Where the Widening Generation Gaps May Take Us

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Collin Hansen
Sometimes advice isn’t just bad, it’s delusional. That’s what Jean Twiggy writes in her new book generations, the real differences between Gen Z, millennials, Gen X boomers and silence and what they mean for America’s future. She makes this comment about advice about the most optimistic and self confident generation in history. That’s my generation. I’m on the older end of the spectrum, it’s the millennials. Here’s the advice that we heard over and over growing up. Just be yourself. Believe in yourself and anything is possible. Express yourself and you have to learn to love yourself before you can love someone else. Well, Jane’s counterpoint is this, what if you’re a jerk or even a serial killer? No, not anything is possible, you’re delusional. She writes this quote, people who really love themselves are called narcissists. And they make horrible relationship partners. What’s tough medicine for us millennials, but she’s right. I felt understood in her book. And I don’t need to understand other generations both older and younger. Because in many ways, we have less in common with each other than ever before. Dr. Twiggy writes this, the breakneck speed of cultural change, it means that growing up today is a completely different experience from growing up in the 1950s, or the 1980s, or even the 2000s 20 as a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and widely published researcher. The book is full of important insights. She described same sex marriage as the most rapid change of public opinion on a social issue in history. And not coincidentally, she writes that, she says that all signs point to further retreat from religion. And in place of religion, we get politics, and she warns this world history suggests that transferring religious beliefs into politics will not end well. I had to agree with her that with her sense that optimism has been lost in the United States, since the Great Recession, and that our society built on abstract ideas depends on trust and truth that we don’t often enjoy. Today. Generations is a bracing book and an important one, whether you’re a parent, or pastor or politician, or just want to learn more about yourself and your neighbors, and I look forward to talking about it with her now. Dr. Twenge, thank you for joining me on gospel bound. Right away, you make a big claim, you write this, when you are born has a larger effect on your personality and attitudes than the family who raised you does. Now I know, Jean, that for many of my listeners, that’s scary. They they work hard to be good parents and instill certain values and encourage certain beliefs. So would you suggest they’re just wasting their time?

Jean Twenge
Not exactly. So I’m a parent myself, I have three kids. And, you know, this statement recognizes two things. So first, that family environment doesn’t have as big of an impact on personality and behavior as many people would think. But that when you grow up, and your culture has a bigger impact than then many people would think. But I don’t think people especially parents, your take out of that, that it’s all hopeless per se, more that your kids are, who they are from the time they’re born. And most parents know that, especially if more than one child. You see how they’re different from day one. And your job is to try to shepherd them through our current cultural moment with all of its challenges, and have them come out on the other side as a productive adult. I once heard someone say, when you’re a parent, you’re not raising children. You’re raising adults, and I thought that was so insightful and such a great way to think about it.

Collin Hansen
Well, tell me more what you mean by that. What difference does that make?

Jean Twenge
Well, I think it makes a difference because in modern parenting, the message is often you want your child To be happy at every moment, and that that’s the goal. But that’s not the goal. Because what makes them happy in the short term is often what they don’t, not what they need for the long term. So our job isn’t really to make our kids happy, it’s to help them become productive adults. And sure, if they can be happy along the way, that’s great. But those, those two are sometimes going to be in conflict. And we have to think long term in those circumstances.

Collin Hansen
Makes me think there was a conversation I had recently with a fellow parent, we have third graders, we were noticing that in our public school, there was a significant increase in emphasis on character formation. This is a pretty conservative community overall. But we were still kind of taken aback by by that emphasis on, on character on behavior, how you treat one another. And she asked the teachers what that was about. And they said, well, about seven years ago, or so we started to see really dramatic changes, for the worse in terms of behavior for kids. I couldn’t really, you’re the you’re the person to ask this question to. My initial thought was, maybe it’s the millennial kids, millennials, kids that are finally hitting school. Have you heard that anywhere else? Is that local? Or would you attribute it to anything else?

Jean Twenge
Yeah, well, you know, as you know, from reading the book, I like to when I can, you know, rely on on really solid national data. And I don’t know of any solid national data, I’d say for elementary school students anyway, on on those types of factors. But certainly, we do know that kids in that age group are spending a lot more time inside and on devices and less time outside and less time being independent, then they were a generation or two ago. So when they get to school, and then they have to figure out how to behave, they just don’t have as much experience with those types of situations. And that may be part of the problem.

Collin Hansen
Does, it seems that millennial parents have an expectation of child direction, a lot more than some previous generations, at least in what I pick up on talking with them. Now, a lot of the the, the aspects you talked about with generations depend primarily on technology. And you’re right, this technological change isn’t just about stuff. It’s about how we live, which influences how we think, feel and behave. Now, I’ve been reading your work for a long time, and you’ve deeply shaped my own thinking and teaching on this on this point. But I have also learned that sometimes people disagree strongly. They always want to push back and say it’s not technology, it’s ideas, this goes back centuries, or they say, it’s all about money. You know, that’s the only thing that really motivates people. So why do you choose to attribute so much to technology?

Jean Twenge
Well, you know, the traditional theory of generational differences is about events, you know, that each generation is shaped by wars, pandemics, terrorist attacks, you know, economic cycles, and that’s what makes them who they are. But that doesn’t capture why it’s so different to live now than it was to live 200 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago, you have really, technology is really at the root of that. So technology has direct effects. So things like social media and smartphones and labor saving devices and airplanes and air conditioning and better medical care. But then it also has these downstream effects, because it does affect values. So technology makes it possible for cultures to be more individualistic, more focus on the self, and less on social rules, more valuing, valuing of equality, more putting yourself first, it also slows down the life cycle, better medical care, you get longer lifespans. That’s one of the reasons kids are less independent. It’s why teens in high school are less likely to get their driver’s license or have a paid job or drink alcohol or go out on dates can predict compared to previous generations. It’s why young adults marry later and have kids later and settle into careers later. It’s also why 60 is the new 50 and middle aged people look and feel younger than their parents or grandparents did. So the whole lifecycle has slowed down. And at the root of that is technology. So so I wouldn’t make the claim that all cultural change or all generational change comes from technology. But a remarkable amount of it can be traced back there in one way or another.

Collin Hansen
And correct me if I’m wrong, you’re often in these arguments where somebody will be asking about a lot of the changes with mental illness and they’ll suggest any anything from September 11 2001, to the great recession to the political upheavals to the pandemic, and you’re saying those can all have In effect, but technology is the real distinguishing characteristic here, whereas more of an effect, would that be an accurate summation? It would,

Jean Twenge
particularly for teens and young adults. When we look at the mental health statistics for those groups, the pattern is really clear and really consistent and really, really concerning. So what you see, see if you trace it, and like, let’s just take, you know, the last 20 years or so, is that rates of depression and anxiety and self harm and suicide, were either stable, or actually going down between, say, the early 2000s, and about 2011 or 2012. Then at that point, they suddenly start to go up with, for example, teen clinical level depression doubled between 2011 and 2019. Now chose 2019 Is that endpoint on purpose to show it happened before the pandemic hit? Yeah, because there’s been a lot of attention, you know, the adolescent mental health crisis recently, but it’s often in the same breath, he was saying, Oh, it’s because of the pandemic. It started a good eight years before the pandemic. So if you know if you trace it over that whole time, the Great Recession, barely budgets, mental health, it doesn’t budget at all for teens. And for adults, there’s just a little bit of an uptick in poor mental health. And that’s it. You don’t see it for September 11, either, when you go to take the data that goes back further, it barely bulges at the pandemic, yes. Depression continued to increase for teens during that time. But then it’s increased at about the same rate that it had been increasing since 2012. So why 2012 That happens to be the first year the majority of Americans own a smartphone. It’s also around the same time that social media changed, that it became something not just that, say about half of teens are doing everyday, something that’s kind of optional, to something 75 or 80% of teams are doing every day, so became almost mandatory. It’s also about the time Facebook bought Instagram, social media became much more visual.

Collin Hansen
Well, you will come back to some of these topics. You. You alluded to this earlier. And I think it’s essentially what you see throughout the entire book is a chicken and egg dynamic between technology and individualism. Did technology give us individualism? Or did individualism give us technology? Seems like you come again, and again, back to the interplay between these two. How are we supposed to think about that?

Jean Twenge
Yeah, I mean, I think for the most part, it’s technology driving individualism, that technology makes it possible for people to live alone and be more independent, and gives people more leisure time to be able to focus on on themselves. It creates circumstances where we can value equality, more safer gender roles is a great example, because of more service based white collar economy tends to favor if anything, the skills then that women are usually good at, as opposed to say, physical strength. And now that we have lots of machinery to do those types of jobs is not quite as necessary. So that’s, that’s that’s where you get the causal arrow from technology to individualism. The To Do you play with each other, though, because you can certainly see the influence of individualism and how people use technology. So that we have say, you know, iPads, that then the whole family can watch their own show. Well, if it wasn’t for individuals, and maybe people wouldn’t want to do that. And then same same thing with taking selfies and the emphasis on yourself focus on social media and things like that. So it social media has, you know, interplays with individualism in different ways. It used to be a much more attention seeking thing, now that it’s become more mandatory. If anything, it’s something that seems to undermine self esteem because everybody else’s life looks so glamorous and perfect.

Collin Hansen
Right. Now, another application of your your work on technology or research on technology is what you’ve alluded to earlier, the slower life. Now do we age and it kind of physically we age slower, but also just how we progress through a lot of life stages? So do we age more slowly through those stages, especially marriage and childbearing? Because of technology, or because of individualism?

Jean Twenge
It’s it’s definitely some of both. So technology is at the core because that leads to longer life expectancy. It also is the reason why education takes longer to finish. So we’re talking about millennials earlier Millennials are the generation That set records in terms of college education, more millennials have gotten a college degree than any previous generation. And that’s because it’s more necessary to succeed in the economy today, which is more sophisticated and requires that higher level of education, for many jobs, certainly not all. And individualism absolutely plays into it as well, that people are just more likely in an individualistic society to have the thought, well, you know, I want to, I want to enjoy being young. And I want to wait to get married until I’m a little older, I don’t want to wait to have kids, you know, until I’m more settled down, I want to take that time to enjoy my independence. That’s a more individualistic way of thinking. And I always want to be clear with these things. When I talk about individualism or collectivism, for that matter. I am not making a value judgment. Each cultural system has its advantages and disadvantages. There’s trade offs involved in both, neither one of them is all bad or all good.

Collin Hansen
Well, you know, Brad, Brad Wilcox is a sociologist that I read quite a bit. And he talks about a lot of these same phenomena. And one of the things he observes and I’m sure he’ll expand on in his, his forthcoming book on marriage is that you might be able to see some social or even economic effects from fewer children and delayed marriage and, and a society might decide we want to incentivize childbirth and marriage for social reasons. But what he’s found is that it’s not really the incentives, necessarily, it’s simply the lifestyle. People have chosen, that they do not want children. It’s not because they can’t afford it, necessarily. And you touch on that with millennials being the richest generation of all time, at their at their stage.

Jean Twenge
Popular belief. And yes, corrected for inflation. I always have to throw that in, because people always assume well, you didn’t correct for inflation. Yep. Correct for inflation.

Collin Hansen
That was that was one of the things that stood out to me and I, I bought a house again, I’m an older millennial, and I bought a house right out of college was pretty rare. So I was on both ends of what you talked about. I was like a Gen X or losing all of that money in my first house. But then I was a millennial who got it back, because I bought again, afterward, after the Great Recession. So that was a really interesting observation helped me too, could you expand a little bit more on different sometimes you see really clear continuities across the generations or sort of a trend down or a trend up. Sometimes these see these sharp shifts, and there appears to be one between Gen X and millennials, specifically related to safety. And the slow life you write that millennials are the first generation in American history in which the majority of 25 to 39 year olds are not married? And of course, no surprise there as the fewest children of any generation in American history then as well. What changed between Gen X and millennials?

Jean Twenge
Yeah, there were a couple of trends. So I mean, one is actually a good thing, which is that the teenage pregnancy rate went down by quite a bit which change?

Collin Hansen
Yeah, talk. We talked about that all the time. And then it 90s And then it’s just not even an issue to talk about anymore? Hardly.

Jean Twenge
Yeah, yeah, certainly not as much. I mean, it’s gone way, way, way down. And that started in that transition between Gen X and millennials. I think that’s, that’s, that’s part of it. But you know, there’s also some other reasons, like individualism, you know, like, just nuts that started with boomers and built into Gen X and and then grew with with millennials. But yeah, that idea that I will, you know, to have kids, that’s going to mean a lot of sacrifice. And that’s just not something that I want to do. And I think that that certainly plays a role in that in that trend, for sure.

Collin Hansen
That you observed that technology since the mid 20th century has broken the generational cycle. What do you mean, what, what’s the generational cycle there?

Jean Twenge
So there’s a book that came out in 1991, also called generations that advanced the theory that generations come in cycles, that there’s four different types, and that they cycle in and out throughout history in conjunction with big events. So, you know, that book makes a pretty strong case, you know, for the generations, we had data on up to that point, but then it starts to break down. So it works pretty well up to boomers, it starts to wobble a little bit with Gen X, for example. Those authors said that Gen X had low self esteem. In fact, it’s the opposite because individualism was growing. And then it really completely the wheels completely fall off when you get to millennials, because their theory was Millennials were going to be collectivistic very civically oriented. And just that that did not turn out to be the case. As you know, there’s lots of great things about millennials in terms of how hard they work to get college educations. They’ve done very well, economically, but being very civically oriented. Well, maybe in the case of some politicians, perhaps. But some people would argue even that, I think,

Collin Hansen
yeah, well, that yeah, the, when I was, apathy was sort of the name of the game in the college scene, late 1990s, early 2000s. And then the thought was, oh, you’re gonna see a whole lot more activism. It just doesn’t appear that that was the case, you have seen significant shifts, and complaints. And of course, then you have this huge spike and 2020. Of course, that’s not really based on the colleges, because in young adults, because of the pandemic and the way that that happened. Yeah, exactly. There. So you didn’t really see that expected expected, kind of backlash there or, or cycle. You know, when I’m talking with people about cultural change, that some people see it as essentially volatile, that essentially, it’s the backlash thesis, they’re this generation does this. So this generation does this. And there’s a lot of back and forth. We’re like a pendulum swing. And there’s others who see it as linear. And that can either be of progress or regress. What do you see from the data?

Jean Twenge
It’s mostly linear. So the pendulum swing argument is more like that cyclical argument of generations. And for the most part, no technology continues to become more convenient and advanced. Individualism continues to grow. It takes different, it has kind of different flavors in each generation, but it’s continued to progress. The lifestrategy, slow life has continued to slow down, you know, and so that’s a pretty linear movement, you do get cycles in terms of mental health. That’s where there’s, there’s some of that, but that, you know, that’s not necessarily something people want or decide is going to happen. So that’s not a conscious thing of I’m going to rebel against this generation. That’s just a product of the way technology has basically made things better or worse. And that does seem to cycle in and out that, for example, for a lot of millennials, doing say instant messaging, or you know, MySpace, if you remember, that was a way to connect, but it wasn’t mandatory. It wasn’t something everybody was doing. It wasn’t something that took hours and hours and hours out of the day. It didn’t interfere when teams were with each other face to face. And then for Gen Z, all that changed, it became mandatory, it became something that took up hours. It was a you know that smartphones are something that even when you work together with your friends in person, that sometimes people were still taking out the phone, and they were just spending a lot less time with each other face to face than Millennials did at the same age.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. Well, speaking of mental health, I, I presume you’ve noticed the same thing I have that sort of the mainstream media spigot has been thrown wide open of pushback on a lot of the therapeutic changes in the last maybe even just half generation in some ways. Have you noticed the same thing? Or if so, any theories on why that’s the case? Say a little bit more about what you mean? Yeah. So what I mean is, all of a sudden, with the times the Atlantic, and all these places are publishing about how everything’s become trauma, and that’s a problem. Everything is self diagnosed mental illness, and that’s a problem. Just it seems like all of a sudden, I saw it everywhere. The questioning of the therapeutic capture of all of life, and the seeming the seeming search for everybody to under, you know, to identify their under underlying traumas. And that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t know if you’ve seen the same thing. That’s, but if you haven’t, that’s fine.

Jean Twenge
Just yeah, no, I know what you mean. So I think there’s two different threads here. So one is, and I think what you’re referring to is this, that people have said, you know, their growth in therapy speak.

Collin Hansen
Right? Yeah, maybe

Jean Twenge
that’s maybe that’s not the best of ideas. And yes, the expansion of what trauma is that it that used to be a word used for, you know, people came back from war. And now it can be, you know, my friend was mean to me. And I don’t mean to make light of, you know, people who really do experience trauma, but that’s the problem that many people have pointed out of the definition expanding is that if everything is trauma, nothing is trauma, right? People notice that that? So there is that and so there’s there’s the pushback against against that. However, some of that pushback says actually, the way we’re doing this is kind Contrary to therapy, yeah, so coddling of the American mind is a great example of that. That says, you know, actually, when you do therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy says, challenge those negative beliefs that you have, don’t go looking for trauma, don’t go looking for the negative, in fact, you should do the opposite of not assuming that someone is insulting you, instead, realizing there might be other reasons of not being negative of not taking that us versus them, you know, point of view. So you know, that that’s certainly out there as well that, you know, if we actually were following the most effective therapy of CBT, then we would not be focusing on all that as well.

Collin Hansen
Oh, exactly. Exactly. That’s, I was recently doing a podcast where this topic came up. And that was the exact point that I made. I’ve also read a lot from your your frequent collaborator, Jonathan Hite on that topic, especially. Junior your top your chapter on Gen X contains a fascinating insight you describe describe the treadmill of middle class prosperity, expectations increase, and satisfaction decreases. And you write this in contrast, most people can find meaning in their lives by helping others intrinsic goals are not just more meaningful, but are also more attainable, probably why they are linked to greater happiness. Have you seen that that trend toward extreme extrinsic goals of wealth, especially as that continued with the younger generations after Gen X, or have they gone back to more intrinsic goals?

Jean Twenge
Yeah, it has continued. So, for example, there’s a survey of entering college students that asked about important life goals. And one of them is the importance of being quote very well off financially. So this the date on that, going back to the late 1960s, when it was the Boomers were college students, and so the late boomers, the importance of that starts to increase. So you know, back in the late 60s, maybe 45, or so percent, so that was important, and it starts to grow. It grows the most, you know, in the 70s, through the 80s. But then it keeps inching up year after year. And the most recent data we have from a couple of years ago was it reached an all time high, I think it was 83% said that was important. So it’s continued to entire. So definitely a growth in that focus on extrinsic goals. So things like money, fame, and image. So there’s some disadvantages to that approach. There is an advantage, though, in that Gen Z, for example, is very practical, you know, it focused on focusing on end goals can be a very practical way to go. The downside is, you’re just focused on extrinsic goals, and you don’t have the intrinsic of the inherent joy of doing something, or building relationships. It’s a sad way to live, it’s like showing up to a job where you’re just doing it to get a paycheck, going to school just to get the degree or the grade. It’s kind of meaningless. And I think that’s something a lot of young people are struggling with.

Collin Hansen
I was hoping you’d give a different answer that that had changed. I did think so you probably saw the same survey I did a couple of months ago that showed that trust over time, and family or interest and trust in family, government, religion, and everything was just in really almost collapse. But the one thing that was up was want to make more money. And I thought, oh, that’s, that’s not going to end. That is going to be a real struggle. And let’s let’s turn it specifically here toward religion. What would you say is your book’s most important finding related to religion?

Jean Twenge
Well, basically, that the decline in religiosity is real. No. So you know, over the last 10 or 15 years, there’s a lot of back and forth on this it it was okay, yes, affiliation is down, but they’re still going to religious services or, okay, going to religious services we now acknowledge yep, that’s down, but private beliefs. So things like a belief in God or private prayer, that that still there? Well, now that’s down to same thing with some of the generational trends. The idea was okay, this is down for millennials when they’re, you know, teens and young adults. But once they get married and have kids, they will come back to religion. And that didn’t turn out to be true either than the last one was, well, okay, they’re not religious, but their spiritual spiritual. Yeah, not true either. Spirituality is basically more or less the same. While religiosity has gone down so it hasn’t spirituality hasn’t replaced religiosity

Collin Hansen
was interesting you, you you joke about how millennials are faulted for killing everything. And I remember or that phase of BuzzFeed articles I think millennials had killed. Yeah. Look, if I’m gonna be a millennial talking about this, I’m gonna bring your point out, if you’re going to add to that list, it would appear that it was the millennials who killed religion in the 2000s. And if I remember correctly, you’d say specifically the focus on the self and the personal journey. And then specifically, especially the role that individualism played in widespread acceptance of gay rights, which I would then of course, observe that that’s connected to what we’ve been talking there about marriage and family. Focus on the self and a shunning of too much responsibility that would constrain lifestyle. And also with Yeah, just higher expectations of self fulfillment in different ways. And those extrinsic values versus intrinsic. You know, there’s an there’s another other thing that just stuck with me, and I just haven’t stopped talking about what I’ve read in this book over the last couple of months since I finished it. And you, you talk about, well, there’s a lot of things that stand out to me, one of them was how boomers, poor mental health, maybe related to persistently high substance abuse. That’s something that did not go away and was particular to their generation. I mentioned earlier, millennials is the richest generation because of education and buying homes after the Great Recession. The millennials, we mentioned this as well earlier, make more money, but feel less wealthy, because they have high expectations driven by social media. And this really stood out to me, because they spend so much on childcare, so that that both parents can work. And of course, related to that, then the cost of childcare has skyrocketed because of the demand. So it eats up more percentage, not just of your income as well. But I have to say we’ve kind of waited all the way 30 minutes into this interview for me to ask about it has to be the standout finding, I think of your book is about Gen Z born to that 1995 to 2012, and their attitudes towards sex and gender. More than half believe that there are more than two genders. And they believe that older generations are ignorant compared to these progressive beliefs. Now, you mentioned you do not you know, you do not cite this as definitive, you just throw it out there as a theory, I will say as the host that it has to be a factor here. You mentioned pornography as one of the things that could be affecting this shift. And I would say not coincidentally, the sex recession of millennials has become the sex depression, as he described in Gen Z. And also just ask, in general, was this kind of views on Gen Z, and sex and gender was that also kind of the most surprising or significant finding of your book or something you entirely expected going into the writing of this book?

Jean Twenge
Well, I had first found that decline in sexual activity among young adults, five, seven years ago. And it was a huge surprise at the time, you know, with online dating and Tinder and hookup apps and, and more acceptance for premarital sex. It was very unexpected and unexpected, because there’s more, you think it would be the opposite. So it was kind of shocking when that when that showed up in the in the national datasets that for young adults in particular, fewer of them were having sex, and I would not necessarily have had predicted that. Some of it is because people get married later. So it’s a good segment of they’ve gotten married young than they probably wouldn’t be in that category and not being sexually active. But the average age of marriage is now about 28. So that’s, that’s part of what’s going on there. But, you know, it was it was very surprising.

Collin Hansen
It’s surprising, in part, because the media narratives don’t match, and sort of the fictional and film they don’t, those narratives don’t match the reality. The realities are that the people who are having sex are the people who are unattached and those are the people who are fulfilled, but the surveys just show the opposite to people having sex and more fulfilled in life for the people who are married and committed. So it just doesn’t seem to line up with what we see reinforced in media. Here’s my last question. You know, of course, I work for a ministry here at the gospel coalition that advances Christian faith in the end the church. And so maybe I’m just seeing what I’m conditioned to be able to see here but I, I cannot help but observe a trend across generations in your book. And this is what it looks like more technology means more individualism and fewer social connections such as the church and and family in there, which means that also higher rates of mental illness and demands from you mentioned here the cry believes it for emotional safety and a merciless culture of of outrage without absolution. Okay, that was a big, long statement there. But I have to say this, that that description that is traced through your book is exactly what my religion at least, would warn us to expect. And yet every trend seems to indicate Americans are clamoring for more technology, more individualism, and also, in some ways more retribution toward one another. What, what am I missing? set me straight? Correct me? What am I missing here? This is exactly what I would expect, and in many ways fear would happen to us.

Jean Twenge
Yeah. I think that’s the problem is we don’t always have a clear eyed view of these things that we want. And AI technology is a great example of that. Particularly, because let’s just take social media, spending a lot of time on social media, it’s very easy to do, because the companies have poured billions into making sure that their users are on the app as long as possible for as much of the day as possible. They call it engagement. I hate that word, because it makes it sound like such a good thing, you know, but that’s their word for it. And that’s how it’s gone. So we have that. And it’s conspiring against what we actually need as human beings, which is to be with each other face to face, and to have several close relationships rather than say, you know, hundreds of followers where it’s a shallow relationship, and to focus on those intrinsic things of those actual human relationships, rather than chasing those things that are hard to get, and not actually that fulfilling in the long run. Like getting lots of likes and followers being a great example of that. So, you know, I think we’re just in this dilemma, especially just right now, where this technology was supposed to connect us. And instead, it’s coincided with record levels of loneliness, and depression. So clearly, it hasn’t worked. And we need to reconsider our relationship with that technology. And I think adults need to do that. And I think even more, we have to think about protecting kids, like raising the minimum age for Social Media to 16 and actually enforcing that.

Collin Hansen
Well, you, you do not hold back on this. I love this quote, I’m gonna I’m gonna read it to conclude here. My guest here has been Jean Twiggy, her book, we’re talking about generations, I think you’ve already seen how the insights that I’ve derived from it and heard about all the different things that I think people, no matter where you are in life can benefit from, but this is this quote, stood out that technology say it has isolated us from each other. So political division, fueled income inequality, spread, pervasive pessimism, widen generation gaps, stolen our attention, and as the primary culprit culprit for a mental health crisis among teens and young adults. So what I’m thinking Jean is put down that smartphone, talk to your neighbor, at least after they’ve listened to this or watch this interview. Does that sound right?

Jean Twenge
It does, although I have to point out what I said before, that quarter hour right after it, which is that technology is not all bad, or all that it has given us the gift of time. I mean, about that, think about the way our grandparents and great grandparents lived, that they, they their life expectancy was probably only about 60 or 65. And that they had to spend so much time doing laundry and cooking and all of these other things just to survive. So technology has given us that gift of time, but it is it is up to us how to use it.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. Amen. One of the things that that I run, one of the things that I run into a lot is that I think it’s part of the American spirit to think that technology can overcome all of our challenges. And there’s a there’s a built in bias toward technology toward that as seeing that as progress. And so yeah, I want to make sure people don’t walk away from this thinking that I’ve misrepresented you there because you’re just trying to help us see the potential downsides and some of how that’s played out. We seem to assume the positives. But you’re right, we’ve got time and time was one reason we’re able to record this podcast and and people be able to listen to it and now go out there and meet your neighbors. Right. Similarly, again, my guest here has been Jean Twiggy, author of generations check it out, as Thank you so much for your time.

Jean Twenge
Thanks for having me on.