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Generations review: Zoomer, boomer, millennial – what's your tribe?

For good or ill, dividing people up along generational lines with names and traits to fit seems hard to resist. What's going on, asks a new book that sets out to find the real differences

By Elle Hunt

14 June 2023

Group of young skateboarders sitting in discussion with mature skateboarder in neighborhood skate park

Dividing us all along generational lines is compelling, but tricky

Thomas Barwick/getty images

Generations
Jean M. Twenge (Simon & Schuster)

ZOOMERS are anxious and attuned to injustice. Millennials are self-obsessed and bad with money. Baby boomers broke the world. As for Generation X, who even remembers them?

These labels are as familiar as an old pair of jeans – regardless of whether they fit. Even though we are continually cautioned against such thinking, reminded that it is reductive, divisive and often based on patchy evidence, generational traits seem too convenient a shorthand to give up. …

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