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

Dr Jean Twenge is a psychologist, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, generational researcher and an author. Each generation tends to view themselves as more refined than the one before them. But with Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z, something changed. Generations started to see life as easier in the past, less prosperous now and tougher to succeed. Jean has spent a career working out just why modern groups believe this, and how true it is. Expect to learn whether millennials actually did have it harder than boomers, which generation has the most robust mental health and why, the massive effect of technology across age groups, why 60% of Gen Z girls have mental health problems, why young people aren't getting their drivers' licenses, why there is such a big decline in sexual activity and alcohol and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Generations - https://amzn.to/40BByHr Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #millennials #boomers #genz - 00:00 Intro 02:09 Is Gen-Z Particularly Unique? 07:18 Why Are So Many Young Girls Considering Suicide? 16:47 The Main Causes of the Mental Health Crisis 20:57 Overcoming Inherited Trauma 24:28 Managing the Rise of Addictive Technology 29:02 Why Gen-Z Take Less Risks 35:04 Young People’s Perspectives on Life 39:00 Why Women Are Having Less Kids 45:16 Millennials Feel Worse Off Financially 49:09 The Change in Education & Employment of Young People 1:03:24 How Political Stances Have Changed in Youth 1:15:35 Is There Hope for Gen-Z? 1:18:50 Where to Find Dr Twenge - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And then the one that really knocked me out of my chair was the poll of US 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 10 Gen Z said villains. It was only one out of 10 for Boomers. And that's interesting, because that's offense 250 years in the past. It's not even an assessment of the current moment. And there's that very, very strong negativity.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Why write another book about generations?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  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 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 that would be great to look at all of the living generations and see where they are and how they're different.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  You know, a little bit, but not entirely. So my prediction was, one prediction was that millennials would find adulthood somewhat challenging. And I think that has been borne out. Millennials, after all, were the ones who coined adulting as a verb. And certainly, there's been, you know, a good amount of negativity online from millennials about many topics. But millennials have actually done really, really well economically. So there's this idea that kind of started, especially around the Great Recession, of millennials being broke and all needing side gigs. And they'll be a first generation to not do as well as their parents. And so that was one of the first things that I looked at and

• 1:58Speaker 00

  found, actually, millennials are making more money than Gen Xers and Boomers were at the same age.

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  Is there something different or particularly unique about the behaviour 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?

• 2:24Speaker 00

  You know, I think there is because if you look at a lot of the other generational progressions, say from Boomers to Gen Xers to Millennials around things like individualism, it was a pretty linear progression. But then something kind of broke between Millennials and Gen Z, or I Gen as I call them. There was 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. And those are classic symptoms of depression. This all started to rise with teens around 2012, and those increases just kept going. It was really the most fundamental

• 3:08Speaker 00

  generational break I had ever seen in decades of doing this research. There was just this very sudden shift from self-confidence to depression and from optimism for Millennials to pessimism for Gen Z.

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, you mentioned before the fact that Millennials can sometimes be victims themselves a little bit, and that there was concerns about whether or not they were going to do worse than their parents. And you know, this adulting thing, which suggests that you've got this sort of long life strategy where you're becoming an adult infant for maybe a little bit longer than you should have done. How do we know that Gen Z isn't just yet another generation, which the one before it feels like is a complete catastrophe, but in however many years' time is going to flourish, and it's going to be another Millennial situation?

• 3:57Speaker 00

  And maybe that'll happen, you know, I think there's a couple of things that have that has me worried. And then one is that that increase in depression has now spread up the age scale to younger millennials, to 26 to 34 year olds. They were actually doing pretty well until about 2015. So a few years later than we saw the big upticks for teens. So there's something going on in the culture that is slowly creeping up to affect a lot of people. So that, you know, I think is not a good sign. The other is we know from clinical psychology that the younger you experience your first episode of depression, the more likely it is to reoccur

• 4:38Speaker 00

  later in life. And with the rates now being so high among Gen Z, that that's concerning. But even with that said, sure, we don't know what the future is going to bring in every way. And they could end up doing very well. Absolutely.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  What would you say is the story of mental health across the generations then?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's, it's kind of a complex story. So we start with the silent generation. So those are the generation before the boomers. They actually look very good in mental health compared to the generation before them, the greatest generation fought World War II, and then the boomers after them. And these are also people who are older now, who went through the COVID-19 pandemic, who were the most vulnerable, and yet actually had the best mental health. So that's where we start. Then with boomers, mental health starts to look worse across the board. Days of feeling more stressed and in poor mental health,

• 5:36Speaker 00

  suicide rates, everything, it starts to look worse for boomers. Gen X kind of continued the boomer trends, actually improved them a little bit after, as teens, having a lot of struggles with mental health in middle age, Gen X has actually done relatively well. Millennials did really well as teens, very happy, optimistic. But then that depression has started to come for them as well. And then for Gen Z is where we see unfortunately the most consistent downturn with pretty much every indicator, depression, self-harm, suicide, everything going in the wrong direction.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  Is it a challenge doing studies over such a long period of time in different environments with different people, potentially using different methodologies, longitudinally trying to compare them all, maybe across multiple territories? How accurate can you be with the data for this sort of stuff?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is definitely a challenge. So what I've tried to do in the book is rely on the data sets that have been consistent for the longest period of time. So there's a survey of 18-year-olds in the US that goes back to 1976 and has used the exact same questions. There's one of poor mental health that has measured that since 1993. There's the General Social Survey, which has stuff on on politics and sexuality and a lot of other things that goes back to 1972. Because you're right, that's what you have to to try to find is that data that has been

• 7:13Speaker 00

  consistently measured so you can make those comparisons.

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

  The most concerning statistic that I've seen, which has been floating around the internet for the last couple of months, the CDC found that nearly one in three high school girls considered suicide in 2021, a 60% increase since 2011. More girls also now report feeling so sad and hopeless they couldn't engage in their normal activities for at least two weeks in the last year. Why? What's going on with this? Why is it girls? Why is it not boys? There's also a liberal-conservative split here. What is your reading of digging into all of the data?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  So it is happening for boys as well. The increases in, say, depression and suicide are not as large for teen boys as they are for teen girls, but they are absolutely still there. So we can't ignore boys in this conversation. So that CDC data is just one data point out of many that pretty much all show the same pattern, that teen mental health started to get worse after about 2011. That's when that increase began to happen. And it just kept going. And just for context, teen depression doubled between 2011 and 2019. In other words, before the pandemic.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  So it's clear the pandemic is not the original cause of these trends. They started more than 10 years ago. So then we have to say, okay, what happened in 2011 that then kept going and reverberated across the decade that had the biggest impact on teens' day-to-day lives? And it's clear that that's new technology: smartphones, social media. The end of 2012 was the first time the majority of Americans owned a smartphone. It's also around the time that social media use moved from optional to virtually mandatory among teens. It's also when social media itself changed. It's around when Facebook bought Instagram, for example, when the like button showed up and the retweet button on Twitter.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  All these things happened around that same time period, and that's when teen depression started going up. And it's not just the phones, it's not just social media, it's also that those had ripple effects. Teens also started spending less time with their friends face-to-face around that same time. They also started spending less time sleeping around that time. And those are both things that are likely linked to that increased technology use. So that's not a good picture for mental health, when you are sitting in your room alone, scrolling through social media at 2:00 a.m.

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  Are there some types of screen time that are worse than others?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  It looks like that's the case. So, for example, there's a big data set of teens in the UK. And the link with depression is higher for social media use than it is for TV time or gaming.

• 10:20Chris Williamson?

  Right, that's interesting. Why do you think that is? What is unique about social media that is causing that to stand out?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, to be fair, spending too much time on anything is usually not the best of ideas. But social media does have some unique qualities. So, one is that its algorithms are designed to keep people on those apps for as long as possible and coming back as often as possible because that's how they make the most money.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  And teens are especially susceptible to that because their self-control is just not as developed. Most adults have a hard time, you know, putting down social media. It has that quality to it. Plus, you know, Facebook's own research showed these big issues with body image for teen girls and young women on Instagram. Everybody looks perfect, everybody's life is more glamorous, everybody is always on vacation on Facebook. It distorts reality. You know, we are comparing ourselves to others, but we're not comparing ourselves to others in real life. We're comparing ourselves to others the way they're presented on social media, which is warped.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  And that's also not good for self-esteem or for mental health.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  Why is there a difference between boys and girls?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  So I think one of the reasons, one of the reasons the increase has been, you know, bigger for girls is that girls spend more time on social media and girls are more impacted by social media. So the link between depression and social media use is stronger for girls than for boys. And probably because of a lot of the body image issues that come up. Also, just the way teen girls in particular relate to each other. It's often around, you know, emotions and bullying happens with words rather than physically more often and social media is like a perfect storm for those things.

• 12:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've been doing a lot of learning over the last couple of months about intra-sexual competition, the way that female friendships work and this very, very highly attenuated understanding of social groups, hierarchies, dynamics. You know, we always think about men as being the hierarchical status-driven group, but it seems like both in terms of genetic predisposition and in terms of behavior, females are much more socially attuned. They understand body language, facial expressions much more. They use gossip as weapons rather than fists, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, I can see how a quantified metric of popularity,

• 13:00Chris Williamson?

  essentially, which is what you can see social media as, especially if you're not using it for to be a content creator, but just to kind of keep in touch with your friends and see who's popular and who's in and who's out. A girl, I've never once been told off because I've unfollowed a guy, but it has happened a couple of times because of unfollowing a girl.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you're absolutely right. I mean, popularity has always been really important for teen girls and now it's quantifiable. How many followers do you have? How many likes did you get on that post of yourself in a bikini? I mean, that's the other thing you have to really think about when it comes to this. I mean, Instagram's a platform where young women and teen girls post pictures of themselves and ask people to comment.

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  You're outsourcing your sense of self-worth to the world, to the internet. How much of this is present outside of the US? You mentioned that there was a study there in the UK, but I did see some stuff online saying that the link between social media and depression doesn't seem to be quite so strong outside of the US. Is that right?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  That's not my understanding of the literature. Plus, we now have more and more data on those mental health trends over time, particularly for loneliness, but also for self-harm and for depression, that particularly in English-speaking countries, it's a very, very consistent pattern that depression and loneliness start to rise among teens after about 2012 and keep going. I mean, the pattern is virtually identical to that in the United States. And for adolescent loneliness, we see it in 36 out of 37 countries around the world.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  Is social media affecting each generation or each age cohort differently?

• 14:49Speaker 00

  I think so. You know, I think the impact on teens is very clear and arguably more negative. But with, you know, with mental health issues starting to go up the age scale, it didn't used to be there was any increases in depression for 26 to 34-year-olds. And starting after about 2015, it started to spread to that group as well. So maybe that's social media, maybe that's other pressures. I think it's a more complex picture there. But there is, especially since the mid 2010s,

• 15:29Speaker 00

  just with cancel culture and online culture and negative news gets clicks. There's this toxic soup, you know, that we all seem to be living in that I think is having an impact on everybody.

• 15:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, one of the most interesting things that I learned recently was the increase of suicides in pretty much all age and gender categories over the last few years. Suicides for middle-aged white males are five times that of teen girls, and they show a similar pattern as well. I think that the other highest group of suicides is mid-20s Native American men. What do you think's going on there? That can't be smartphones and social media, surely.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Right, because depression, suicide, any of these things are multiply determined. That's probably, that's usually not the question I'm trying to answer, though. I'm not trying to figure out what are all of the causes of mental health issues or suicide, but why have they increased? And at least in the US suicides among middle aged people are actually down. And they're up among young adults and teens. So they're they're starting to converge, even though, yes, you're right, that is generally where the suicide rate is the highest. It's starting to equalize.

• 16:39Chris Williamson?

  Oh, in terms of the trend, how they're both moving together?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:42Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Okay, so let's say that you've got the smartphone addiction, the use of social media, all of the ways that that gets interpreted by both males and females even more so. What else is contributing to this? I'm sure that, as you say, this is contributing in a chunk of it. But what else is going on outside, which is causing this mental health crisis?

• 17:06Speaker 00

  So you mean for teens?

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I think a lot of it is the ripple effects that that the way teens socialize has fundamentally changed, that it's moved online. And then teens are spending less time with each other face to face, which is much better for for mental health than scrolling through social media. You know, and they're also spending less time sleeping. That is also really bad for mental health. Huge links between sleep and mental health outcomes. So it's it's it's like a perfect storm with the way teens spend spending their time outside of school is fundamentally shifted. And has shifted in a way that they're spending more time on activities

• 17:52Speaker 00

  that tend to lead to unhappiness and depression and less time on activities that are protective against mental health issues.

• 18:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so it's not just the fact that you're using social media. It is what that time on social media replaces. So you're losing some of the positives and then you're adding on some of the negatives. And you've called that the ripple effect?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's that's how I think of it, that, I mean, sometimes I've I've said that the technology is, you know, the worm at the core of the apple, that it it that it kind of all comes back to that, that it it ripples out from there. And, you know, that's also the the theory that I talk about a lot in in the new book is that technology has all of these wide ranging effects, that it's not just we use different technology, it's how has that changed our behaviors? How has that changed our values? That, you know, is just one example. Technologically developed times and societies tend to be more individualistic, more focused on the self and less on others.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  And what you get from that is a mix of what's sometimes considered good and bad. You get more equality, but you also get more disconnection.

• 19:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you said that the drivers for generational differences are individualism, technology, and a slow life strategy. What's the dynamic that's going on there? Why is that important?

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so technology is linked to individualism because technology makes individualism possible. It makes it possible to live by yourself and to not depend on as many people because we have all these labor-saving devices in communication and everything else. And technology also leads to the life cycle slowing down. So at times and places when people live longer and education takes longer to finish, people have more time to grow up and more time to grow old. So the whole developmental trajectory from infancy to old age has slowed down. So children are less independent. Teenagers are less likely to do adult things like get their driver's license right away

• 20:02Speaker 00

  or have a paid job or go out on dates. Young adults marry later, have children later, settle into their careers later. Middle-aged people look and act younger than their parents or grandparents did. So 50 is the new 40. Older people enjoy longer lives and better health. So that's the slow life strategy. It has a huge impact on how each generation has lived their lives, leads to a lot of misunderstandings. You know, the grandparents are like, why are my millennial grandkids not married yet? But this is something all the generations have seen. It has kept going for quite a long time. And, you know, my goal in the book is to help generations understand each other better.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And I think understanding the slow life strategy and how that's played out is one big step in that direction.

• 20:53Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I've become fascinated by over the last couple of years has been behavioural genetics. And the level of heritability of anxiety and depression is pretty high. But what we've seen is conditions of anxiety and depression, rates of that increase a lot in the last 10 years. How do you square that circle? The fact that we do have this massive biological predisposition, it is incredibly heritable. And yet, we've been able to almost beat our genes in a bad way with the last 10 years.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Because there are environmental effects. So in the classroom, personality psychology is what I teach. So anxiety, very similar to neuroticism in the big five. Like a lot of personality traits, it's about 50% heritable. Well, more accurately, it explains 50% of the variation in a group of people. That it's probably due to genetic heritability. That still leaves us 50%. Some of that's error in how we're measuring it. But I think it speaks to just how big these environmental changes are, that there is such a large genetic component. Yet we have still seen these enormous changes.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Because yeah, some people are going to maybe never be depressed in any environment. Some people are going to be depressed in any environment they're in. But then there's a big middle group where the environment is going to have an impact. And it does. And you know, you see this over time, but you also see it in other cultural comparisons. So depression is virtually unknown among the Amish. And it's not because they don't know where it is, or what it is, or that they don't get treatment for it. It's because their sense of community and how tight knit they are and their sense of purpose is so strong. And if anyone is feeling sad, they immediately get support.

• 22:47Chris Williamson?

  It's almost the opposite of an individualistic society. Yeah, I think one of the most difficult things that people have to swallow when they first learn about behavioural genetics is the fact that a good chunk of the outcomes that they're going to get with their self-development, their personal progress is. Predisposed in one direction or another, that they have constraints. They don't have unlimited degrees of freedom, which in a meritocratic society is something that kind of feels uncomfortable. You know, you want to be able to be anything that you can be and you want to be able, you don't want to feel like people are starting off on different footings, especially with conversations about equity and equality. But this is one of those scenarios where you actually think, well, fuck, the fact

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  that there's only 50% that you have control over with your depression and anxiety in an environment that might be engendering more of that is actually almost a prophylactic. It's kind of almost protective in this way. If you had control over 100%, this would allow the environment to rag you around however much it wanted.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I sometimes say this when I, when I give talks on this, that if new technology is the cause of this huge rise in teen depression, that might actually be good news because we might be able to do something about it. Because we cannot change the genetics we were born with. We can't change what happened to us in the past. It would be really hard to solve poverty or discrimination overnight. But we can set some reasonable limits on technology and maybe solve, at least try to solve this problem and we might actually have an impact.

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  What are some of your proposals for how both people, users, parents, et cetera, should try and protect themselves and others from it?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  So there's two big things. So as individuals, one thing that we can do, no phones in the bedroom overnight.

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  Yes, we are from the same team, Jean. We are from the same team.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Yep. And that, you know, parents hear that and they're like, oh, I can do that for my kids, but I don't know, I think I have to have it. I'm like, nope, it's for you too. And I mean, just, just so many studies from sleep labs, we know this, that you're going to get a better night's sleep, but most people have their phone on their bedside table within arm's reach. Some people even sleep with it like it's a lover, right? So what people say next is, well, but I have to have my phone in my bedroom overnight because it's my alarm clock, to which I say, I have some advice for you. Buy an alarm clock.

• 25:11Chris Williamson?

  Radio alarm clocks have been around for like 100 years. Come on.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Yes, you can buy the alarm clock on Amazon on your phone and then put your phone away and get a good night's sleep. So that's, that's the number one. That's what individuals can do. It's, the research is very strong on it and it's very straightforward and relatively simple as opposed to say, you know, how much time should I spend on a screen? That's a lot harder. So that's the first thing. And then, you know, as

• 25:41Speaker 00

  as a society and individual countries and so on is to try to put some limits, particularly on social media, particularly for children and young teens. So, for example, let's raise the minimum age for so social media to sixteen and actually do age verification to enforce that. Let's let's get it out of that age of, you know, the twelve to fifteen year olds, which is already such a difficult time developmentally. Let's get that social media out of that equation.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  Personally, for me, even for the people that are skeptical about the link between the social media use and the current increases in teenage depression and anxiety. I don't understand. I I I'm struggling to steel man a case for this makes teenagers' lives fundamentally better. Messaging apps, fine, things like YouTube also seems to be fine for me. But when you're talking about TikTok, there is literally nothing coming out of that app, which is expediting some young person's development in the world. It's not showing them things around the world which are going to expose them to new ideas. It is it. It is the biggest waste of time that I can think.

• 27:00Chris Williamson?

  And I do understand that I am now sounding like the boomers that probably were criticizing whatever cartoon I was watching on Nickelodeon when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. But I I I struggle to see why this isn't a a policy. And also, when you think about the fact that these technologies still are very new, ten years to be able to work out just what are the sort of effects.

• 27:26Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I I I would be in support of a policy like that. You mentioned that you are teaching in the classroom. So you have had experience interacting with eighteen year old millennials and eighteen year old zoomers. What are the differences that you have noticed personally?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, as you know, I'm a data person. I like relying on what the generation says about themselves a lot more. And that tends to be what I emphasize in the books. But I have been teaching undergraduates for quite a long time, since I was a grad student, myself, in the 90s, and I've been a faculty member since 2001. So probably the biggest shifts are with millennials. Lot more self-confidence, which has advantages. They're more likely to raise their hand in the classroom. Also, more likely to be entitled and say things like, "I need to take the final date because I'm going to Vegas for my birthday." Really? What is your boss going to say in six months when I...

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Like, "I can't do the big presentation because I'm going to Vegas for my birthday." So, yeah, so that type of entitlement is much less common among Gen Z. But they also, you know, downside, are much more reluctant to talk in class. But they're very nice. They're very nice. They're very helpful. They're very sweet people. You know, each generation has their strengths and weaknesses. I'm obviously generalizing here, and it's obviously my one experience. But that does sort of fit the data, that you see self-esteem go down between millennials and Gen Z. And Gen Z is more likely to say that they really want to help others.

• 29:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Why are young people much more risk averse, then?

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's one of the things that really surprised me in looking at Gen Z is they are, they're less likely to say they want to take risks. And there's a big culture around safety. And not just physical safety, but what they call emotional safety. So it's a phrase I had never heard before I started talking to a lot of young adults. And they don't just want to be protected from physical dangers, but they often seem to want to be protected from bad experiences. And I can understand that impulse, but as many people have observed, that can veer into just never being, wanting to never be uncomfortable, which isn't realistic.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  And especially as a young adult, you're thinking, especially, say, a university student. It's often how you learn. And having difficult discussions is necessary sometimes when you're talking about complex topics.

• 30:02Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the ways that this risk aversion has shown up in behavior?

• 30:07Speaker 00

  So Gen Z is less likely to get into physical fights with each other. They are less likely to get into car accidents. And then there's around the kind of emotional safety piece. I think that is why there has been the call for safe spaces. Why there's been more of the disinvitations of speakers. There's been much more of the idea of you can't say that. Of we can't even have that that person come to campus. You know, that words can hurt. So this really big focus on speech and language as harmful or even violent.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  And that kind of the kind of concept creep of of words like trauma. And and hurt and violence.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  What's driving that?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  I think part of it is, you know, safety was hugely emphasized with this generation when they were young. And they did not rebel against that. They embraced it. So, you know, expect teenagers and young adults to rebel against a safety culture. And they really didn't. You know, they they took it seriously. And there were lots of upsides to that that safety culture. So I think it comes from that. And then, of course, also comes from the way people are interacting with each other online. Because, you know, think about if you're 16 years old today. You know, how are you more likely to be hurt? Often, it's going to be online. That's where people are going to be nasty to each other, not to your face.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  And that's partially just the way the medium works, be a little more aggressive verbally when they're anonymous and when they're not seeing the look on the other person's face. And that's what online culture is. And that's where so many teens are spending so much of their time now.

• 32:03Chris Williamson?

  Why was there more of an emphasis on safety and less of a pushback? I can't work out. I remember being told from my parents, you know, we, as every young person is, they're concerned about your health and your well being. What changed?

• 32:22Speaker 00

  You know, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to say. I mean, I think there was, there clearly was a fundamental change though, because Gen Z teens fight with their parents less than especially Gen X teens did at the same age. So, you know, you'd think if parents were like, "Safety, safety, safety", that there'd be a rebelling against that by, by fighting about it. And that just, just hasn't happened. And I think it, it, it's partially because they're, they are just don't, they're, they're not as likely to want to say, you know, go and drive around and do crazy things because they can do crazy things online.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. So I've got a bunch of interesting cottage industry obsessions at the moment. And one of them has been trying to work out why young people are having less sex than ever before.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  Um, socio-sexuality, openness to new experiences, risk aversion. All of this to me seems to be driven by partly the ripple effect, I think, which is what you mentioned earlier on. And it seems that there are just so many other things that are convenient and comfortable to do that get in the way. And the reason that I like this as an explanation is that it seems to cover so many of the different bases that

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  each individual person can find in their online use their own targeted version of an anesthetic or an analgesic that will be, allow them to not need to go out into the real world to face rejection from a partner, to deal with the discomfort of making up and breaking up, the risk of having sex. You know, we are in a post Me Too world. It's no surprise. When was Me Too? 2013? Something like that. So.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  2018.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  Was it? Me Too was 2018? Oh my God. Uh, anyway. My point being, we have, th- these things have converged, right? They've all converged together. And it seems like.

• 34:24Chris Williamson?

  What a lot of people, especially guys, that are the ones that will face the most rejection, women also face their own massive security risks in the dating market. But I think more frequent low level rejection would be something that is felt by men. And if you are in an environment and a society which is more risk averse, which has perhaps coddled and coaxed young people to not have to deal with these sorts of things, stepping out and facing the fear of approach anxiety and rejection and all of that. When you do have Tinder, online porn, video games, all of these things are potential distractions. What is your view on the current approach of young people to relationships,

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  family life, casual sex, long term marriage, all of that?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, life isn't safe and sex and relationships, you know, don't feel safe either. I mean, described for young men and then for young women, there's the fear of sexual assault. There's also a lot of complaints from young women that, you know, young men watch so much porn, they think that's how real life sex is going to be. There's all of these things. But, you know, those certainly, there are those fears. Previous generations kind of looked at those fears and said, well, that's the price of doing business. And I think a lot of Gen Z, because they have these alternatives, have said, well, forget it. You know, because I have, I have, there's all of these other things I can do, you know, for a sexual outlet.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  And I think that goes a long way toward explaining, you know, what's going on. And not just as a sexual outlet, just, you know, there's more things to do at 10pm now. You know, when there were three TV channels, it was all boring. Now you can binge watch almost whatever you want on Netflix or other platforms.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  We're slowly distracting ourselves outside of human nature.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  I think that's that's kind of true, you know, and we're really seeing this in the surveys with teens as well. That the number of teens who you say want to get married, or at least want to have a long term partner, has been, was steady since the 1970s until the transition between millennials and Gen Z. About 10 years ago, that's when it started to go down. Same thing for saying that they're likely to want to have children. So I think we're going to see really big shifts in in family life as Gen Z is of childbearing age. That the birth rate might never come back up. And that probably the marriage rate is may may suffer as well.

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  That's another pet obsession of mine, the birth rate, global birth rate declines, but this is global, right? You're looking at South Korea, 0.8, Japan, I think just above 1, China, right down in the bottom of the 1s as well. US is what 1.7, 1.8, something like that, also not particularly good, the UK, Germany absolutely ruined at the moment. And yeah, you know, everyone remembers the R0 number from COVID. You know, if it's above 1 for every person, there is more people giving more people. But if it's below 1, the for birth rates are below 2.1.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Actually, it's it's 2.

• 37:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, 2.1, but if you have the equivalent, which is there are fewer people having fewer people, which makes fewer people to have fewer people and so on and so forth. I I spoke to someone that added another wing into this because I like that sort of demographic explanation. But their point was that females are very easy to sort of have social contagion and the mimetic nature to their behavior. And if motherhood is less seen, it is less inculcated in themselves. So you almost get, in the same way that birth rate decline and demographic collapse occurs in this kind of spread out step by step way.

• 38:16Chris Williamson?

  You also get an equivalent here, which is kind of like a psychological contagion too, that spreads out while there's fewer mothers around, which means there are fewer mothers influencing young girls to become mothers, which means that there are a few to to to to to all the way down.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yeah, yeah, it builds on itself. And, you know, it I think it's especially true kind of guessing that it's it's that, you know, we're not going to see much of a turnaround because. The birth rate really started to go down with millennials. Well, millennials as 18 year olds said, yeah, I want to have kids. Gen Z isn't even saying it at 18.

• 38:49Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the TikTok trend of girl with the list? Do you know what this is?

• 38:54Speaker 00

  No.

• 38:55Chris Williamson?

  It's bad. So I wrote a newsletter about this a couple of weeks ago. There was a girl who printed out on a piece of paper 350 reasons as to why she didn't want to have kids. And it ranged from everything from literally growing a parasite inside of you to like vaginal prolapse and all manner of obscure complications that can occur during during childbirth. One of them was not being able to wear cute heels as much as I want. And it was, I think it ends up, she's printed it out. So visually, it's very, very kind of impressive and long. But it showed to

• 39:35Chris Williamson?

  me just how much the individual that own freedom themselves as a priority, it takes precedent that you are pedestalizing your own ability. There was a recent street interview that just went up yesterday using a ton of clips from my channel, which I really loved. And a bunch of women mostly being asked, do you want to have kids? If not, why not? Et cetera, et cetera. And the answers, I know that these street interviews get very heavily edited. I'm very, I'm always hesitant of using these as evidence, but you don't put words in people's mouths. These people are saying it for themselves. And it was stuff like, I go to music festivals every weekend.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  And if that happens, that means that I can't, I don't have time for a kid. I'm working on myself right now, and I don't feel ready. Oh, how old are you? I'm 38. And, you know, I

• 40:29Chris Williamson?

  the evidence that I've seen from a meta-analysis from Professor Rinsker Kaiser says that eight out of 10 women who don't have children after they break through their fertility window didn't intend to not have children. I wonder how that's going to change. That was 2011. So you know, you're catching that tail end, I guess. I really wonder whether that's going to change. I wonder

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  The biological clock is basically going to stop ticking for Gen Z women in at least psychologically when they look back and think, okay, I'm now going to spend the remainder of my life without without children. For the people that like to throw around, well, there's millions and millions of children that need to be adopted. In the USA, there are thirty pairs of parents for every one child that is available for adoption. The number of hoops that you need to jump through is unbelievably high. So adoption isn't some sort of panacea to to this, you know, the same as like, why buy a new dog when you can adopt from a home? Like, it's just the the numbers aren't there to support this. But

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  one of the other things that I don't understand is some of the claims that get made. And I think that this is indicative of both my generation and the generation coming after, which is that we hate to be wrong, because being wrong on the internet is tantamount to ego destruction. Everybody's always been like this, but I think it's got even worse recently. If you ask people why it is that they don't want to have kids, they'll say that it's due to income.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:04Chris Williamson?

  But I know that you have some statistics that show if the problem was income, even adjusted for living, even et cetera, et cetera, that's bollocks. So what what is the story of income over the last couple of generations comparatively?

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So first, you know, I have to mention, there's been several recent polls of young adults who don't have children. And then asked those who said, yeah, I don't want children. Why? Personal freedom was almost always at at or near the top of the list. Exactly what what you saw in these on the street interviews. You know, income certainly comes up, but it's often, you know, not the primary thing. So yeah, the story of of income is interesting. Millennial young adults actually make more money than Gen Xers and Boomers did at the same age. Their wealth building has also caught up. That wasn't true for a little bit there, but it's now caught up. So there is a little bit of truth to the income idea, though,

• 43:03Speaker 00

  because most of those income gains have been from women. So you think about a heterosexual couple and, you know, maybe the woman makes a little less than the guy, but they're both making a good amount of money, which is why those numbers are so high, you know, for millennials now. Well, if they both keep working full time, then you have to pay for childcare. Childcare has always been expensive and is even more expensive now. So there is, you know, a little bit of truth to it that is more challenging than the old days, when, you know, the old bad days in a lot of ways, when women were not making hardly anything. And so if they quit their job, the family wouldn't really lose that much income if she stayed home with the kids. So there is that.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  But there's also some economists have looked at this that they looked in the US at counties that had a lot of income growth. Well, you'd think, okay, it was income, then you should get a big increase in the birth rate in those counties that had the big economic growth. It actually went completely the other way. The birth rate went down in those counties that had the big economic growth. And they think it's because, you know, young women were taking those career opportunities instead of having kids. So plus, there's a, if it took so much income to have children, why do people who are lower income have more kids than people with more income? And they do. So the income explanation, you know, people have priorities, they make choices.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  And yes, you know, certainly there are big problems with housing and childcare and so on. But it is not the only explanation. It's probably not the primary one.

• 44:39Chris Williamson?

  I find that so fascinating. There was a study done recently looking at lottery winners. And if a man wins a lottery, it seems like he's more likely to get married. If a woman wins the lottery, she's more likely to get divorced. And I think that the...

• 44:56Chris Williamson?

  It seems like in a modern world where you can be afforded all of the different opportunities and experiences that can be placed in front of you, there are lots of things to do. And having children seems basic. This seems boring. It's like, I don't want to do this. Talking about the gender pay gap and the changes there, one of the insights I got from you was millennial women's incomes are much higher than the incomes of women of previous generations as a result of both higher wages and more hours worked. In 2021, millennial women aged 35 to 44 made roughly twice as much as boomer women in 1980 and over 20% more than Gen X women in 2005. Women 25 to 34 made similar gains. Men's incomes have fallen since 1970.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  They haven't fallen much. I mean, that's the way it balances out. Women's incomes have just gone way up. Men's incomes have gone down by a little bit and you average it out and what you get is pretty solid incomes.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  Why do millennials still feel poor then?

• 45:56Speaker 00

  I think there's a bunch of reasons. One is what we just described, that in heterosexual couples, you're going to get that challenge of, okay, is somebody going to quit or go part-time? Or are we going to pay for the expense of childcare? I think that's one reason. Another reason that's often mentioned is housing, okay? But housing is so much more. Well, those income statistics that I've been talking about correct for inflation and housing is one of the main pieces of that inflation calculation. Plus, if you look at the data, at least up to 2020, afterward got even harder. But up to 2020, millennials' homeownership rate was very similar to Gen Xers and Boomers at the same age. It was less, but it was less by a couple of percentage points. It really wasn't as much.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  And given that more millennials went to college, that makes sense that in that 26 to 39 group that you might have a little bit of tapering off, but it's really small. You know, you'd think, given the way people talk about it online, that it would be, you know, the homeownership rate would be like half in millennials compared to Boomers. And it's not. So I think that explanation falls apart a little bit. I think a lot of it is the social comparison that people do online. That, you know, it, who goes on Twitter and says, "My income is great and my generation is doing awesome." That's not the norm. It's just not the way people, you know, discuss these things online. And the same thing with news articles.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  You know, it's so often this, you know, boomers were the ones who got all successful, which isn't true either, you know, and then they pulled up the ladder after they climbed up it so the millennials couldn't go up. I mean, that gets clicks. So I think there is this, again, this toxicity and this kind of negativity, you know, that have driven a lot of it. And I think partially it also got stuck because, you know, great recession times, millennials were really pummeled by that. That is absolutely true. It's just that they roared back really well, say between about 2011 and 2019 in particular.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  But even during the pandemic, those incomes were doing very well for people in that millennial age range.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  Even if it's not as well as the people that they follow with blue ticks on Instagram are showing. One of the really interesting dynamics that I've just considered there is if women are the primary breadwinner in the household and on average, overall household earnings are looking pretty good, but the woman needs to take time off work in order to raise the kid, you are taking a larger hit, a larger proportion of the overall household income is being hurt by that.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's right. Yeah, and I think that's one of the big dilemmas. And, you know, it's also something to think about, you know, in terms of the birth rate because even though, you know, you're on the same page, a lot of this is around personal freedom, there is an economic component and that's what the economic component is. It's the challenge of childcare. So, you know, if you're going to concentrate policy, maybe that's where the policy should be around childcare.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  What's happening in education? College degrees and high school graduates lumped together. What's happening?

• 49:12Speaker 00

  You mean in terms of income?

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  No, just in terms of people completing college degrees, people completing high school.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really, really amazing. I think we forget that it was really only a few generations ago. Say, greatest generation born in the early 20th century, where it wasn't even really the norm to complete high school. Many of them didn't. That was very, very common. And then very few went to college. So with the silent generation, those were 1925 to 1945. It started to become much more common to finish high school and go to college. And then that kept growing. And it really, really came to fruition with millennials, who are the most college educated of the generations. That's probably why their incomes are higher, by the way.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Because they more than did, you know, get that college degree. So, you know, that's, that's just a really huge change that the people forget about, about how large that has been.

• 50:14Chris Williamson?

  What about the, didn't, didn't I see something that the number of people completing high school has dropped recently? Aren't there more high school dropout, people that aren't getting high school diplomas?

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Not that I know of. I mean, it, now, it's possible that there were some weird things going on in the pandemic.

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  That, that might be what you're, what you're thinking of. But at least up to that point, it had been absolutely in the other direction. That dropping out of high school was a lot less common for, say, Gen Z versus Gen Xers in the 90s. That, you know, the high school completion rates used to hover, you know, in the 80s. And now they're well into the, the upper 90s.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the, one of the interesting stats I learned from Richard Reeves last year with his book of Boys and Men was that seven times more males than females dropped out of college during COVID. And, you know, you've got this massive retreat, this huge imbalance. It's going to be two to one females to males completing a four-year US college degree by 2030. That's going to worsen the earning potential down the line. That's going to worsen their imbalance within the home in terms of who's contributing income, which is going to make having children even more of a burden in terms of the lost income from the female.

• 51:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a, a perfect storm.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  It is. And, you know, maybe there will be more men who are the stay-at-home parent. That's already happened. But, you know, is that, is it ever going to be 50/50? A lot of people have their doubts.

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think, look, there is, people can be what they want. There are ways to have unconventional household setups that, that will work out fantastically. But, on average, I think that women's attraction is going to wane if they have a man that isn't contributing in the protector-provide role, that typically, that's what happens. This is more than just cultural archetypes, as far as I can see. This is genetic predisposition, you know, like, status accounts for an awful lot. Mate value isn't something that we just make up. It's mediated through culture, for sure, but it is rooted in biology, right? And, and these things can be bent, maybe even a good amount, but they can't be broken.

• 52:29Chris Williamson?

  And I do think that there are some challenges there. So what about changes to approaches in career, the workplace, younger employees? Why are they different? How are they different?

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, the workplace changed a lot, of course, you know, with, especially with virtual work, that's starting to shift, you know, post-pandemic. But, you know, I think the, the most interesting changes are, are with Gen Z. You know, the, by my calculations, the oldest of Gen Z are 28. So they're not just new young employees at accounting firms. They're now the new young employees at the law firms and, you know, in medicine and in the faculty and, you know, lots, lots of other professions. So, you know, I, the most important thing is the most simple. Do not assume your young employees are millennials anymore. They're not, and they're, and Gen Z is fundamentally different from, from millennials.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  But, you know, I, we're going to see, I think, a lot of the things that have come up on college campuses. Are already in the workplace are going to be even more so. And I think that's what we're already grappling with and will continue to do so in the in the next few years. Of are there going to be demands for safe spaces? Is everyone going to need to state their pronouns, not just in their email signature, but verbally? You know, and I don't think these things are all bad. There's some very, you know, good practical things to to both of of those. But a lot of older generations are gonna have some.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  Wrestle.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, wrestle with them. I think that's a good, that's a good verb. And then there's, there's, there's other things, you know, we've already really seen. Like one example I use in the book is just how it has become so common for university presidents to release statements about political events.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  And I think that's also now why young employees are demanding or asking that CEOs release statements about a politic political events. CEOs are kind of reluctant to do that. They don't want to alienate half of their customers. But then their young employees are demanding it and they're caught between a rock and a hard place. I don't think that's going to go away.

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so the personal is political, but the professional is also political now as well?

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting. Yeah, have you seen, I maybe getting out of my skis here. Have you seen the newest season of South Park?

• 54:57Speaker 00

  I have not.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  There is one episode that I implore you to watch. And in this episode, Butters gets a job at an ice cream parlor. And Cartman is jealous because Butters has a job and it means that he's earning money. So Cartman decides that he'll ask Butters to get him a job. Butters pulls a favor and Cartman starts working there. Within the first couple of minutes, Cartman says that he needs to take a mental health break. Then he works from home for the remainder of the day because it's mindful Mondays. And then it's like work from home Wednesdays and it's finish early Friday. And it like he keeps on needing to take a mental health day and he's being overworked. Then he tries to get Butters to work in a co op thing with him because he says, why are we working for this owner? He doesn't even do anything.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  Meanwhile, the joke is obviously that Cartman hasn't done anything at all or contributed to it. And yeah, I, it really hits the nail on the head, I think, of of one of the stereotypes that we have about this industry or this this sort of current generation of people who in industry don't want to work particularly hard. But then there also seems to be some truth in this, the fact that there are increasing rates of of mental health problems.

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen any data to do with sick days, days taken on leave for mental health absence, stuff like that?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I haven't seen that, but there there are some interesting questions, you know, around this for, you know, one of the the big surveys in the US of eighteen year olds, a great, great place to to sample, you know, they're either going to get a university or enter the enter the workplace. And so things are on work ethic, like, are you willing to work overtime is a great example. So that one had actually been going up, so it had been on the decline for quite a long time with, you know, from boomers to Gen Xers to millennials, younger people saying, that's not what I want to do. I don't really want to work that hard and I don't want to work overtime. And then about ten or fifteen years ago, it actually started to come up, you know, with with

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Gen Z started to be more likely to say, yeah, you know, I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to work hard. And then in 2021, it went just like a huge, big decline. And who knows, maybe that's a blip. I don't know. But that was also, you know, around the time of the idea of the quiet quitting and the great resignation. And yeah, some of some of these ideas of somewhat unrealistic ideas of, you know, why should we have to work for a living? I don't know. I don't think I get this. Yeah, that's kind of how it works.

• 57:28Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with Nicholas Eberstadt? Do you know him?

• 57:32Speaker 00

  I recognize the name.

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so he did Men Without Work, and then he did Men Without Worker post-COVID edition. He was on the show a couple of weeks ago. Fascinating. You would love his stuff. I think you you should really dig into it. So there is this cohort of seven million men aged twenty-two to fifty-five in the UK. And they are not in work and not looking for work. Only 10% of them are students. They spend an average of 2,000 hours per year watching screens.

• 58:02Chris Williamson?

  Probably video games. Half of that time is on either prescription drugs or weed. One third of them live in a household which claims at least one disability benefit. And yeah, you know, hiding in low unemployment data is this cohort of prime working age men. And when you actually drill it down to it's that particular group of that particular gender of that particular age cohort with these. It's massive. It's a huge, huge group of people and they have absolutely no desire to do it. And I put this episode out with Nicholas and it performed really well on YouTube. And there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments from guys saying, you know, why, why should, why should I bother working?

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  You know, you know, the, the, the, the world hasn't offered me anything. Cost of living is so high that it's easier to work from home. Or they would say, um, corporate employers don't value you in any case. So I don't need to do this. That because women are too full of themselves and because girls that are four out of tens. Believe that they should be getting with a millionaire, that there's no point in me even working if girls don't give us the, uh, the incentives to do it. And it felt like a fever dream. It literally felt like a fucking fever dream, reading this thing and going. That it either, either some very, very appropriate chat GPT bot has been deployed on my YouTube channel.

• 59:27Chris Williamson?

  All with the same personality to try and troll me into believing that this is true. Or I've managed to find a, a cohort of these guys that are, you know, not, not even work skeptical, work negative. And I, it made me reflect, I wrote again, another newsletter. That reflected on a couple of conversations, one I had with David Goggins, who's this Navy SEAL hard guy. And Dana White, uh, the, the president of the UFC, a video that I'd seen of him. And David Goggins looked me in the eyes a couple of months ago when we were doing this episode. And he said, it's so easy to be great nowadays because most of the world is weak. And Dana White says to his, to his kids. If you are even remotely a savage, you will run these people over because nobody has any work ethic at the moment.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  And it really made me reflect on those two things. And I understand that people don't want their greatness to stand on the shoulders of a failing society. Right? You don't want to capitalize on what you feel like is increasing fragility that is spreading out around you. But for the people that listen to the stuff that we're talking about today and kind of despair and think, oh, God, you know, what's going on? Yes, civilisationally, this is a massive problem. But individually, if you are the sort of person that is concerned about this, you're probably not the sort of person that is going to actually be affected by it. So what that means is that the bar for greatness has never, ever, ever been set lower. It is so easy to decide and put five, five percent of work in and a tiny

• 1:00:56Chris Williamson?

  bit of talent and you are already ahead of almost everybody else because the bar is set so low. So that was me trying to turn a white pill out of a relatively negative bunch of stats that I'd learned at the same time.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  And, you know, a lot of what a lot of people would answer to that, especially in the US is, yeah, but it's so much harder to get into these competitive colleges, which is true. But more people are going to college overall. So you could argue it's easier to get into college, period, maybe. But, you know, it is, it is true that there is a lot of competition, more people to apply to the most competitive places. So I think that would, I'm guessing if Gen Z heard that, that would be their answer. They'd be like, nope, you know, you're being delusional. It actually is more competitive. And that's what they have, they have been heard. And there's some truth to that. But I also do think it's true, maybe in particular, getting to the workplace. Yeah, if you're somebody

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  who's really going to put in that, that, that hard work, maybe that is a little more unusual than it used to be.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  We've got the stats on overtime. You know what I mean? It's there in front of you. If you're able to work on your mental health, if you're able to spend as much time off social media, go outside and touch some grass a little bit, that should be pretty protective. And again, the easiest thing to do to separate yourself out from any group is to look at what most other people are doing and avoid those things that you know that are negative toward them. Like, it's not hard. Does this meme that Elon Musk tweeted about a year ago that I fell in love with? And it's this sort of traumatised illustration of a man with sunken eyes and scraggly hair. And he's sort of looking down at the floor. And he says, Dear Lord, why are you testing me so much? And then on the other side, there's

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  this sort of Chad Jesus illustration that says, you literally need to put your phone down and go outside. And it just makes me think, like, look, again, the bar is set relatively low. Yes, these things are incredibly compelling. They're limbically hijacking. They're purpose-built to try and get you to come back. Variable schedule, reward, all of that stuff, right? I understand, I have my own problems with my mobile phone too. But just a tiny, tiny little bit of wrangling, you know, finding a group of friends who also want to better themselves too, that also want to kind of push back against comfort and convenience and ease. And this isn't to say that you need to live an uncomfortable or inconvenient life, but that there are ways to do this. So one of the other elements that we haven't spoken about yet,

• 1:03:24Chris Williamson?

  but is a massive contributor, is political stances. How has that wobbled and waned over the last few generations?

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, really the biggest overall change is just a lot more polarization. And you see this among young adults, to the more identify on the extreme left or the extreme right. And that there's, in the US, you also get much more of an association over the last few decades with being liberal and being Democrat and being conservative and being Republican. People forget that that used to not be as stark. And it's just become this environment where it's not just, oh, I disagree with that other party, but I hate them. And not only I disagree with that other person, but I hate the person. And we're there.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Some people refer to it as affective polarization, affect meaning emotion. And that's what's really stunning. There's a big survey that's been done for decades and decades. And it asked people to say, on a temperature scale, how warm do you feel towards certain groups? And Democrats about Republicans or Republicans about Democrats is in frostbite territory now. And it used to be maybe, oh, mid 50s, and now it's like 20. So there's just, you know, a lot of negative feeling. It's almost like it's replaced religion. Or, you know, even more, um, yeah, so something else where it's just like, that's

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  the other. That's how we're dividing each other now is, is it's based on politics.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  I saw a study that showed one third of Democrats worry about their son or daughter marrying a Republican.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  Exact same thing.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Chris Williamson?

  Is it true? So you mentioned earlier on, uh, Gen Z from college coming into the workplace and needing their CEO or president to comment on current cultural events. Something tells me that if you are conservative or Republican, this is not going to be the sort of thing that you're pushing. Therefore, does this suggest that Gen Z is more liberal? That they are voting more progressively?

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  Well, young, the younger generations tend to be more progressive and older people tend to be more conservative. It's, the, the basic idea is that when you're young, you see the problems in the world and you want things to be changed. Then you get to a certain age in midlife where you say, hey, you know, there's actually a lot of these things have changed. That's enough. We can stop there. You know, so I think that that's part, part of the dynamic there. But, you know, people do sometimes stereotype and think, you know, all of Gen Z is, you know, liberal and Democrat. And that's not the case. You know, there's a good third of them who voted for Trump. But even the conservatives like Trump a little

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  bit less. So there's, there's some generational break. There's actually probably one of the reasons why he lost in, in, in 2020 was that he lost the support of more young conservatives.

• 1:06:37Chris Williamson?

  Is there evidence to suggest that this aging out of liberalism is happening more slowly or less?

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  You know, there's not, and it's, you know, the one thing we've kind of learned in the last five years or so is a really cool paper that made the case that your politics are at least somewhat shaped by who was president when you, or a teen and a young adult, and whether that president was popular. So the millennials who were young when Obama was president, a relatively popular president, will probably, this data suggests, tilt more liberal and Democrat their whole lives. So then if you look at that for Gen Z, it's a little bit more, it's a little harder to predict, because neither Trump nor Biden

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  has had particularly great, you know, popularity ratings. So it's a little harder to see, you know, what direction they're going to go in the future. And it is interesting, because although they are a very progressive generation across a lot of social issues, they also, in terms of their behaviors, are almost more conservative in an odd way, like they're less likely to drink alcohol and have sex, for example. But their views on most issues are pretty progressive, on average.

• 1:08:01Chris Williamson?

  Why are these young people so much more negative about their country?

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  I think that's one of the biggest questions that we have to try to answer. And I think one possible explanation, you know, obviously, there's a lot of toxicity online, and it has a lot to do with it. But I think kind of the other piece of the puzzle that has not been discussed as much, is that this is another downstream effect of more depression and mental health issues. Because depression isn't just about feeling, it's not just about emotions, it's also about how you think, and how you think about things. And by definition, depression means you view the world in a negative light. So that's why there's more,

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  that's why there's more pessimism. That's why there's the view of, you know, everything is unfair, and thus we need to change things. And then the one that really knocked me out of my chair was the poll of US adults that said, "Do you believe that the founders of the United States are better described as heroes or as villains?"

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  And four out of 10 Gen Z said villains. It was only one out of 10 for boomers. And that's interesting because that's that's offense 250 years in the past. You know, it's not even an assessment of the current moment. And there's that very, very strong negativity. And it's, you know, the other items too, you know, things, whether things are fair or whether, you know, they should be changed, young adults much more likely to say, yeah, you know, we need to tear the whole thing down and start over. And negativity isn't always bad. You know, we don't want people to have rose colored glasses and see everything is positive. But if that negativity is combined with hopelessness and nihilism, which it seems

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  to be, that's not good for a stable democracy.

• 1:10:00Chris Williamson?

  This is probably my least favorite part about the internet. I have many things that I like about the internet, despite the fact that we've been very critical today. My least favorite part, it took a conversation with my friend Michael Malice to actually give a word to it. It's so funny, you know, you spend all of this time reflecting on things and introspecting, and oh, I'm going to link all of these different concepts together. And then you realize that something that you thought was an unbelievably difficult web to put together already existed, and it had a word that you'd learned since you were age 12 or something. And it was cynicism. I realized that the culture that I hate the most on the internet is cynicism, that everything sucks, that everything's rubbish, that it's not going to get better, that the

• 1:10:43Chris Williamson?

  people who believe that it can get better are the ones that are actually the problem. They're the ones that are delusional or conspiratorial, or have been silver spooned or coddled, or been given unfair advantages in life. And I realized that that, as far as I was concerned, was the worst trend that I was seeing online. So outside of the distaste and negativity for country, is there evidence that shows that there's a, how could you say, like generalized cynicism disorder, that this is just being spread out elsewhere too?

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, so this is the thing you're describing on the internet, I call it the hellscape narrative. You know, and that's, that's what you see. And, you know, things are worse than ever. Are they really? I don't know. And, yeah, and the survey data, 18 year olds more likely to say, I don't have any hope for the world, I can't have hope given the, given the situation.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Locus of control has become more external, meaning I don't think there's anything I can really do about it. Things are so unfair. All of those have spiked in the last 10 years.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  So drawing this back to my current pet obsession of the mating crisis, I see a lot of people doing that, externalizing in terms of locus of control, that it's because of whatever that's out there. All men are going, potential rapists and assaulters, or all women are too full of themselves, or whatever it might be. Another sort of interesting, I guess, consideration there too, is the cynicism and the negativity that we see amongst young people is, it's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy, that if they don't try to step outside of whatever

• 1:12:34Chris Williamson?

  it is that they're doing, they give themselves proof that the world is like that, because if you don't go and do something to change it, then what do you think, what's going to happen? The world isn't just going to deliver you change, especially not to just your life. And again, with the climate change thing, something we were talking about earlier on, but with regards to having kids, it's almost like some of the social change movements that are happening are used as excuses. You know, how many, how many Gen Zers genuinely understand anthropological impact on climate? Like, really, really understand what's going on? It is incontrovertible that humans have an impact on the climate, but let's talk about, you know, exactly how much of a difference is it going to be in downstream, et cetera,

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  et cetera. I see so much, because I talk about the sort of declining birth rates a good bit, people saying, why, it is fully unethical to bring a child into this world when it's already overpopulated and we're destroying the planet. Like, you do understand that's like, just straight up antinatalism, right? Like, it's just, it's just the most antinatalist position that you can hold. And do you really think, like, if you think that living on a planet that's got too many people, which we don't at the moment, is bad, wait until you live on one that's got too few. Wait until you live on one that is trying to desperately hold on to an embedded growth obligation to continue the GDP to grow, when the population is dropping by 10, 20, 30% per generation?

• 1:14:03Chris Williamson?

  Wait until that happens. And I'm like, fucking screaming this from the rooftops, saying, look, how can you be focused on climate change, something that may slightly inconvenience your great, great, great, great, great granddaughter's life if that isn't going to be born if you don't have any kids. And within the space of 50 years, within the space of 30 years, China's population's going to be halved. They're going to go from 1.2 billion to 650 million people. Korea is having a 96% extinction rate over the next 100 years. For every 100 Koreans that exist now, there will be four great grandchildren. For every 100 Koreans, there are four great grandchildren.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:14:48Chris Williamson?

  Climate, it's the oppression in the world. And you just think, fuck, like, I've turned into the boomers. I've turned into the boomers that I railed against for so long. Listen to me. I can hear it just falling out of my pores. So I don't know. I, I, I want to be able to discount a lot of the stuff that we've said today as, you know, every generation rails against the one that is coming next and says that it is so on and so forth. I wonder whether there is such a thing as such a difference of degree that it becomes a difference of kind, that it almost locks in a longer term trajectory, which is so much more suboptimal, that it almost is a difference of kind. And there have been some difference of kind things, as well as difference of degrees

• 1:15:32Chris Williamson?

  and intensities, too. What, what ways could you be wrong about this stuff? Have you considered that?

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You know, what, what has really been the kind of lifesaver of that my whole career has been, I've tried to draw from these, you know, big nationally representative data sets, often of young people. And that, you know, you're listening to what the generation says about itself, not what older people's observations or some tiny pocket of people are doing. That helps a lot. But things can change. It's very hard to predict the future. That's just the way it is. So, you know, does this mean that Gen Z is going to be negative their

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  whole lives? Well, I hope not. And I think there are some positive signs. I mean, one thing is that voter participation is way up among young adults. So if you are hopeless and negative, that's pretty bad. If you're negative, but then you vote and try to change the things that you think need to be changed, that's a better outcome. So that's where I do have some hope is that political activism in this generation. Where I do have, you know, a little bit of fear and bias, maybe also just given my life stage, is I would prefer that we didn't completely overthrow the government, burn it all down and start

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  over. And I think there are a good number of Gen Z who do want to do that.

• 1:17:12Chris Williamson?

  What are your predictions for the future? We've got, you call them the polar generation or generation polar or Gen A, generation alpha coming through. What do you think's happening next?

• 1:17:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we don't have that much data yet on this generation, but this is those born 2013 and later. So yeah, a lot of people call them Gen Alpha. I call them Polers after melting polar ice caps and political polarization. So two things, you know, that will be talked about and perhaps have an impact on them. You know, the little data that we do have is troubling. A lot of childhood obesity, a lot less of playing outside and exercise, probably because of screens. So hopefully we can turn that around. I'm less pessimistic about the fact that, you know, a lot of them went through the pandemic when they were

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  young because a lot of generations, say the silent generation, went through the Great Depression and World War II when they were young and they turned out pretty well. So generations can grow from adversity. What I'm afraid of is if they get stuck with problems that they can't get rid of as children and teens. And I have the same worry about Gen Z.

• 1:18:26Chris Williamson?

  Especially if there is something pathological perhaps about seeing challenge as a negative as opposed to something which is to be overcome. You can only really grow from it if you decide to go through it as opposed to be completely split in half by it. Jean, this is really fascinating. I really appreciate your work. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the things that you do. Where should they head?

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the new book, Generations, about all six living American generations and just tons of data and conclusions in there. So my website is jeantwenge.com. So J E A N T W E N G E. See, after 90 minutes, I can't even spell my own name. But that has stuff about the books. I also have frequently asked questions about generations, stuff about speak engagements and all the good stuff.

• 1:19:22Chris Williamson?

  Jean, I really appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.