Professor Bobby Duffy

Because if you're coming in and say Gen Z are really peculiar, all you're doing is adding to that sense of generation separation and conflict, which is the last thing we need and really not held up by the data.

Well, I think the big conclusion I came to in the book is that a real problem is not generational conflict, it's generational separation.

We have drifted apart by age group in a way that we just haven't really noticed.

So if you go back to the 80s and even early 90s and you looked at the age profile of villages through small towns, bigger towns up to the big cities.

there was no difference in measures like the old age dependency ratio.

So the proportion of retired people to the proportion of working age people, they were all the same.

But then since then, we've just splayed apart in an incredible way where towns and villages are getting older and cities and large towns are getting younger to really big degrees.

And I say we haven't noticed it because when we poll people on this and you ask them, do young people tend to live in cities and older people outside, they say, yes, of course.

That's the case and then but then if you ask them was that always been the case they also say yes Of course, that's always been the case 50 years ago and it wasn't we used to live much more mixed by age on top of that I would say, you know Our digital lives are much more important to who we are nowadays and still the biggest gaps I see in any of my generational analysis is between use of social media platforms and other

technological communication behaviors.

So, you know, huge take up among Gen Z, steps down to millennials, then bigger steps down to Gen X, and then baby boomers and pre-war really not engaging that much.

So we're on different platforms doing different things to very different intensities in our digital lives too.

And then third factor is on top of that, we've lost a lot of the kind of community support connections, whether that's religion, you know, trade unions more as a social thing rather than a work based thing.

So many community groups.

So we've lost a lot of the scaffolding that pushed lots of young people and older people together in our day-to-day lives.

We're still very connected in the home through the family, even more connected than in the past.

But outside of the home, we have very little contact across the age groups compared to the past.

That is definitely part of it.

I mean, I think, and then even a step back from that is those people are no longer living in the same towns and villages or cities to the same degree.

So we've actually kind of completely physically separated, but definitely the loss of our community infrastructure