gen z doesn't exist

maybe we need to revise how we define generations

Last week, this diagram went viral on X. Created by strategist Rachel Janfaza, who publishes the Zoomer-focused newsletter, The Up and Up, it tackles an emerging problem with how we define generations: they seem a bit wrong.

I fully agree with Janfaza on Gen Z. After the 2024 election and the shift of the youth vote toward Republicans many presumptions and predictions about Gen Z have been blown out of the water. In 2017, when Jean Twenge published iGen and kicked off the public discourse about Gen Z, it felt like the narrative was an all-too-soon rehashing of the what had been said about Millennials only a few years before.

Just four years prior in 2013, it was all about Millennials—see: Time’s “The Me Me Me Generation” or Tim Urban’s “Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy”¹—and the pros-and-cons list assembled about them bore a striking resemblance to their younger siblings. Millennials were tech-addicted, fame-obsessed, entitled and narcissistic, a complaint seemingly universal to all rising generations; their politics were progressive though, and their demography was diverse. Less than half a decade later the same would be said about Gen Z. They had same attributes only more so: more digitally-native, more influencer-focused, more-deluded, about themselves, about what the world owed them, about what the world could be. The Zoomers, it was presumed, were turbo-millennials.

Gen Z was Gen Y on crack—until suddenly, they weren’t.