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The writers of The Atlantic have a long history of fretting about the youths.
Take one 1925 article, which began with a call for reason: a promise to judge fairly whether modern young adults were truly as delinquent as everyone seemed to be saying. “They are under suspicion on the counts of, briefly, dancing, drinking, kissing, motoring alone and often at night (‘alone’ means two together),” the author, identified only as “A Professor,” declared. “In the case of girls, dress is included, or rather, going about with legs and arms bared.”
Of the drinking charge, young people seemed to be absolved. Certainly they were imbibing, but less than their elders—and they’d developed new etiquette to keep things under control. (“A really nice girl may drink cocktails in public,” the writer explained, “but not whiskey and soda.”) On the other counts, unfortunately, the Professor didn’t let them off so easily: “Legs are no more interesting than noses” when young ladies wear skirts this short. “The sad truth is that the human frame has ceased to be romantic.” Oh, and this new generation, in addition to diluting sex appeal, reportedly lacked intellectual curiosity. Also emotion: “There seems no doubt that these young things feel less, on the whole, and do more, than once did we.”
That was just one story in a whole canon of writing, published here and elsewhere, that has professed concern for young people—but with an undercurrent of condescension, even disdain. In a 1975 classic of the genre, the conservative journalist Midge Decter described the young hippies around her as coddled to the point of incompetence, having used the idea of a countercultural movement to get away with doing nothing much at all. “Heaped with largesse both of the pocketbook and of the spirit,” she wrote, “the children yet cannot find themselves.”
All those writers who peer at the youths, squinting through their binoculars and scribbling in their notepads, make up an embarrassing lineage. Recently, I’ve been wondering if I’m part of it. I write fairly often about Gen Z, sometimes worriedly—but I’m a Millennial. I didn’t have iPads around when I was a child; I wasn’t scrolling on Instagram in middle school. I’d already graduated college and made new friends in a new city when the pandemic hit. I’m still examining contemporary young adulthood from the inside, I’ve told myself. But a few days ago, I turned 30. Technically, I’m in a new life phase now: “established adulthood.”
Where’s the line between ogling and empathizing? And how do you describe trends—which are broad by definition—without using too broad a brush? The young people of the 1970s arguably were, on the whole, more interested in challenging norms than their parent’s generation had been; that seems worth documenting. Any dysfunction that came along with that may have been worth noting too. (Joan Didion clearly thought so.) Likewise, the Professor wasn’t wrong that social mores were transforming with each successive generation. Legs were becoming more like noses, and that’s the honest truth.
The task, I think, is to write with humility and nuance—to cast young adults not as hopelessly lost or uniquely brilliant and heroic, but just as people, dealing with the particular challenges and opportunities of their day. In 1972, The Atlantic published a letter from a father who jokingly wondered how the youths described in the papers could possibly be the same species as his children. “Not long ago the president of Yale University said in the press that when the young are silent it means they are feeling ‘a monumental scorn’ for political hypocrisy,” he wrote. “When my son, Willard, Jr., is silent, I am never sure what it means, but I believe that he has his mind considerably on sexual matters and on methods of developing the flexor muscles of his upper arms.” Readers have always been able to tell the difference between real curiosity and zoological scrutinizing. They know when a stereotype rings hollow.
Just rifle through the five pages of responses to Decter’s story, which The Atlantic published with headlines such as “Sentimental Kitsch,” “Hideous Clichés,” and—my personal favorite—“Boring and Irrelevant.” One reader told Decter, with bite, not to worry so much about those wild children who weren’t settling down in their jobs and houses like good boys and girls. “Rest assured,” he wrote, “my generation will be like hers—led by the silent, nervous superachievers, intent on their material goal, lacking the time to question the madness of their method.”
The characterization is cutting. But that letter also raises another good point: Young people are not immune to oversimplifying, either. They’ll eventually get old enough to write about their elders, and to include their own sweeping generalizations and nuggets of truth. “I wonder what will be written in 1995 about our children. I get the feeling we will make the same mistakes,” another reader wrote to Decter. “For isn’t that the American way?”
