Editorial: Gen Z shouldering Millennials aside

if a new one arrives every five years, it keeps society young. Photo / 123RF

It is getting harder to keep with new generations. No sooner have older ones come to grips with Millennials than Generation Z has arrived in the workplace. Or rather, not in the workplace on any permanent basis.

Though the first of Generation Z is finishing tertiary education and starting work, they are said to be not much interest in careers. They prefer "gig" work or setting up their own business online.

They are also called neo-digital natives, a step ahead of mere digital natives who still use phones for talking or text. Generation Z operates on video.

Like Millennials, they expect instant satisfaction but their ambitions are said to be more realistic, more to do with financial stability and social responsibility.

It is getting harder to put dates on generations. The end of the baby boom can be fixed by the mass adoption of the contraceptive pill in the mid 1960s.

But if Generation X lasted the 20 years of a natural human generation and Millennials were born since the mid 1980s, Generation Z should have started only 10-12 years ago.

Yet here they are, coming out of university. They seem to have reduced the Millennials to those born in the 10 years to the mid 1990s, before the millennium.

Since more than 20 years have passed since the mid-1990s it means babies born in the last two or three years are another new generation, yet to be named.

Every generation likes to contrast itself to the last. Gen Zs tell us today they are more security conscious than Millennials, which they attribute to the global financial crisis when they were in primary school.

But they also claim to be more entrepreneurial, starting online businesses to help pay for tertiary education rather than carrying millennial levels of student loans.

Gen Z is said to be more competitive and more financially literate, less idealistic, less interested in ephemeral experiences, more attuned to opportunities to scratch out a living online.

They don't consume digital services so much as create them. They make themselves "influencers", freelance marketeers who cultivate a personal following on social media and can use it profitably to promote products and lifestyle services they think their followers will enjoy.

The very creation of new generations looks suspiciously like a marketing ploy, a way to give consumers group characteristics in order to target them more precisely. But if a new one arrives every five years, it keeps society young.