Stop Debating if Generational Differences Are “Real” or Not

I see these posts every now and again arguing that generational differences aren’t “real” and that we should stop talking about them altogether. They contain links to articles in the Washington Post or the Atlantic that make research-based claims that generational differences are a “figment of our collective imagination.” They claim that all generational differences can be explained away by life stage, economic status, or other differences.

Here’s the problem with this debate: “real” is the wrong word, and it sets up a false choice.

Those who argue that generational differences are not real reject the idea that being born within a particular set of years will determine how you, as an individual, will behave, and they are 100% correct. The problem is, those of us who take generational differences seriously in our work were never making that claim in the first place. It’s a mis-framed debate.

Of course your birth year doesn’t determine your values, behaviors, opinions, or beliefs. But your gender or your race don’t determine those things either, yet we still talk about gender, race, and nationality as real lenses on experience—not because they lock individuals into a script, but because they shape the context we grow up in. They matter.

Sociologists have long argued that the social, economic, and political context you live through when you are coming of age—roughly ages 15 to 25—has a lasting influence on your values and beliefs. So if you can point to an extended period in history where the social, political, and economic forces moved in a distinct direction (like “the sixties,” for example) then you can make the case for a generational cohort that came of age during that period (like the Baby Boomers). Going further, there was a period of unraveling that followed the “sixties” era, and people born in that period are now often referred to as Generation X. Then the social internet era arrived, and the Millennials entered the scene.

Generational differences are rooted in the analysis of historical patterns and trends. They are not deterministic. They are stories—narratives we create based on the historical analysis, and narratives that many people happen to see themselves in.

These narratives helped us transform the conversation we were having about Millennials entering the workforce fifteen years ago, away from the initial discourse of complaining (Millennials are entitled!) and toward a discourse of understanding, recognizing, for example, that Millennials grew up in a period where the status of children was elevated, where they negotiated with their parents and referred to adults on a first-name basis. So yes, Millennials came into the workforce expecting access and influence on people higher in the hierarchy in ways previous generations didn’t. That didn’t come out of nowhere or out of individual entitlement; it reflected a generational trend rooted in the history of how adults treated children during that period.

In that way, these narratives are not only real, they can be useful. They can help us see things that we were missing, and they can help us have more empathy for people who are different from us. They can help us have more productive conversations in the workplace, even though every individual in your office will be a unique mix, in some ways aligning with the story of their generation, and other ways not. That uniqueness doesn’t prevent the larger narrative from being helpful to us.

To be clear, these narratives can be unhelpful too, and we have to watch out for that. Don’t use them to promote negative stereotypes (Millennials are entitled! Gen X are cynical slackers!), and never tell someone born in 1967 (like me) that they must be independent and cynical because they are a part of Gen X (though that’s kind of true for me, but that’s not the point). That’s treating the generational differences like they are deterministic, and we’ve already established that they are not. The solution is not to abandon the narrative, but to use it with care: as context, not as a diagnosis.

Generational differences are also not an exact science, and there is not a clear consensus on who the generations are, where the cutoffs lie, etc. That does make it more difficult to use the narratives in positive ways, but it doesn’t make it impossible, and I’m okay with that limitation. I personally subscribe to Strauss and Howe’s body of work on this topic, but I’m not pretending that they have been “proven” right in any way. I just think their approach is the most comprehensive, and the depth of their analysis of historical trends is valuable, even though some historians and social scientists have been critical of their specific cycle claims.

So where do we go from here? The conversation about generations has been pretty quiet lately, which makes sense to me, because the Millennials are now just moving their way up the corporate ladder (looking at BLS data, I estimate 25% of all CEOs are Millennials), and the generation that follows them hasn’t arrived in enough numbers for us to notice. That could very well change in the next few years. When the next cohort arrives in force, we will, once again, dive head‑first into a familiar discourse of complaining. That’s exactly when generational narratives, used wisely, can help us shift from complaining to understanding.

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