generations” definitions and labels are social facts and official statistics. Many other individuals and organizations use Pew’s definitions in order to fit within the paradigm, compounding the problem and digging us deeper into this hole with each passing day.
In a Washington Post editorial, Cohen argued that these “baseless categories” are “worse than irrelevant [and] drive people toward stereotyping and rash character judgment. This is disappointing, because measuring and describing social change is essential, and it can be useful to analyze the historical period in which people were born and raised. People should write books and articles on these topics. But drawing arbitrary lines between birth years and slapping names on them isn’t helping.”
Cohen further suggested that there are “lots of good alternatives to today’s generations. We can simply describe people by the decade they were born. We can define cohorts specifically related to a particular issue — such as 2020 school kids.”
Pew actually listened to the criticism, and altered its mode of operations, outlining a new approach to generational research that would control for other demographic factors and offer greater methodological rigor. “By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they’re not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people’s complex lived experiences,” wrote Kim Parker, director of social trends research at Pew.
But despite the fact that there’s no tangible meaning to generational labels, American society has latched onto them hard, which has had real policy impacts. It won’t be easy to move away from reflexively dismissing some irritating phenomenon by saying “good old Gen Z” or “OK boomer,” but we could definitely use less branding in this deeply divided society. Maybe if more of us saw that we are, in a way, one cohort, not many, we would stop gutting funding for things like social security and pre-K. Maybe we’d stop dismissing each other as lazy and entitled and instead try to understand one another’s needs and background.
It might also be worth remembering some basics of human biology. We are unusual animals in that we breed whenever we want, within broad biological limits, and are not exactly tied to mating seasons. We’re not like the Chinook salmon that seek out upriver spawning zones or feline species that go into heat each spring and summer. Humans are being born all the time in a cascading waterfall of being. There are more of us than ever before, but we all have the same deep genetic roots, stretching back to our African origins. We are a continuous, unbroken chain of life, far more intertwined than we usually realize. That may sound like hippie woo-woo nonsense, but I’m too young to be a member of the “Woodstock generation.” Certain things are just true.
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