Don’t Trust Anyone Over 21

Nicole Ault:

Freshmen entering college this fall don’t remember 9/11. I’m a senior, and for me it is only the dimmest of memories. We’re a new generation, and we’re not “millennials,” whose birth years fall between 1981 and 1996, according to Pew Research. We’re Generation Z, or “iGen,” as psychologist Jean Twenge has dubbed us. We were born in 1997 and after.

The term “millennial” has become a smear on anyone under 35, a vague indictment of selfish sloth. But iGen-ers aren’t millennials by birth year or behavior—and by lumping us in with them, older generations hold us to a distressingly low standard. We have the potential to do—and be—so much more.

Young as it is, iGen is proving itself smarter than the avocado-toast-and-Instagram stereotype. Studies have found that we’re cautious and practical, more averse to student debt. We do less drinking, take fewer drugs and have less sex than millennials did at our age. With the war on terror and the 2007-09 recession shaping our earliest memories, we’re more realistic than idealistic.