I have always been fascinated by generational differences. My husband and I were recently musing about our childhood experiences compared to those of the younger generations.

We were latchkey kids, heading home after school to let ourselves in, make a snack, do chores, and watch some TV from the whopping seven channels available to us. We fended for ourselves while our parents finished up their workday. Today that would be considered unthinkable — a reason to call in the authorities.

We rode in the back of a pickup truck, amused by what the wind did to our faces, without a thought about safety. Now kids are strapped into five and six-point safety restraints to ride in the back seat of a car. I rode my bike in flip flops while my husband navigated makeshift jumps on his BMX bike in a field where a Target now exists. Today kids are in knee pads, elbow pads, and helmets before they step near anything self-propelled with wheels. We were free range — knowing it was time to head home for dinner when the streetlights came on. I was thrilled to play Simon in the dark on a family camping trip. My husband was thrilled to ride in the back of a station wagon for a long trip to Florida to see family. Today kids are delighted by the Lightning Lane at Disney so they can ride more rides in less time. A family treat was sharing a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken at dusk on the beach or getting a celebratory ice cream for my brother’s grand slam. The kids in our world today know their meal number of choice at every fast-food restaurant without looking at the menu. Not a treat, but a necessity to make it to soccer or dance practice on time.

It is easy to put these experiences into neat little buckets of good or bad. (The back of a pickup truck . . . bad!) A deeper look gives us more than simple labels. It gives lessons that can help all of us as we figure out how to live today. These experiences shape each generation in unique ways that can’t be explained away as better or worse. They are humans adapting to the changing times — and the qualities that result from those adaptations are what each generation carries forward or leaves behind.

What follows is a look across five generations. Not at what they are, but at what they adapted to, and what each one has to teach the rest of us.

The Silent Generation

The generation born into the Depression and shaped by the long shadow of the Second World War learned to subordinate the individual to the institution. Their early adulthood was structured by the assumption that the institution — the company, the government, the church, the marriage — would hold if you held up your end. They built careers across decades inside single organizations. They saved. They stayed.

The quality that has emerged most clearly in their later years is one that surprises everyone who underestimated them. Many in their late seventies, eighties, and nineties have learned to navigate smartphones, streaming, video calls, online banking, and apps that did not exist when they were forty or sixty. A generation that grew up before television is teaching us that adaptation has no expiration date. (My Dad flips between YouTube and Hulu without too much trouble and YouTube content is teaching him how to play the guitar.)

That is the lesson worth taking. The willingness to learn does not belong to the young. Most of us have not tested our own capacity to start over at sixty or seventy. This generation has — and has demonstrated that the capacity is real. (Right along with their ability to hoard Cool Whip containers as perfectly good Tupperware.)

The Boomers

The generation that came of age in the long postwar expansion learned what institutional patience can produce. They built careers slowly, inside organizations they often did not leave for decades. They learned the long game — that change happens through staying long enough to inherit decision-making, and through the slow accumulation of position, relationships, and credibility.

The cost of that quality is also real. Staying long enough can become its own trap. The institution that promised to hold up its end did not always do so. Some of what was built turned out to be hollower than expected. Some of what was sacrificed for the institution was not recoverable.

But the lesson worth taking is the willingness to build over a long arc, and the patience to let what you are building actually develop before you abandon it for something faster. That is rare now. Most of us were not raised to wait. (They are also the ones most likely to post a Facebook warning when their account has been hacked, rather than just changing the password. The instinct to warn the village dies hard.)

Generation X

The generation that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s learned to operate without supervision. Latchkey childhoods. Working parents in environments that did not honor the family side. The rise of dual-income households. Divorce as common reality. We figured it out. We made the snack, did the chores, kept the house from burning down, and signed our own permission slips when our parents forgot.

What that produced — in us, in the way we approach work and life — was a generation of pragmatists. We default to handling it. We do not ask for help easily, partly because there often was no one to ask. We learned to be useful young, and the usefulness became the identity.

Our world also expanded through the first wave of “influencers” — though we didn’t call them that yet. The musicians who shaped MTV combined auditory and visual art in a way that hadn’t existed before. They shaped how we dressed, talked, and danced. What we saw as cool. They were the original influencers — and the phenomenon Gen Z is still living inside was invented for us.

The cost of that quality is the difficulty of receiving. The same self-reliance that got us through can become a barrier when the work or the life requires that we let someone in. Gen X often discovers, in midlife, that the asking-for-help muscle was never developed. The figuring-it-out was so reliable that no one taught us the other.

The lesson worth taking is the self-reliance itself — the calm confidence that says, I can probably handle this. But also the limit of that confidence. Knowing when to ask is its own discipline, and it has to be learned. (They remind us that real cool never flames out — just look at the Rolling Stones, Billy Idol, and Sting.)

Millennials

The generation that came of age across 9/11 and the 2008 recession learned that institutions cannot be relied on the way the previous generations relied on them. Career ladders broke. Student debt piled on top of compressed starting salaries. The implicit promise — work hard, stay loyal, the institution will hold up its end — turned out to be conditional in ways the previous generations had not had to consider.

They were also the first generation to walk through the technology revolution. Early internet in their childhood. Smartphones in their twenties. Social media as the proving ground for identity at the most formative ages. They learned the tools as the tools were being built. The next generation would run with what they walked through. (Who can fault them for the long, awkward “Millennial Pause” at the beginning of a video?)

And they were raised in a more structured childhood than the generations before them. Boomer parents had decided to do parenting differently than their Silent Generation parents had — more involved, more invested in childhood as a developmental project. Activities, classes, advanced courses, college as the expected next step. (With more trophies at the ready.) The result was a generation raised to believe deeply in the meritocratic promise. The 2008 recession arrived just as they were preparing to collect on it.

What that produced was a generation skilled at constructing meaning outside institutions. Side projects. Communities online and offline. The refusal to treat any one job as the whole story. Adaptive identity-building in conditions that no longer guaranteed a stable institutional identity.

The cost of that quality is real. Treating every job as transactional is exhausting. So is the constant rebuilding of meaning when the conditions keep shifting. Millennials often carry a low-grade weariness that the previous generations did not have to carry — the weariness of knowing that nothing is guaranteed.

The lesson worth taking is that meaning can be constructed outside institutions, and that the work of constructing it is itself work that deserves respect. We do not have to inherit identity from the company we work for. We can build it across multiple sources, and the building is the practice. (Shouldn’t we all celebrate “adulting” wins with more abandon?)

Generation Z

The generation born into always-on connectivity is shaping itself in conditions that none of the previous generations encountered. Screens from infancy. The pandemic at formative ages. Constant observation, constant comparison, constant performance. Less unsupervised time than any previous generation has had. More curated childhoods. The five-point safety restraint applied not just to car seats but to attention itself.

What is emerging from these conditions is real, and it is easy to dismiss.

Gen Z is not adapting by accepting the conditions they inherited. They are adapting by pushing back on them. They are buying dumb phones. They are choosing third spaces — coffee shops, churches, libraries, run clubs — where in-person presence is required and screens get put down. They are demanding organizations and bosses they can actually trust. They are refusing to grind for organizations that won’t reciprocate. They are insisting on mental health as a non-negotiable rather than a perk.

The previous generations adapted to what was. Gen Z is adapting by demanding what should be.

That deserves more attention than it usually gets. The easy read is that they are softer or more entitled than the previous generations. The deeper read is that they have grown up inside the conditions the rest of us produced, and they are now asking us to put back what we optimized away. Eye contact. Real conversation. Presence. Trust. Real authenticity. The parts of the human experience that the previous generations took for granted and the youngest one had to articulate as needs because they were no longer the defaults.

The lesson worth taking from Gen Z is the insistence on human connection as essential rather than optional. The integrity question that the previous generations could afford to keep implicit — are you who you say you are; can I trust your word — Gen Z is asking earlier, harder, and out loud. (They are also the ones bringing back vinyl, Polaroids, and bookstores. Quietly correcting some of what we threw out.)

What We Owe Each Other

What emerges across the generations is something the labels obscure. Each one has adapted to what it was handed. Each has developed qualities the others can learn from. None of them is the failed version of the others. No one generation got it all right and no one generation got it all wrong.

The Silent’s late-life flexibility. The Boomer’s institutional patience. The Gen X capacity for self-reliance. The Millennial refusal to let work be the whole of identity. The Gen Z insistence on human connection and integrity. Each one is a real adaptation. Each one is worth carrying forward.

What gets dismissed as character flaws is often just adaptation out of context. The Boomer entitlement was once institutional patience. The Gen X cynicism was once the self-reliance of being left to figure it out. The Millennial fragility was the appropriate response to institutions that broke their promise. The Gen Z softness, on closer look, is the insistence that the human in the system be treated like one. Each label has an adaptation underneath that deserves examining before the dismissal. 

The work for all of us is to learn across, not into. To see what each generation actually figured out under the conditions they were given. And, what the next generation decided to fix. To take the lessons without taking the easy route of slapping on labels.

The practical work, especially as younger generations enter the workforce, is curiosity. Before labeling them, ask what they are bringing to the room. Their refusal to perform exhaustion as a virtue. Their willingness to ask hard questions about purpose. Their fluency in tools the rest of us still struggle with. Their insistence on connection that doesn’t have to be defended. The environments that produce real innovation are the ones where people in the room get curious about each other before they categorize each other.

To the younger generations, there are lessons born from well-earned wisdom. Before you wave off some of the traditional ideals, know that everything old becomes new again, just better. We’re counting on you to find those nuggets and to lead the next way.

That is the work. To build, in whatever conditions you have been given, with all the wisdom available to you. The lessons each generation has carried are the inheritance you get to choose what to do with.

— Cheryl