I remember sitting in a coffee shop at the Naschmarkt a few years ago – you know, in that part where tourists are still few, and the Viennese still truly savor their melange, not just for a photo – and at the next table, two young men were arguing. One was saying something like, “You don't get it because you're a millennial.” The other took offense. The first one was in his early twenties, the second just over thirty. A difference of five, maybe seven years. And I thought: when did we let our birth years become a verdict?
Since then, that scene comes back to me every time I see another piece on how Zoomers differ from Millennials. And I see them often. Almost every week. Articles, podcasts, social media posts, corporate training sessions – they all feed us this image of two fundamentally different creatures who might as well have grown up on different planets. Zoomers – anxious, ironic, digital natives. Millennials – nostalgic, burnt-out, stuck between an analog childhood and a digital present.
But here's what I can't shake: what if it's all just a nice story? What if generations aren't a biological fact, but a narrative we've all collectively agreed to accept as truth?
Where Did “Generations” Even Come From?
The idea of dividing people by their birth decades is not new. Karl Mannheim wrote an essay on generations as a sociological phenomenon back in the 1920s – and it was a serious, thoughtful work. He argued that people who experience the same historical events at the same age form a common “horizon of experience.” It sounds honest. It sounds like something real.
But then something strange happened. Marketers took this idea and turned it into a product. The concepts of “Generation X,” “Boomers,” “Millennials” – all of this is largely a product of American consulting culture, which needed a way to segment audiences. Neil Howe and William Strauss, authors of the popular generational theory, essentially created a tool to predict consumer behavior. Their work was hugely influential, but the academic community has repeatedly pointed out: their methodology suffers from cherry-picking data and overgeneralization.
To put it simply: we were sold the idea that our birth year determines our character. And we bought it. Eagerly, happily, because people like to belong to something bigger than themselves.
What Science Says – And What It Doesn't
When I worked as a therapist, I often noticed that people come in with a ready-made narrative about themselves. “I'm like this because I'm a Scorpio.” “I act this way because I'm the eldest child.” “I can't save money because I'm a millennial.” A narrative frees us from the need to look deeper into ourselves. That's not a criticism – it's just human nature. We all do it.
Scientific research on generational differences paints a much more modest picture than is commonly believed. Psychologist Benny De Clercq from Ghent University and his colleagues conducted a large-scale analysis of data on the personality traits of different age groups – and found that the differences within a single generation are significantly greater than the differences between generations. In other words: a specific Zoomer from Graz and a specific Zoomer from Vienna might be psychologically further apart from each other than that same Zoomer from Graz is from a Millennial from Salzburg.
Moreover, many studies fail to separate the so-called “generation effect” from the simple “age effect.” This is fundamentally important. When twenty-somethings show high levels of anxiety, is that a Gen Z trait? Or is it just what it feels like to be twenty in general? When thirty-somethings complain about fatigue and career disappointment, is that Millennial burnout? Or is it just the mid-life crisis that every generation has experienced?
To answer these questions honestly is to admit: we often see age, but call it a generation.
Anxiety – Our Common Ground
There is one topic where Zoomers and Millennials are believed to differ most sharply: anxiety. They say Zoomers are more anxious. More prone to self-diagnosis, more open to talking about mental health, more aware of their conditions.
But here's my question: aren't Millennials anxious too? Or did they just learn to call it something else – “stress,” “fatigue,” “just a lot of work?” I remember my early twenties: I was anxious through and through, but I didn't have the words for it. Or rather, the word existed, but using it felt excessive, a little inappropriate. A weakness.
Zoomers grew up in a world where talking about anxiety has become more normalized. This doesn't mean their anxiety is greater or more acute. It means they have a language for it. And that, it seems to me, doesn't separate them from Millennials – it shows where society as a whole is heading. Slowly, creakily, but it's moving.
When I look at twenty-five-year-olds and thirty-five-year-olds standing side by side, I don't see two different tribes. I see people who have learned to articulate the same inner world in different ways.
The Digital Divide – Real or Exaggerated?
The most popular argument for a fundamental difference is the digital environment. Zoomers are the first generation to grow up with a smartphone in their hands from childhood. Millennials remember a world before the internet. Isn't that a fundamental difference?
In part, yes. I won't pretend it's insignificant. There's something special about remembering a world without constant connection. It forms a certain sense of silence as the norm, not as an absence. Most Millennials know what it's like to be bored without a screen.
But here's what's interesting: media consumption studies show that Millennials don't differ much from Zoomers in how much time they spend online. Problems with attention, addiction to notifications, anxiety at the sight of unread messages – all of this has long ceased to be just a Zoomer story. We're all stewing in the same digital soup. We just entered it from different sides.
And another point that is often missed: within each generation, the digital experience varies enormously. A Zoomer from a wealthy family in Vienna and a Zoomer from a small town in Lower Austria could have grown up in fundamentally different information environments. One had a tablet and high-speed internet from age five, while the other only knew cable TV until they were twelve. Where is the common “generation” in that?
The Economy, Not the Birth Year
Here's what seems more important to me than any talk about generational values: the economic context. Millennials started their careers in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. Zoomers entered adulthood during a pandemic and the subsequent economic turmoil. Both groups have faced a housing market where buying a home in a major city – be it Vienna, Graz, or Salzburg – is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Both groups live in conditions where stable employment is no longer guaranteed, and the pension system seems like something from another era.
When Zoomers say they don't want to “work for the sake of working,” and Millennials say they're tired of toxic corporate culture, it's not a clash of values between two generations. It's the same reaction to the same economic reality, just expressed a few years apart and with a slightly different vocabulary.
To call this a “generational conflict” is to look at the symptom while pretending not to see the disease.
When a Label Becomes a Cage
I think about what happens when we hold on too tightly to a generational identity. On the one hand, there's the warmth of belonging. It's nice to feel that someone understands you. That there are people who also remember certain things, who have also gone through similar stages. That is real and valuable.
But on the other hand, the label begins to work like a prediction. If I'm a Millennial, then I must be nostalgic, burnt-out, and obsessed with avocado toast. If you're a Zoomer, then you must be anxious, ironically detached, and unable to talk on the phone. And slowly, we begin to conform to the expectation. Not because it's true, but because it's easier.
This is what psychology calls a self-fulfilling prophecy. I've witnessed it in the therapist's office hundreds of times. A person accepts a narrative about themselves – and begins to live within it. The narrative becomes reality not because it was true, but because it was believed.
And the generational narrative works exactly the same way. We believe in it – and we start to behave accordingly. And then researchers record this behavior and say: look, they really are different.
What Unites Us – And Why It's Uncomfortable
Admitting that Zoomers and Millennials are, on the whole, similar is, strangely enough, an uncomfortable thought. Not because it's unpleasant, but because it deprives us of something familiar. A convenient explanation for conflicts. A convenient way to know “who I'm with.” A convenient excuse not to listen to someone who is “from a different generation.”
Both groups grew up in a world where the old social contracts – a job for life, a clear career ladder, a house by thirty – have stopped working. Both are searching for meaning in their work and relationships. Both, to one degree or another, are experiencing a collective anxiety about the environment, about the future, about a world that is changing faster than we can adapt.
Both groups – and this is perhaps the most important thing – suffer from loneliness. They call it different things, they experience it in different ways, but it is there. And no algorithm, no TikTok, and no nostalgia for MSN Messenger can undo that loneliness.
If anything truly separates these groups, it's not values or psychology. It's language. The vocabulary they use to describe the same experiences. Zoomers will say, “I don't have the capacity,” while Millennials would say, “I'm fine,” but they mean the same thing. Zoomers talk about “boundaries,” while Millennials talked about “personal space.” Different words – the same need.
Maybe It's Not About Generations, But About Us?
There's something I've been thinking about for a long time, and I still haven't figured out how to say it without sounding dramatic. I'll try.
When we argue about who Zoomers are and who Millennials are – what exactly are we doing? Are we studying human nature? Or are we looking for a way to avoid meeting it head-on? Generational categories give us the illusion of understanding another person without having to actually listen to them. I know you're a Zoomer – so I know who you are. I don't need to ask.
But it is that very act – asking – that is the only thing that truly works. In therapy, in relationships, in any conversation across a gulf of misunderstanding. Not categories. Not generational theories. Just the question: “How do you experience this?”
I don't want to say that generational experience is a fiction. It's as real as any shared experience. People who watched the same TV shows as kids, read the same books in school – they have something in common. That's not a myth.
The myth is the idea that this shared experience is more important than the individual one. That a birth year predicts character more accurately than a childhood, a family, a chance encounter at sixteen, a book read at three in the morning, or the smell of chamomile tea that somehow reminds you that everything will be okay.
We are more complex than any category. All of us. And that is not a weakness of our classifications. It is their honest limit.
Maybe instead of asking, “How are we different?” we should be asking, “What surprises us about each other?” Because surprise is the beginning of a real conversation. And a real conversation is the only place where generations cease to matter.
