After all the heated arguments on everything from technology and social media to work and the economy, who could've predicted that baby boomers and the younger generations would find something in common?
But last month, X (formerly known as Twitter) user Girl Fieri (@realgirl_fieri) asked all the non-boomers on the platform to share their most boomer-esque complaints, and the replies immediately started pouring in.
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So we decided that taking a look at the submissions would be a nice change of pace to the never-ending discourse on intergenerational differences. Or, in this case, similarities!
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Usually, baby boomers are perceived in quite negative ways. Or as Lawrence R. Samuel, Ph.D, who is the founder of AmeriCulture, a consultancy dedicated to translating the emerging cultural landscape into business opportunities, said, they are often seen as dinner guests who’ve eaten and drank pretty much everything set out on the table, leaving only scraps for those who came later to the party.
"Generational hostility is nothing new," Samuel wrote. "There is in fact a long history in America of a younger generation differentiating and distancing itself from their parents’ generation. (It actually goes back to the 18th century.)"
"As a people, we are very much interested in making our own mark, blazing our own trail, and doing things our own way. From this respect, it was inevitable that Gen Xers would set themselves off from baby boomers as a cohort and attempt to carve out their collective identity. The same was and remains true for millennials and Gen Z," he explained.
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However, as we can see from these posts, common ground isn't that hard to find.
In fact, Bobby Duffy, Professor of Public Policy at King’s and formerly Head of Public Affairs at Ipsos, argued in his book 'Generations' that cohorts are not as important as most think and that the vast majority of issues and attitudes do not map neatly onto the definitions we have (which themselves are somewhat arbitrary, especially on a global scale).
He suggests that most of the polarising issues facing the world today split the generations as well, and that the overarching societal shift towards more liberal attitudes on things like gay marriage, female employment, etc are the result of opinions shifting across all generational groups over the last 30-40 years and are not the byproduct of a sudden influx of liberal youngsters into the voting booths.
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The idea that the generations have way more in common than has been widely assumed is also supported by Ipsos Global Trustworthiness Monitor data.
Looking at how the different generations prioritize different criteria for judging whether sectors and brands are trustworthy, we can see a huge amount of common ground between the generations and little real division.
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Yes, there is some variance in the strength of feeling that different generations have for different criteria; baby boomers, for example, are far more likely to prioritize reliability and openness/transparency than younger generations, while Gen Z and millennials rate more of the lesser priority issues more highly such as value sharing, intent and the importance of leadership.
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But despite these differences and variations in the strength of feeling, all four generations regard the same four trust drivers; reliability, openness/transparency, responsibility, and value for the price, as the most important and in the same rank order.
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If we turn our attention to looking at how the different generations judge the trustworthiness of different industry sectors and institutions, again, we see that the usual narrative of younger generations being less trusting isn't the case at all.
The older generations trust most sectors less than millennials or Gen Z.
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Baby boomers and Gen X are less likely to trust financial services, energy, oil & gas, banking, social media companies, and consumer-packaged goods than those younger than them, with more significant differences between the elder and younger generations in each case.
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One could be forgiven for expecting that younger generations are less trusting of oil & gas, given the climate crisis facing their futures and the assumptions we often make about how they feel about the environment and sustainability. The same could be said of banking, with many growing up through the financial crash of 2008. But it's the older age groups yet again with the lowest level of trust in these sectors.
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So, generational divides are not as large or as significant as many would have assumed.
If you too have boomer complaits (or are a boomer yourself and don't see the youth as morally bankrupt), don't worry. You might be even closer to them than you've been told.
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