Teens aren’t what you think anymore. Here’s why you need a new playbook
Imagine it’s 2033. Today’s teenagers have aged into 20-somethings. Are they just as rabid about their content consumption? Are they pushing older generations to do more about the climate and inequality? Have they found some hope about … anything?
This is not another Gen Z report. This is an issue about what it means to be young in today’s world and what that might look like tomorrow. It’s also not, therefore, an issue about the future of a thing or a topic. But rather a group of humans. So, we’ll talk about where teens are today, what this cohort might look like tomorrow and what “being a teen” might look like in the future, too.
I mean, are teens really that different from us grownups? Sure, they watch more TikToks than most adults. They watch Minecraft YouTubers even after they’ve “outgrown” playing Minecraft. But way more adults watch football or basketball than play those sports, too.
No. Wait. There are differences. And not just that they can say “slay” without sounding cringe.
There are demographic differences. There are behavioral differences. There are differences in how they spend their time. There are differences in how they view education.
There are differences in their relationships with brands, content, creators and institutions. Finally, there are concerning flags raised in our research about optimism for the future; mostly that they have very little of it across a spectrum of socioeconomic topics. But don’t worry, they still roll their eyes.
We know this, partially because we asked teens directly. Using both the Ipsos KnowledgePanel and the Club Z online community, we interviewed hundreds of teenagers and mirrored many of those questions against surveys of adults.
Being a 20-something is a relatively new concept in the recent generations. It’s a life stage opened by the decades-long shift of staying in school longer and getting married, buying homes and having kids later in life. Those shifts opened a period where more youth are independent, single and often struggling financially on their own rather than coupling into dual-income households. That’s a new horizon for teens to be looking toward. Will they keep up these trends?
Thinking about teens and the future is tricky business. They have anxiety and hope about the existential crises around them and how they will play out in the future: war, climate change, political polarization.
But at the same time, it’s hard to get young people to think about the future. I know. I’m close to having three teens in my house. So, if you ask them about the future, they’re just as likely to talk about a class they’re looking forward to next semester. Or having to deal with their bully tomorrow. Maybe, assuming you can get more than a shrug and an “I dunno” out of them, maybe you can get them to think forward to summer.
But as teens become 20-somethings, the question is always: What will stick?
Will they remain massive consumers and producers of online content? Will they want their lives lived and also displayed and shared on screens? Will they shop with purpose (and also buy less and not shop) to help address problems like waste, climate change, or inequality? Will they even see those issues as problems?
Part of this is all a very American or at least a developed-economy story. Being a teenager, or being young in a population that is aging, as ours is, is very different from being young in areas like Africa where the U.N. projects at least one-third of all 15- to 24-year-olds will live by 2050.
But wherever teens are, there’s a common idea among elder generations that the youth will save us from these problems and make the world a better place. But why should they have to? As the remarkable teenager Eva Lighthiser says later in the issue, “We're aware of the fact that previous generations were the ones who made the decisions that brought us here to this day.”
We grown-ups can’t blame today’s teens for the lack of optimism we see in the data in this issue. The “ancient” (as my teens call anyone over 50) among us can’t blame them for the high rates of anxiety and depression. After all, they didn’t make climate change happen. They aren’t prompting wars. Most of them can’t even vote yet.
These are our problems we’re leaving behind for our children, whom we say we’ll do anything to protect. Yet, we as brands, as leaders, as governments, and as parents can start cleaning up our own messes, just as we tell our kids to do. It starts with reconsidering all the ways we have relationships with the kids these days. Here are some ideas to connect.
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