Why Do Young People Seem So Fragile? - Dr Jean Twenge

And then the one that really knocked me out of my chair was the poll of U.S. adults that said, "Do you believe that the founders of the United States are better described as heroes or as villains?" And four out of ten Gen Z said villains. It was only one out of ten for boomers. And that's interesting because that's, that's a fence 250 years in the past. It's not even an assessment of the current moment and there's that very, very strong negativity. (whoosh)

Why write another book about generations?

So my previous books were on one generation apiece and a lot of it was about the effects of technology. And I give talks on, on teens and young adults and people say, "But hasn't this technology affected everybody?" And that got me thinking and I realized, of course the answer is yes and there's all kinds of other big cultural changes. And thought it would be great to look at all of the living generations and see where they are and how they're different.

One of the first ones that you wrote was Generation Me, which was back in 2006. Given that you've been tracking my generation for quite a while, what are your thoughts or what's the story of how millennials have done in your opinion? Did your predictions come to light?

You know, in, uh, a little bit, um, but not entirely. So my prediction was, one prediction was that, um, millennials would find adulthood somewhat challenging, and I think that has been borne out. Uh, millennials after all were the ones who coined adulting as a verb. Um, and certainly there's, there's been, you know, a good amount of negativity, um, online from, from millennials about, you know, um, many topics. But millennials have actually done really, really well economically. So there's this i- idea that kind of started especially around the Great Recession of millennials being broke and all needing side gigs and will be the first generation to not do as well as their parents. And so that was one of the first things that I looked at and found actually millennials are making more money than Gen X-ers and boomers who are at the same age.

Is there something different or particularly unique about the behavior and the views of Gen Z than the most recent generation? Is it just a step-by-step iteration/continuation of what came before or is there something particularly different about this one?

You know, I, I, I think there is because, you know, if you look at a lot of the other generational progressions, say from boomers to Gen X-ers to millennials around things like individualism, it was a pretty linear progression. But then something kind of broke between millennials and Gen Z, or iGen as, as I call them. There was a h- just a really big increase in teens starting to say they felt left out. They felt lonely. They felt like they couldn't do anything right. They felt like they weren't enjoying life. Those are classic symptoms of depression. This all started to rise, um, with teens a- around 2012 and those increases just, just kept going. It was really the most fundamental generational break I had ever seen in decades, you know, o- of doing this research. It was just this very sudden shift from self-confidence to depression and from optimism from millennials to pessimism for Gen Z.