What Are the Generational Differences?

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Schulz: Let's start broad and then kind of drill down into narrow things. I think about generational differences that you started in 1938. The lost generation, those born between 1883 and 1900. Generation X, 64 to 1980. And the millennials, 1981 to 1994 is their birth. Then finally, my students now are Gen Zers or I Geners born 1995 to 2010. Schulz: How different are they? There's this increase in cutting, anxiety, depression amongst these I Geners.

Shermer and Schulz discuss: an operational definition of the “good life” or “happiness” or “well being” • the reliability (or unreliability) of self-report data in social science • relative roles of genes, environment, hard work, and luck in how lives turn out • personality and to what extent it can be scientifically measured and studied • factors in early childhood that shape mental health in mid and late life • generational differences: • the impact of loneliness • misconceptions about happiness • what social fitness is and how to exercise it • what most people get wrong about achievement, and more…

Marc Schulz is the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and the Sue Kardas PhD 1971 Chair in Psychology at Bryn Mawr College. He also directs the Data Science Program and previously chaired the psychology department and Clinical Developmental Psychology PhD program at Bryn Mawr. Dr. Schulz received his BA from Amherst College and his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a practicing therapist with postdoctoral training in health and clinical psychology at Harvard Medical School. His new book, co-authored with Robert Waldinger, is The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.