Emma Brockes wrote 3,500-plus words on Jodie Foster last week for The Guardian after a wide-ranging interview in which the two discussed acting, Hollywood, fame, work, family, gender, sexuality, age, and their intersection. Only a few of those words went viral, this comment Foster made about Gen Z:
They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. They’re like, “Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.” Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like, “Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?”
Leading into the quote, Brockes noted the veteran actress and filmmaker (who in full disclosure is my age) touted the benefit of relationships across generations, spoke of mentoring young people, and engaged in “cheerleading” for Gen Z. Even with that context, her critique resembles much intergenerational sniping: hyperbolic, stereotyping, and dismissive.
As Paul Fairie has shown with humor on Xitter, older generations denouncing the younger has a long tradition. In a thread titled “A Brief History of Kids Today Have No Respect,” he provides clippings of complaints spanning the decades, culminating in this one from a century-and-a-half ago:
Fairie’s related threads, “A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore,” “A Brief History of Kids Today Are Too Soft,” and “A Brief History of Kids Today Are Spoiled” continue the theme, an echo whining its way through the ages.
That Foster’s comment generated quick backlash would be no surprise to publications such as Business Insider that tirelessly pump out clickbait feeding generational nostalgia and intergenerational resentment. Resentments range from the silly (We didn’t have emotional support cups, we drank from a garden hose if we got thirsty!) to the serious (Young people wanting to work remotely is destroying cities!)
Online, hostilities flow in both directions. While Millennials and Gen Z take heat from their elders, smeared as entitled brats, audacious shirkers, or fragile snowflakes, Baby Boomers take enough incoming that some late Boomers are eager to identify themselves as early Gen X in the same way that some Americans abroad hope they’ll be taken for Canadian.
Messages proliferate on social media akin to those in Bruce Cannon Gibney’s 2017 book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, which argued Boomers stuffed their pockets by racking up debt and plundering the planet—leaving younger generations to deal with the consequences—and continue to hoard housing, privilege, and power, forestalling solutions to the problems they’ve caused. It’s a clapback that raises the stakes well above the tsk tsk, If you want to buy a home, stop buying avocado toast!
While the past half-century’s legacy weighs heavily, it’s worth noting that key figures behind Gibney’s betrayal predate the Boomers. Reagan hailed from the early Greatest Generation (aka the Interbellum Generation) and Newt Gingrich from the Silent Generation, to name just two architects of our present economic and political state. Their mantle is carried forward by Millennials Matt Gaetz, Vivek Ramaswamy, and many others. What connects them in pushing policies that accelerate inequality and environmental degradation is not age or generation. It’s political ideology.
There is harm in assigning malingering or malignity to whole generations. For one, it allows for veiled ageism—It’s not old people that offend me, it’s Boomers—with Boomer frequently applied as an epithet to anyone over 50, which casts a net over folks in the Silent Generation (Biden, McConnell) and Generation X (Klobuchar, Ernst). Derision toward Millennials and Gen Z is often no more than youth-directed ageism, as Fairie’s threads illustrate. The powerful appear well-insulated from this ageism. Ordinary citizens are ordinarily not.
As Gen X ages, some of its members have joined the battle on the side of the olds, though more often they can wonder about their erasure in coverage of the conflict, perhaps because its existence complicates an “us/them” narrative. It’s harder to have more than two fighters in the ring and know where to put your money—and there is both money and power to be gained from pitting the younger against the older.
Though the conceptual roots of generations theory lie in sociology, generational labels are accrued “through a somewhat messy process led by journalists, magazine editors, advertising executives, and the general public (Rafelson, 2014).” In recent decades, business interests have driven much of the discussion. Corporate media, as noted earlier, profits from how intergenerational conflict drives traffic. Marketing and sales departments, once focused on basic demographics, conduct and publish research on generational attitudes that they then reinforce through their messaging. And across industries, businesses have focused on generational issues they presume to be driving “workforce management problems,” which can divert attention from workplace problems such as inadequate compensation or unhealthy corporate culture.
These concerns are happily picked up by right-wing media and tossed into the culture war hopper in ways that benefit corporations and their political champions. So we get Fox News horrified that “Gen-Z employee is 'shocked' by the 'depressing' 9-to-5 work schedule” (itself responding to a piece in, that’s right, Business Insider). Distressed that “Gen Z is shaping itself into the 'Wasted Generation.” Irked that “Millennials' ability, ambition comes into question following new polls: 'Go out and get a job.” Blaming a lack of work ethic for younger generations’ financial insecurity and housing inaccessibility, of course, helps steel the resistance of their audience to worker empowerment and government action.
As researchers Stéphane Francioli, Felix Danbold, and Michael North point out, there is asymmetry in the Boomer/Millennial beef. Applying the language of what psychologists call Integrated Threat Theory, they found Boomers’ concerns largely “symbolic,” with Millennials presenting perceived threats to their values, such as a traditional work ethic. Millennials by contrast were most worried about “realistic” threats (defined as those to safety, resources, opportunities) as they believe Boomers’ “delayed transmission of power hampers their life prospects.” With 2023 dramatically beating all records for heat and extreme weather events, that phrase—“life prospects”—takes on ominous meaning.
Ill will between generations is consequential. It’s much more than a simple distraction from our urgent social, economic, and environmental problems; like other forms of division, it can hinder the solidarity needed to solve those problems. The danger of hunkering down into generational identities lies in underutilizing existing allies across generations when legions of like-minded activists and supporters populate each. Potential new allies across generations, who might vary by the moment and the issue, become absolute foes. Meanwhile targets of legitimate ire, including America’s overpaid, over-powerful, underregulated, undertaxed CEOs (who BTW now tend to be Gen X), get to sit on the sidelines and cheer on the wrong fight.