Book Excerpts

Generation Disaster, in their own words:

“We live in a world of constant anxiety. Things like terrorist attacks and school shootings are extremely real, and extremely possible to happen to us. Especially when it comes to school shootings, ‘it won't ever happen to me’ is no longer is realistic. Statistically speaking, we are very likely to experience such a thing. I hear kids talk about how when they are bored in class sometimes they think about what they would do if a school shooter came into the building. I don't think that is something my parents ever thought about. And I think it really has an effect on our mental health.”

- College student’s response to a 2015 survey about perceived safety

On 9/11’s impact: “Everything changed. Security changed, economy changed. Everything. Changed.”

-Male survey participant, born 1992

“I think [we] are misrepresented. We are the generation of a new turning. We were raised in a time of crisis (9/11, dot-com bubble, 2008 housing bubble) and we weren’t given a fair chance at adult life like previous generations. We have a positive outlook on life even though times might be personally hard for us. We’re never taken seriously and that’s a sad realization as an adult. I think my generation is capable of great things, the world just needs to give us a chance.”

-Female survey participant, born 1990

From the Introduction chapter:

Do you remember where you were when you first heard about airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field in 2001? If, like me, you’re now somewhere in the vague stage of life referred to as “middle age” or older, you almost certainly can recall that moment, and it’s likely that you divide at least some aspects of your adult life story into before versus after that day. At the very least, your experience of air travel drastically changed. Perhaps it also impacted your life in more existential ways, like shaping your views about security and risk, even if you weren’t directly affected by the attacks themselves. 

But if you’re an emerging adult, somewhere between 18 and 29 years old, your perceptions of the events of that day may be a lot more variable. If you’re at the younger end of that age range, like most of my current undergraduate students, you were a baby or toddler and have no direct memory of the attacks themselves. Those at the older end of the group may recall learning about the attacks soon after they occurred, when the first images were broadcast on television. Some heard about the disaster while they were still at school that Tuesday through an announcement by a teacher or principal. According to recollections I’ve heard from many young people, a lot of these authorities delivered the news in ways that were presumably well-intentioned, but that often inadvertently confused or distressed children who were far too young to understand what was happening, or to grasp whether they were in danger personally. Many of my students who came from the New York City area recall being picked up at elementary or middle school and brought home early by a caregiver or sibling – and then in some cases spending hours waiting to hear the fate of a parent or other relative who worked in the city and who couldn’t be contacted. Most of those stories had happy endings as the parent eventually made their way home, but some did not.

Obviously the impact of losing a caregiver had profound developmental consequences for the more than 3,000 children whose parent was on one of the planes, in the buildings, or killed in the response. Plenty of research also recognizes lasting effects among those young people who were directly exposed to the event, like the children who lived in lower Manhattan and were displaced from home, or the adolescents at nearby high schools who heard the planes crash into the World Trade Center and may have witnessed people falling from the burning buildings. Children whose parents participated in the rescue and recovery efforts or served in the resulting wars experienced other types of acute and chronic trauma due to their caregivers’ emotional and physical injuries, and sometimes due to parents’ serious illnesses and premature deaths years later because of the environmental toxins they were exposed to during the response.

While I’ll discuss some of the literature about outcomes for children with that kind of direct exposure to 9/11 in Chapter 3, that relatively small group is really not my primary focus throughout this book. Instead, I will argue that the effects of 9/11 and many other subsequent disasters and societal forces – now including a global pandemic that has impacted everyone alive to varying degrees – have significantly shaped the lives of all of today’s emerging adults in multiple ways, even if they lived far from the crash sites and they or their families had no first-hand connection to the attacks.

That’s hardly a controversial thesis: Of course major world events and social norms shape each generation’s environment, and the developmental impact of stressors like the Great Depression, major wars, previous pandemics, and other disasters has long been recognized and studied. I can see evidence of this among recent generations in my own family: My grandparents’ experiences during the Great Depression of the 1930s permanently shaped their values regarding money and self-sufficiency, creating a habit of fiscal conservatism and a dedication to saving for uncertainty that lasted throughout their lives. Then they started their own families as the world was heading into the Second World War, so they were raising young children amid all of the political and social turmoil that wars always produce. My maternal grandfather was deployed to the South Pacific shortly after my grandmother got pregnant, and apart from a three-day leave immediately after the birth, he didn’t even get to know his first child, my mother, until he returned home for good when she was already three years old – a not uncommon pattern for families during a war when men were subject to being drafted regardless of marital or parental status, and women were left behind to raise children alone, often while working outside the home to make ends meet.

My parents were born in 1942 and 1943 so they grew up during the early Cold War era, with its much-mocked “duck and cover” drills that instructed school children to take shelter under their desks to protect themselves during a nuclear attack. Today we can look back and scoff at the absurdity of that practice, but they remember that the threat of attack seemed very real to them at the time – just as the threat of school shootings is intensely real to today’s students, despite the very slim odds they’ll ever actually experience an attack first-hand. Some 70 years later, my mother recalls being told as a third grader (the most senior grade in her school) that she would be responsible for looking after the kindergarteners in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union (which in retrospect was pretty unlikely in her small Ohio town), and she worried about how her eight-year-old self would be able to protect and feed dozens of five-year-olds. My father grew up in a New Jersey suburb with a distant view of the Manhattan skyline, and he says as a child he frequently thought about how quickly the fallout would reach his town if the city were bombed. These threats shaped them, without ever touching them directly.

For me and my Generation X peers (born 1965-1980), our Reagan-era fears focused on the lingering pre-Glasnost threat of nuclear war with Russia, and worries about how we’d survive the apocalyptic conditions we watched in horror in the 1983 television miniseries “The Day After.” More saliently, we also entered adolescence during the growth or height of the AIDS epidemic, before transmission routes were really understood and long before effective treatments were developed. That meant an end to the post-Pill sexual freedom enjoyed by many of the Baby Boomers who preceded us. Instead, we faced our initiation into sexual activity knowing that unprotected sex might not only lead to unwanted pregnancy or stigma, but it could outright kill us.

So, yes, external forces that drive childhood and adolescent anxiety about the world are not a new phenomenon, and there’s no winning in a competition over which generation had it worse than others. However, I’ll make the case throughout this book that no past American generation has faced the cumulative load of multiple simultaneous stressors that today’s emerging adults grew up with. That load may center around the attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath as a critical cultural turning point for the nation, but it’s by no means limited to that single event’s direct impact. (Note: This point about multiple stressors clearly does not apply to earlier cohorts in other regions of the world, like Germans in the 1930s, growing up amid crippling financial and political instability and the rise of the Nazis. Nor does it apply to those currently growing up in developing nations or regions plagued by wars, corrupt governments, famine, and forced migration. I absolutely don’t mean to ignore or downplay the challenges those groups have faced, but this book will focus on current cultural dynamics in the U.S.)

 In fact, I propose that today’s emerging adults share a uniquely stressful cohort effect based on an unprecedented combination of challenges, which I’ll elaborate on in each chapter throughout the book:

• Whether or not they remember the actual events of 9/11, they can’t clearly recall a time when Americans were not conscious of the risk of another terrorist attack at home, or a time when we weren’t at war abroad.

• Many have seen peers or older relatives enter military service, or have done so themselves (in some cases because they had no other employment options), perhaps to return with physical or psychological wounds.

• Throughout their lives, they’ve been exposed to increasingly dire reports about how climate change may affect them personally, and they’ve experienced its impact, directly or via the media, in a series of major hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, and other natural disasters.

• They also have been exposed to reports of a relentless series of mass shootings in schools and other public settings, often committed by – as well targeting – members of their own generation.

• Their childhood and adolescence occurred during a period of serious economic recession and slow recovery that may have robbed their family of assets and limited their expectations for their own future careers, while they watched the income and wealth gaps grow between the rich and everyone else.

• They entered into adulthood during a period of extreme political strife and internal conflict within the nation – and for some, within their own families – and they’ve lived through the election and reign of a highly divisive president, as well as witnessing and often participating in developing protest movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.

• Setting today’s emerging adults even further apart from past generations, all of these events are shown and discussed non-stop in mass and social media, amplifying political conflicts and distorting perceptions of disasters’ actual frequency and the degree of personal risk of exposure.

• In addition to all of those external stressors, older adults and members of the media regularly accuse the group of alleged character flaws that are supposedly shared by the entire generation, judging them as “entitled,” “lazy,” and “narcissistic” – and as we’ll see in Chapter 5, many of them appear to have internalized these harmful labels.

On top of all that, the COVID-19 global pandemic that started spreading through the world in 2020 has thoroughly disrupted every aspect of life and caused multiple new losses for emerging adults. Those impacts, which are still evolving as this book goes to press, include upending traditional educational experiences, preventing opportunities like jobs and internships, limiting typical developmental experiences like dating and traveling, disrupting marriage plans, and for some, causing serious personal illness or the deaths of family members and friends.

It’s a lot to have dealt with as the group moved through childhood and started taking on the responsibilities and privileges of adulthood, but what does it mean for their current and future functioning and expectation? As psychological and sociological literature on cohort effects has demonstrated, like Elder’s classic 1974 study of children of the Great Depression, the environment a generation grows up in shapes numerous aspects of their adult lives, including practical matters like their professional ambitions, as well as more philosophical matters like their beliefs about justice and safety. Again, I’m not proposing a competition about which generation has faced the most challenges in their respective times, but I’ve spent my career wondering about two key questions: How has this particularly complex combination of disasters, social conditions, and omnipresent media influenced this cohort of emerging adults? And what does that mean for America’s future as they pursue career and life goals and move into positions of power in society? Those are the primary themes that I’ll explore throughout the book, examining not only those directly impacted by 9/11 and other disasters, but the broader cohort whose entire world has been shaped by this distinct combination of conditions.