Once we know something, it becomes hard to imagine what it feels like not to know it.
More quotesEvery generation is apparently a new species, identifiable by the technology it used during puberty. This is marvellous for consultants. If young people remain recognisably human—status-seeking, contradictory, social, hopeful, lazy in some ways and industrious in others—there is little proprietary mystery to sell. But declare them fundamentally transformed and panic opens its wallet.
The recipe is simple. Take millions of people born across fifteen arbitrary years. Select several flattering or alarming tendencies. Ignore class, place, family and life stage. Give the cohort a letter. Sell a report explaining how to communicate with these baffling creatures. Then interpret every contradiction as proof of their complexity. A theory that can explain both thrift and extravagance, individualism and conformity, has achieved the commercial miracle of being impossible to disappoint. It is astrology with better typography.
Generational labels can describe shared historical exposure. Someone entering work during a recession may face different choices from someone entering during a boom. That is worth studying. The bullshit begins when context hardens into personality and averages become instructions for every individual. A twenty-two-year-old and a sixty-year-old may differ because of age, period, wealth, experience or an actual preference. Slapping “Gen Z” on the first person does not identify which. It merely makes ignorance sound segmented. If a strategy needs a mythical new human to feel urgent, check whether the old human problem was simply harder to package.