our new generation essay

What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic University

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Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Sport Australia. He is a Director of Effective Altruism Australia.

Australian Catholic University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Your great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:

They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.

But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?

Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)

This is the key question in What We Owe the Future . It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.

MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”

Read more: Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope

Future people count

It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As The Simpsons puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”

We all know we should protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.

Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.

There could be a lot of future people

Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, humanity’s future could be vast : much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.

While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.

We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to feel . Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is actually closer to 5 billion , it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally feel 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t feel 1,000 times worse.

MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be.

Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing more . Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.

Read more: Labor's climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are missing

We can make the lives of future people better

Another reason we struggle to be motivated by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the long-run effects are so uncertain ?

Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we did not make progress toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, 4.3% of children still die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about 23 million people . Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?

MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.

For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could prevent the next pandemic. MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.

Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which

[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles?

He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.

The risk of an engineered pandemic wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book.

That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.

MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future.

The same win-wins might apply to decarbonisation , safe development of artificial intelligence , reducing risks from nuclear war , and other threats to humanity.

Read more: Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Things you can do to protect future generations

Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like all possible views of the longterm future).

MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions.

For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:

Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?

The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, reducing your meat consumption would address climate change, but donating money to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective.

Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.

MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours , which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded Giving What We Can. And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called Effective Altruism .

Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.

• Climate change
• Generations
• Future generations
• Effective altruism
• longtermism

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Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, Earth System Science (School of Science)

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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

By Louis Menand

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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By Rebecca Mead

By Manvir Singh

By Elizabeth Kolbert

We asked young people what changes they want for the future. Here's what they said

How will Millennials and Generation Z shape an inclusive post-COVID future? Image:  Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash

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Have you read, youth recovery plan, how do millennials and generation z see their future.

Over the past year, the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers community has organized dialogues and surveys on what young people see as the most pressing issues facing society, government and business.

On the Shapers’ tenth anniversary the community has published Davos Labs: Youth Recovery Plan – a series of 40 policy recommendations on 10 key issues to help policy-makers integrate the voices of the next generation.

In parallel, the Millennial Manifesto offers a modus operandi to young people as they mobilize to shape an inclusive post-COVID period.

Transparency, accountability, trust and a focus on stakeholder capitalism will be key to meeting this generation’s ambitions and expectations. We must also entrust in them the power to take the lead to create meaningful change.

Why are young people critical to the recovery?

15% of the world’s population – some 1.2 billion people – are aged between 15 and 29 . The world gets ever younger, with 10 billion more people yet to be born in this century.

This exponential growth will continue to be uneven, with concentration in more populous and less developed countries, resulting in more mouths to feed, more young people to educate and more jobs to provide.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected young people, and especially young women and girls. It has disrupted their education, their training, their jobs, their relationships and their mental health.

On last week's International Youth Day, the YMCA, together with other key youth organizations, called for this to be redressed and for young people to be given a platform , “They knew all these challenges prior to the pandemic, and then they became its pariahs: largely ignored in policy response and often blamed for the spread.”

What changes do young people want?

The youth recovery plan: 10 pillars, 1. conscious consumerism.

Current global rates of consumption require the resources of about 1.6 earths. At this rate, we risk exhausting our planet's life support systems that provide us with fresh water, nutritious food and clean air.

• Incentivize sustainable consumption and penalize production that’s not
• Corporate accountability and executive compensation to follow specific ESG targets
• Investors to work with consumer groups to transform the way big business operates
• All stakeholders to take urgent action to safeguard nature and future food production.

2. Digital access

• $2 trillion Digital Access Plan to increase global internet connectivity to over 80%
• Telecoms to provide affordable data priced at no more than 2% of monthly GNI per capita
• Sanctions against institutions that resort to internet blackouts to supress citizen freedoms
• Activists to share connectivity indicators to put digital inequity higher on the global agenda.

3. Digital literacy: Tackle misinformation

• Tech companies to be transparent about misinformation and its spread on their platforms
• Governments to implement policies to protect individual citizens against harmful content
• Media entities to appoint trusted flaggers and experts to identify misleading information
• Capacity-building programmes and education to help citizens better identify fake news.

4. Democracy with a future

• Philanthropic donors to support young progressive voices into government
• Strengthened laws against media monopolies to protect democratic freedoms
• A Global Convention for Cybersecurity to uphold the integrity of political systems
• Capacity-building and incubation programmes to ignite ambitious policy-making.

2021 can be a turning point but only if inclusive political participation is prioritized.

5. Inclusive jobs and social safety nets

The turn of the decade has given rise to the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. Nearly half of the global workforce is at risk of losing their livelihoods, with the most acutely affected being the working poor, youth, women and minorities.

• A global wealth tax on assets worth more than US$ 50 million to fight growing inequality
• Tax credits for companies and investors who spend revenue on reskilling employees
• Universities to end the exorbitant tuition fees that stifle social mobility
• Universities to reformed curricula for job acquisition in today’s labour market.

6. Mental healthcare

• Governments to guarantee universal access to mental health services
• Investors to support mental health awareness campaigns to reduce stigma
• University curricula to tackle the mental health crisis growing on campuses
• Media entities to shape positive perceptions and attitudes about mental health.

7. Net Zero: Limit global warming to 1.5°C

• Governments to invest in communities most at risk from climate change
• Financial institutions to stop bankrolling companies initiating fossil fuel exploration
• Companies to significantly reduce the GHG emissions of their operations and supply chains to help keep global heating within 1.5°C
• All stakeholders to ensure accountability for urgent green recovery plans.

8. Next generation ESG: Stakeholder capitalism

• Governments to implement fit-for-purpose policies and regulations on big tech
• Universities to ensure ESG literacy is integrated into business and tech curriculums
• Companies to integrate technology ethics into the design of their products and services
• Incubators to provide ESG upskilling to early-stage founders to deliver long-term value.

9. Equitable access to healthcare worldwide

• World leaders to safeguard equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines
• Governments to prioritize the immediate needs of healthcare workers and their families
• Companies to drive digitalization in healthcare services to improve patient care
• Increased support for community health workers to rebuild public trust in health systems.

The Global Shapers Community is a network of young people under the age of 30 who are working together to drive dialogue, action and change to address local, regional and global challenges.

The community spans more than 8,000 young people in 165 countries and territories.

Teams of Shapers form hubs in cities where they self-organize to create projects that address the needs of their community. The focus of the projects are wide-ranging, from responding to disasters and combating poverty, to fighting climate change and building inclusive communities.

Examples of projects include Water for Life, a effort by the Cartagena Hub that provides families with water filters that remove biological toxins from the water supply and combat preventable diseases in the region, and Creativity Lab from the Yerevan Hub, which features activities for children ages 7 to 9 to boost creative thinking.

Each Shaper also commits personally and professionally to take action to preserve our planet.

Join or support a hub near you .

10. Public safety

Public security policies involve rethinking the educational system, drugs policy, fighting structural racism that targets black and poor people's likings.

• Governments to end qualified immunity in law enforcement for police officers
• Increased action against gun violence, including bans on homemade firearms
• All stakeholders to take a stand to end domestic sexual and physical violence
• Criminal justice training reform to protect the safety of vulnerable communities

How will young people achieve those changes?

The millennial manifesto.

To mount the response required to usher in this new world, the Millennial Manifesto team - a component of the Davos Lab - held dialogues on what a matured form of youth activism could look like. Through a process that engaged diverse Global Shapers from every continent, some of the world's most impactful social entrepreneurs, and experienced grassroots activists, the purpose of the dialogues was to devise principles to guide young people as they advocate for a more inclusive post-COVID period.

Two critical questions guided these dialogues: What are the barriers that have hindered progress? And, what key values, principles and practices will enable us to foster long-lasting systemic impact for the next decade?

6 principles for a Millennial Manifesto emerged from this process:

1. We will create space for intergenerational dialogue

2. We will ask big questions to advance bold solutions

3. We will pursue systems change and collective action

4. We will make space for diverse lived experiences

5. We will embrace uncomfortable conversations

6. We will care for ourselves, others and our ecosystem

Youth Recovery Plan in numbers

Cities hosted dialogues, countries hosted dialogues, dialogues conducted in total, young people surveyed, cities where surveys were conducted, total reach of the dialogues, policy recommendations emerged, pillars of recovery.

As many around the world push for the creation of a more just, equitable and sustainable future we must remember that technology is one of the greatest tools for achieving these goals , but without ethical considerations at the fore... this will likely only perpetuate the very inequalities that we hope to address.

Optimism and justice

Experts say youth engagement is 'crucial'.

The red line that runs through the Youth Recovery Plan and the Millennial Manifesto – the surveys, dialogues, and recommendations – is optimism.

Abdullahi Alim, Specialist, Africa and Middle East, Global Shapers Community, and Natalie Pierce, Community Lead, Experiences and Partnerships, Foundations at the World Economic Forum believe , “Young people are fighting these crises and reimagining a better future…Behind the plan is the conviction that by giving young people a say in decision-making, solution-building and lasting change – post-pandemic recovery plans will be more effective, sustainable and inclusive, and ensure a better future for generations to come.”

And Wadia Ait Hamza , Head of the Global Shapers Community explains, “Now more than ever, the world needs young people to step up to address the many other challenges ahead of us. But hurdles remain. While the last decade saw the power of youth activism to highlight and uproot systemic problems, it also showed that young people face challenges of experience and credibility.”

He warns that it is crucial to engage young people in decision-making – but in parallel – it’s also important for young people to think differently about how they want to engage. The sweet spot will be the balance between the energy, optimism and fierce sense of justice that Millennials and Gen Z bring to the table, combined with the conviction of policy-makers to see these ideas through to realization.

Young people hold the key to creating a better future

The 'millennial manifesto' outlines principles for an inclusive future, the 'millennial manifesto' will elevate and empower youth activism, why young people must be at the heart of the covid-19 recovery, international youth day: the global challenge of unemployment, how ethical, inclusive tech can help us create a better world, how can we create a youth-led recovery 10 global shapers explain.

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Student Essay: Helping the Older Generation Embrace Technology

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Jordan Mittler, a sophomore at The Ramaz Upper School in New York City and a participant in the Wharton Global Youth Summer Program, is the founder of Mittler Senior Technology, a company that helps senior citizens adapt to the world of technology. In this student essay, Jordan shares the story of how he started his business and why it has become so critical during this time of social isolation — especially in New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.

In the next few months, Wharton Global Youth will be featuring a new essay every week, written by students around the world who are at home and eager to share their stories of entrepreneurship, leadership and experiences with business.

Five years ago, I gifted my grandparents, Janet and Mark Mittler, iPhones because it was painful for me to watch them still using flip phones! I have always been passionate about technology. I needed to get my grandparents, with whom I am very close, on board with the latest gadgets. It never even occurred to me that they would have no idea how to use an iPhone. They did not know how to perform many of the basic functions that come so easily to my generation, such as texting, Facetiming, photographing — and the list goes on.

And so, the idea for my business was born. I knew I needed to help this older generation, who missed the technology boom and was literally scared of trying to figure out our new connected world. As a result of this very real fear, they were often left alone and out of touch because they couldn’t communicate like everyone else.

Bonnie’s Got Mail

I decided to test my market concept at the local nursing home. I will never forget walking through those doors. I was only 11 at the time, and the director looked at me as if I had 10 heads. I went to the recreation floor and asked over a microphone: “Who would like free technology help?” I only had one taker. Her name was Bonnie Fisher, and I sat with her one-on-one for more than a year providing technology lessons. You should have seen Bonnie light up when she figured out how to connect with her sister and friends over email! I needed to figure out a way to reach a bigger audience.

I reached out to my synagogue, Congregation Kehilath Jeshrun, and asked if they would send a letter by mail promoting free technology help to all of their members over the age of 65. The synagogue was flooded with phone calls from interested seniors looking to enroll in tech class each Sunday. My temple, affiliated with my school, also let me use the school’s computer lab to hold my weekly classes. So many seniors showed interest that I had to maintain a waitlist. I got them into the classroom and taught them everything from texting to FaceTime and how to navigate the internet.

Fast forward to February 2020, and my classes were booming. I had even inspired some of my friends to join me in volunteering their time as teaching assistants. I had just added another class to fit in as many beginner and intermediate seniors as possible, and I felt like I was in a very good position to start scaling my business to reach even more learners.

We all know what happened next. Coronavirus swept through the world and our country, hitting the senior population the hardest and having a grim impact on New York City (reporting nearly 4,500 deaths through the beginning of April). During this time, I canceled my Sunday classes as my own schedule moved to at-home online learning.

I also realized, however, that senior citizens were suddenly even more cut off than ever. This new world of distancing was going to throw the older generation into more social isolation than they had ever experienced. One of my students, Roz Zuger, is 94 years old. I knew she would be disappointed without her weekly dose of tech class. So, I decided that I would attempt to continue my classes online via Zoom and walk all of my seniors through setting up the application and account. I started with Roz, spending endless phone calls with her to get her set up and comfortable with the online meeting platform. Roz had lots of trouble with the audio function on Zoom, and we slowly worked through this together.

After missing only one in-person class – and sending multiple texts and reminder calls — I had my whole class plus others online with me for our first virtual session. I updated my curriculum to be most helpful for seniors during this time when they were homebound and alone. For example, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the Rabbi Emeritus of my synagogue and Principal Emeritus of my school, needed help creating a group chat so he could communicate with all his children at one time. He was having particular trouble setting this up. I was able to show him virtually how to work through all the issues.

Facetiming and Ordering Groceries Online

The key to my teaching success with the older generation is showing, not just explaining. For seniors, talking in technology terms is less effective than presenting them with a visual of how to do something. They’re just not used to the language of technology. Roz, for example, was only able to launch Zoom after I Facetimed with her and sent her pictures via text of the next steps she needed to take. I helped Rabbi Lookstein by sharing visuals with him from my own computer screen.

In the past few weeks, we have been figuring this out as we go along – and it’s working. I started to record all of my Zoom sessions, so the seniors could replay any section of our class for review. After each online session, I send out a link to the recording, as well as a message with everything covered in class that day. My updated curriculum includes showing my students (which total some 80 seniors) how to order groceries online, how to order from Amazon, how to Facetime to stay connected, how to access online newspapers, and, of course, how to mute and unmute their Zoom audio.

It has been really rewarding for me to help so many people become tech-savvy during a time when technology has never been more fundamental to our daily lives. Social distancing has helped me bridge even further the gap between generations – and empower older people with the very valuable tool of connection.

Related Links

• Teen Vogue: Teens Are Helping Seniors Stay Connected

Conversation Starters

How did Jordan Mittler think like an entrepreneur in a time of crisis? Need help? Check out this Wharton Global Youth article for guidance.

Initially, Jordan only had one customer. Why was Bonnie so important to the growth of his idea and his business?

Have you used innovation to respond to needs during the coronavirus pandemic? Share your story in the Comment section of this article.

33 comments on “ Student Essay: Helping the Older Generation Embrace Technology ”

Wow! It’s incredible how technology can connect everyone. Many people often say that technology drifts us apart, but I’d like to disagree. In the current age, technology lets people from all walks of life to seamlessly connect. From Jordan’s example of how he helped local senior citizens be accustom to technology, it indeed shows how something as small as a smartphone can bridge generational divides.

Moreover, I’d like to add that I’ve seen a similar experience with my grandparents. My grandparents currently reside in India while I live in the US. This poses a problem as we cannot communicate readily. However, I found a solution to that vexing issue last summer. My family and I decided it was time for a change in the technology my grandparents were using, so we bought them iPhones. I helped them understand the ins and outs of how to use the technology which they were not familiar with. Because of this, they often facetime us from India and have even become like teenagers, as now they are glued to their phones.

Hi Vishnu, I really enjoyed reading your anecdote about your grandparents in India. I could relate to this issue since my grandparents live in Maryland, while I reside in New Jersey. Pre-isolation, my extended family and I would visit them almost bimonthly. This was crucial to their well-being, as they live alone in a rural area. During the quarantine, I helped introduce them to Zoom, which has been a useful online tool. Now that they are capable of using it, our entire family has weekly digital chats. In relation to this article, our examples of giving help to our grandparents exemplify the responsibility of younger generations to take initiative with technology. Jordan allowing the Rabbi Emeritus of his synagogue to communicate with all his children at once is an important example of lending knowledge and skills to older generations to maximize efficiency and happiness during these times of uncertainty.

I understand that technology helps connect people, especially during this time of endless quarantines. It is beneficial that the older generation is taking an interest in technology, breaking the stereotype that the elderly reject new ideas. After all, technology was and is made to make humans’ lives easier. However, while reading both your comments, Vishnu and Charlie, along with the article, I see that in all the cases of older people using technology, it is because the elderly generation have no other ways to stay connected. Now, this sparked a curious thought inside me—the elderly are using tech because especially during this time period, they really need it to prevent themselves from becoming isolated. But when it comes to young people, we just use tech because we are so addicted to it. We reach for a phone because it’s just what teens do. We text, FaceTime, and play multiplayer games with each other simultaneously. For the elderly, the chance to be able to connect with their loved ones is a big highlight in their life. They have not experienced such ease and luxury for much of their lives.

In contrast, teens have grown up around technology. We should try to bring back a culture that is less focused on technology usage to grow up appreciating the time we use technology, especially to connect with others. The younger generation is so desensitized by constant interaction through texting and voice/video calls that we often fail to appreciate it. I was surprised by the enthusiasm of the elderly when Jordan offered classes, but now I realize that it’s because they have realized its value and are taking efforts to gain the most out of it. For me, it took spending some time in quarantine to realize this. My friends and I are always complaining how we are so lonely, when we have actually been texting and calling daily before the COVID-19 outbreak. Teens need to shift a little bit away from the constant technology usage and take time to do other things that do not require technology—perhaps even teaching their elderly relatives about technology, as Jordan did.

I also have another major concern: older people are already at huge risk to scams and privacy issues, and presenting them with increased technology would give others more opportunities to take advantage of the elderly. I already admire Jordan very much for being able to accomplish the feat of teaching the elderly about technology, and I am also very impressed at how he runs his program so professionally and in such an organized way. But I also hope that Jordan, along with you, Vishnu and Charlie, for your grandparents, have presented the gift of technology as well as explained the dangers that come with technology. There are many scammers and hackers that target the elderly, as they are known to take weaker security measures without knowing the consequences. They are more susceptible to common false alerts on the internet and on phone calls. When we think of introducing technology to the elderly, thinking about their tech security and scam-awareness are not the first things that come to mind, so I think there should be further steps taken to make that a priority. Still, I understand that connecting with loved ones is a priority in this case, as it is a good thing that your grandparents have been able to establish a system of communication to maximize the time you all share. I hope there will be more cases similar to that of yours and Jordan’s students. That way, the world can truly be connected and everyone will FEEL connected!

Daniel It is interesting that you note that students now are doing school from home and despite being tech savvy, they miss the socialization of school and may have to find other ways of relating to their friends or spending their time. They can stimulate their minds thinking about how they can contribute to society, or better their reading and writing skills.

Charlie It is important for children and grandchildren to recognize that their senior relatives can benefit from learning technology, and a little patience in instructing them will make them so happy. On a personal note, my Rabbi has done so much for my family and has been there for all of our family’s life events, so it gave me personal pleasure to help teach him how to connect with his family in new ways during these challenging times.

I love your personal experience with your grandparents. Your thoughts remind me that helping the older generation learn the use of technology also help us connects our lives with theirs.

Vishnu This is wonderful to hear that you got your grandparents iPhones and they are now using FaceTime. It is interesting that you point out that technology sometimes causes people to drift apart, maybe because it is often something people do alone without communicating with others. There are so many elements of technology like face time or zoom that allow people to connect virtually.

Hey Vishnu,

It sounds like we both share Jordan’s experience with the elderly population. I definitely agree that technology has connected us all and bridged generations. While your grandparents are in India, mine are in Florida. I know it’s not quite as far away, but for them, it’s far enough. Similar to how you guys had to cater your lessons to what their generation was used to, I have had my share of challenging but also rewarding experiences. For Jordan, it was FaceTime and Zoom; for me, it was Gmail.

My grandpa called me one day because his friend had sent out a party invite as a list. Grandpa spent about forty minutes trying to find it. I told him to look carefully and like Santa, check his list twice. He didn’t think that was funny. I realized that his friend’s email probably went to his Spambox. I told him to look to the left to find Spambox and click on it. He replied “My Gmail must be different from yours; I don’t have a Spambox folder.” After a few minutes of trying to describe it to him, I FaceTimed him. I looked on his screen and realized that he needed to scroll down in order to find Spambox.

For me, I had always automatically scrolled down to find it without even realizing that I did this. To me, every action or click is like a knee-jerk reflex, but I realized that for grandpa, his reflexes needed a bit more time to kick in. Jordan is absolutely right in that the elderly need more hands-on and visual support. Remember, they grew up with things that required more physical interaction like holding a thick hardcovered book or applying their index finger on a rotary phone. Even my mom tells me she used to love watching each digit of the rotary phone make its way back!

Anyways, thank goodness for FaceTime. I showed grandpa how to scroll down to find his Spambox. And sure enough, the mysterious party invite miraculously appeared. I thought about teaching Grandpa how to move that conversation to his Inbox, but he was so elated that I decided to save this lesson for another day.

I found this article very relatable as I have as well tried to teach my grandparents how to use a mobile phone. At the end I was only able to teach my grandmother how to play candy crush and how to select who she wanted to call without needing to type the number every time. But nothing more. She kept refusing to learn the “new and unnecessary technologies”.

What he is doing very important, specially during the coronavirus epidemic. I have found the elderly are the ones who suffer the most isolation, as they are the ones that are less connected. It reminds me of a video what was viral in social media about a grandmother who sang happy birthday to herself, alone, in her house. It broke my heart. This is why seemingly-small ideas like these can really make an impact and change people’s lives for the better.

Hi Alejandra! I can totally relate to your experience. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been sympathizing for the elderly in nursing homes, who are not able to interact with families. Therefore, I started Facetime sessions with the elderly, either playing piano for them or chatting with them to help time pass by for them. However, I came across some obstacles, such as having difficulties getting on the video chat. She told me that although she enjoys having a companion to talk to, it is really hard for her to work with the technology, such as logging onto the computer. I was dejected for not being able to teach her about technology usage due to the quarantine lockdown.

Furthermore, I live on the opposite side of the globe from my grandmother. The only form of communicating and interacting is through technology. However, she also has hard time using it as well, and it really is painful to think that I am not able to spend most of the time actually talking rather than being lost on using the technology to communicate, especially when I want to spend as much time with her.

As of in the near future, I would like to create a nonprofit business, putting an emphasis on sharing our knowledge of technology to those who are not efficient with it.

Alejandra Seniors are often fixed in their ways and unwilling to change. They like what has been working for so many years. They have to be told that is ok to try things with their phone and not to be afraid to make a mistake. Your grandmother liked to make calls but she may like to learn how to text if she is encouraged to do so, and understand this is a popular way to communicating these days. If she tries it maybe she will like it. She may appreciate someone texting her an image or picture, something you can’t do over the phone.

This article really reflects the present situation of contemporary society.In just 20 years, from cover phones to smartphones, from 2G to 5G, from 8GB to 512GB, the change is so fast and dramatic that the elderly feel disjointed by the society. Take my family for instance. In the 5 years ago, my grandparents don’t know how to use the smartphones. But now, they can use the app like Wechat to communicate with others. When they go out and buy stuffs, they use the apple pay instead of paying the cash. This paves the convenient for them because the elderly will be easy to lost cash or coins on the way home. You know that they will be disappointed and complaint when they know they just lost several dollars. This problem can be solved now. The another advantage that I discovered is that seeing the doctor online. In the past, my grandfather had to get up early around 5.am and go to the hospital to make an appointment. In the morning, the temperature is very low and it is so tired for him to register. But now, they can make the appointment online through the app. This can largely save the time on the way to the hospital and queuing outside the gate. After finishing the doctor, The medicine will be mailed to the home, so that grandpa would not have to go to the hospital to get it again and again. This class sounds great since it helped a lot of “students” to learn the advanced technology. Nowadays, many young people are busy with their work and don’ have enough time to teach their parents to use the phones. This class just solves this embarrassment. Recently, my grandparents know a lot of knowledge about the prevention of COVID-19 and buying the food online without going to the market to reduce the risk of infection. The phones really make the life more convenient and these classes should be encouraged by the public. We should try our best to make the contribution to the society.

I agree with you, YuTao. The article really emphasizes the change that technology has brought onto the modern world and the transformational effect it can have on someone’s life. As technology evolves every day, so does mankind. And in this time and day, it’s up to the newer generation to educate the older generations about this change. Being part of the new generation myself, I’ve had to teach many family members about technology as well, such as setting up an app, purchasing something, or helping them understand how to communicate with their friends through the use of WeChat and similar apps. A couple of years ago, we went back to China to visit our family, and at the end of the trip, because the thought of saying goodbye and not speaking to them for a long time was so painful, we decided to get them new phones and teach them how to use them so we could communicate with the touch of a button whenever we missed each other. My cousin and I had to teach our uncles, aunts, and grandparents how to set up their new phones and WeChat because technology was still foreign to them at the time. And now, they use their phones just like anyone would in this day and time, despite the large age gap between us. At home, my mom constantly asks me questions about technology because she isn’t very technologically advanced, due to the fact that she immigrated here from China back when there was little technology available. However, now that she has one, she constantly asks me how to set things up, how to search things up, or how to manage her WeChat when she wants to call or FaceTime some of her friends. She’s also learned to use her phone to go places by using Google Maps. Using handheld maps and knowing the routes by heart is no longer needed with the advancement of technology. Because of the elderly’s age, getting places and doing things by themselves is not as easy as it was when they were younger. They aren’t able to support themselves, and their kids may be too busy with work and their own lives to be around them every hour of the day. With their newfound technology, they can call for assistance by simply pressing a button that will notify help, or call someone in case of an emergency. Technology could very well save someone’s life. Moreover, I feel like the class that Jordan has decided to teach could end up helping everyone, not just his students. His teaching the classes means that the elderly’s kids don’t need to teach them themselves, and instead can focus on working and supporting their family as a whole. They can rest assured knowing that their parents are safe and that they know what to do in case of an emergency. In addition, they could also learn to download some games for their own entertainment. It’s important to acknowledge Jordan for everything he’s done and to appreciate him for giving us this opportunity to experience something new that can help many. This example shows just how much technology has evolved over these years.

YuTao Thank you for your kind words. More people are no longer using money, so it would be helpful for seniors to use their phone to pay for things, maybe with credit card or Apple Pay. It is very helpful for seniors to be able to use electronics for medical purposes, like emailing with a doctor. I also teach in my class about a healthcare app where seniors can keep all of their medical information.

Experience is key in entrepreneurship. One of the few ways we have to better ourselves as entrepreneurs, and our businesses as life experiences, is going through an initial process of practice and learning, often a synonym for failure. Bonnie’s role in the case of this fantastic entrepreneurial story is exactly this one: giving Jordan a starting point, from which acknowledging the actions necessary to improve the quality of the business. As often stated throughout the article, connecting people has never had such an importance in the terrible crisis we are facing due to the Coronavirus outbreak. Older people are being left behind, not only technologically, but unfortunately socially too: missing tools, such as the previously discussed iPhones and laptops, and absent experience, make it much more difficult for grandmas and grandpas to go beyond the standard, old-fashioned phone call, in a world, in a time, where the closer we can get to having real-life meeting with our loved ones is joining a Zoom call. I personally find this a wonderful example of how we, as youngsters, can personally engage in making these terrible times lighter and less burdensome: each small action can make a difference, regardless of the size of our targeted audience, and our duty as world-citizen, I think, has never had such an important role in our everyday life.

Jacopo I’ve been very fortunate to have this entrepreneurial experience at this early age, and I hope to continue through my high school years so that I will be able to expand this program and scale it so it helps so many more people.

Similar to your experiences, I am also a sophomore and also volunteer to aid senior individuals in adapting to new technology! As a branch director in an organization called Teach Seniors Technology, I could not relate more on the initial difficulties in gaining customers. A few years ago, when I walked into my local community center to give my first lesson, there were only one or two students. In fact, there were many times during my first couple of months volunteering where no students had signed up for my weekly lessons! Though I wasn’t necessarily successful at first, I was also forced to adapt for these reasons. After reaching out to the community center staff, I was able to secure a classroom and promotion materials for my service which now serves several seniors each week.

Yet, I believe the “success” of my organization is determined by much more than the number of seniors who I teach. I often serve seniors from China, who have to bridge both the language barrier and the technological gap here in the United States. One of the ladies at my branch literally burst into joy when I taught her how to use Google Translate! In a world which is becoming increasingly interconnected and reliant on technology, I find that “success” of my volunteering branch rests on reintegrating these seniors into the technological area of society. I am overjoyed by the fact that there are other who share so much similarity with me. As more and more technological advancements are made, we must learn to bridge generational gaps so that our society as a whole can progress together with the technology that is being invented.

Jason It is wonderful to hear of another sophomore participating in a similar type of program.

Just like you, I help senior citizens but also adults from Central and South America with the technology and language barrier that thousands of people face in the United States. Technology is not common for lower classes in third world countries which makes it difficult for these adults and senior citizens to understand what seems like the basics of a smartphone for the majority of people in the US. It is such a joy when I see those which I help finally being able to communicate through Google Translate (An incredible tool I must say) and doing tasks like buying on Amazon, Instacart, or any online store. Observing this has made me come to the conclusion that we must come together as the new technology generation and help all of those individuals who have not gotten the opportunity to learn the incredible benefits the tech world brings; together we can close the digital divide across all ages, races, and socioeconomic statuses. We are the future and have yet to see great things created through technology.

Great response, Rossana! Do I see a team of digital-divide change makers forming here?

Technology helps join people, specially for the duration of this time of infinite quarantines. It is recommended that the older era is taking an hobby in technology, breaking the stereotype that the elderly reject new ideas. After all, technological know-how was once and is made to make humans’ lives easier. However, whilst analyzing each your comments, Vishnu and Charlie, alongside with the article, I see that in all the instances of older humans the use of technology, it is due to the fact the aged era have no different approaches to remain connected. Now, this sparked a curious thinking internal me—the aged are the use of tech due to the fact particularly at some stage in this time period, they genuinely want it to forestall themselves from turning into isolated. But when it comes to younger people, we simply use tech due to the fact we are so addicted to it. We attain for a smartphone due to the fact it’s simply what teenagers do. We text, FaceTime, and play multiplayer video games with every different simultaneously. For the elderly, the hazard to be in a position to join with their cherished ones is a massive spotlight in their life. They have no longer skilled such ease and luxurious for a great deal of their lives.

Despite efforts to teach the older generation about the newest developments in technology, it is saddening how much of the older generation is still very ignorant about it, especially since it is an era of technology.

One summer, I went to China to see my relatives, especially my grandmother. My grandmother lived in more rural parts of Sichuan, in Dazu. She didn’t need to use any technology; as long as she knew how to open the television and call using her corded home telephone, she could live happily growing plants in the back yard and raising chickens. She rarely went into the city to where my other relatives lived, they always visited her instead. However, to my delightful surprise, she proactively volunteered to wait for my arrival in Chongqing, one of the busiest cities in Sichuan.

When I arrived at my aunt’s apartment, where my grandma stayed, I asked jokingly why she decided to finally come to the city, she replied that it was because she hadn’t been here for so long. It was boring back home, and my grandma wanted to experience what life is like in the city for a while. She said that she would stay in the city until I left for America in a few weeks.

I was delighted and planned to take her to all sorts of fun places with great food that I had remembered from my last visit here. In Dazu, you could hardly find such boisterousness due to the lack of crowds. I was sure that she would enjoy it.

One morning, after I had officially settled in at my aunt’s house, my aunt and her husband told me that they were going to go somewhere for the rest of the day and needed me to take care of my grandmother. They said I could take my grandmother out to walk or do some other activities, but to be careful. I agreed with a smile.

My grandma was very happy this particular morning as well. She told me that she wanted to try exercising in the nearby park with some other old people; she wanted to make some friends here. I happily agreed. I walked her to the park and watched her dance and make merry with the folks there. After a few minutes, she could tell that I was a little restless and told me to play on my own and insisted that she could manage herself well. She said that she would go home when she wanted to and told me not to worry. I reluctantly agreed, told her the directions to the apartment building, and gave her the corresponding card. The apartment wasn’t that far, only one block away from the park. Then, I went off to a nearby stationary store to buy some souvenirs for my friends in America.

After some time, I picked the gifts that caught my fancy and went on the line to pay. The store was very popular and so the line was very long as well. After waiting for a quarter of an hour, I finally got out of the line and started my way home. In the distance, I saw a familiar figure. I panicked and hurriedly ran to the entrance of the apartment.

My grandma stood in the burning sun, her arms hung down at her sides, watching the pedestrians. Apparently, she had a squabble with the people from the park almost immediately after I left. She wasn’t in the mood to dance anymore, so she went home. However, the problem is that she didn’t know how to open the more technologically advanced apartment door. To me, the door system was very simple, you just had to swipe a card, but my grandmother never had to use this sort of system, she only ever needed a key. My grandma thought that you just had to press the card against the door or something. She also forgot how to call using the smartphone that was given to her. I also didn’t think it was necessary enough to teach my grandmother how to open the door since it seemed natural to me.

This story truly shows the importance of communication and the need to help the older generation with technology.

“When are you coming back?” These words were music to my 15-year-old ears. I had just helped fix the internet connectivity issue for Ms. Jacobson, one of the residents at Sequoias’, a senior residential facility, where I was volunteering to help seniors with their tech issues in the summer after my freshman year. Ms. Jacobson sent a very nice thank you note about the help she received from me to the Services Director at Sequoias who passed it on to me. The note, painstakingly written in spidery cursive must have taken Ms. Jacobson some time to write and is still cherished by me. The experience with helping seniors with their tech issues and entertaining them with piano recitals helped me get more attuned to the needs of my own grandparents. My two sets of grandparents are separated by a decade and come from similar backgrounds but have very different life experiences. One set of grandparents who live with us are older, technologically challenged, and can call on us anytime to help them operate the phone, the TV and other gadgets. They prefer to read the actual newspaper despite efforts to get them to read news online, and prefer talking on the phone instead of using Facetime. The younger set of grandparents who live in India have a large social circle, live on their own, and while still technologically challenged, have learned the basics of how to use a smartphone, browse the internet, and order online. Jordan’s article made me reflect on my experience working with seniors, both in my own family and outside and I realized that seniors face the same challenges that students of all ages face. First of all, every student learns in their own unique way, much like some of Jordan’s students – Roz and Rabbi Haskel. Some are visual learners, some need more time to read and absorb information on their own, etc. Secondly, each student has different capabilities and interests. Some like one set of my grandparents did not have much interest in learning how to use technology as they were happy with the old ways and could always ask us for help if they needed it. The other set of grandparents found ways to learn the basics that they needed to fulfill their needs as they were living on their own. There is also a social and cultural context to this. More and more seniors are now forced to live on their own, either in their homes or in senior facilities. Those that do not live with family face loneliness among other issues, and do need to know some basics such as texting, online searching and ordering, connecting with their medical provider online, etc. to stay safe, independent, and connected. The need to stay connected has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the issue with being connected is that not only are seniors more vulnerable to scams, they are also very gullible when it comes to fake news. I have had to constantly remind my grandparents who treat WhatsApp and Facebook as reliable news sources that everything they read there is not always true. The other issue is the plethora of apps, tools, and websites that can be overwhelming for seniors. I noticed this issue after working with a couple of seniors at Sequoias and created a home page for every senior I worked with, that contained shortcuts/icons for their most frequently used apps and websites for easy access. Perhaps in all of this, there is an opportunity to create senior-friendly apps and devices, but unfortunately, this is not a coveted demographic for tech companies and marketers. There is certainly a need to help seniors learn tech basics which can enrich and simplify their life. I applaud Jordan’s efforts to provide this valuable service to seniors in his community. However, the bigger question I ponder is that why are seniors put into this position in the first place where instead of enjoying time with their families, they are forced to learn new skills, especially when many have impacted cognitive skills which makes learning new things harder. Additionally, we are only talking about a subset of the senior population. There is a big population of seniors living in poverty who have more pressing issues such as survival to deal with. My own experience with my grandparents and with seniors I worked with is that every single one of them would have preferred to live with their families, surrounded by their children and grandchildren instead of connecting with them over facetime and group chats. In fact, the percentage of multigenerational families in the United States has continued to rise, primarily due to financial necessity. While one size does not fit all and every family has their own unique challenges, perhaps it’s time for us as a society to take a closer look at how best to support the needs of our senior population, given the increased life expectancy in the United States.

Hey, Jatin. I really enjoyed reading your thoughtful post and response. What I love most is that you bring up some broader issues that really add value to the “seniors and technology” conversation. I’ve always admired certain cultures — India for one — where families place more emphasis on caring for and living with their elders, the people without whom they would not even exist. The questions you raise about supporting our senior population are so important! We deliver them meals, help them connect, even give them a ride to the market, but we don’t go beyond to the point of human companionship and connection at a time when they need it most.

The age of smartphones has progressed so quickly that the fact the first iPhone originated just over ten years ago may come as a surprise to many. This development is only one example of a world industrializing at an unprecedented rate. Despite making communication and practically every other aspect of life easier, this revolution may not apply to all — the elderly, as you stated, are often not kept up to date to these new technologies. However, it must be noted that other adults may also not be kept up to date. I believe my parents are a prime example of this. They both immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and made a decent living running a restaurant. However, when it came time to digitalize, they struggled and required my older sister’s assistance to facilitate this new aspect of the business. Now that she’s off to college, it’s my turn to fulfill this position of filling out online documents and forms. This is a growing problem as it is a given that technology will only advance forward, regardless of whether there are those who are unable to utilize these new advantages. That is why I find programs like yours to be so fascinating and thoughtful. My mother has recently taken up taking computer classes, where she learns basic computer navigation skills. It is essential for the whole population to collectively adapt as a whole.

Alvin I appreciate the idea of showing seniors how to fill out forms online, and all of the elements involved in that process.

I certainly agree with Jordan that technology helps us stay connected. It is very important that we help the elderly members of the society on the use of technology. It is not easy to teach the older generation to use technology, as they are not quite familiar with it.

Moreover, I have also had a similar experience with my grandmother who just got a new iPhone and she did not know how to use it properly. Though she was able to make her daily phone calls and read her WhatsApp messages, she did not know how to access the Internet, do Face time and little other stuff. One day during the never-ending lockdown, I decided to teach my grandmother how to use her new phone. Since, she was having sleepless nights due to the change in her sleep cycle because of lockdown, I first taught her how to use YouTube so that she could put spiritual music on it and have good sleep. As days progressed I taught her how to access the daily news online, face timing, texting and many more things. This also gave me an opportunity to spend quality time with my grandmother, which I could not during my school days. My grandmother had a habit of doing all her office-work on paper so, later I started teaching her to use the laptop to check few mails and tally her accounts. This whole process not only helped her a great deal by making her work a lot easier, but also it helped me become more patient by answering the same quarries that she had again and again.

There have been vast advancements in technology over the years and it has helped us in many ways, such as online classes and courses, which are the most helpful things at the moment. By helping the elderly members of the society as to how technology can be used, bridges the generation gap and will help the society progress faster.

I’ve spent a lot of time helping relatives with technology and sometimes it can get very frustrating but I remember that they didn’t grow up with this like we did. So I am more patient and don’t get mad because I love my relatives. What Jordan is doing is really important, especially during this pandemic. The elderly are the most impacted in my opinion, because many of them lack technological experience. His Zoom meetings are a great idea though, keeping the elderly learning and up to date with technology so they can stay connected.

The younger generation is lucky. Since we were young, we have had access to electronic products. Elders often see their grandchildren typing like a speed of light with two thumbs on the keyboard or on the phone, while they themselves can only type letter by letter or word by word with their index fingers. Many elders have only had access to technologies in the past 15 to 20 years. We sometimes get annoyed when they want to learn how to use technology. But when thinking about our situations, aren’t we like them when we are trying to figure out how to solve a simple math question? We see the technologies are easy for us to learn and use, but the elders must take a long time to get used to using technologies.

The last time I saw my grandmother in person was five years ago, but we are able to FaceTime each other at least once a week. When I visited her in China five years ago, I saw her struggling to send a message on WeChat or even make a simple phone call. She would forget which group chat is which and would constantly send private messages in group chats with other family members in it. When I started teaching her how to use WeChat, I saw my grandma was listening to what I was saying very carefully. I taught her how to use WeChat for video calls, voice calls, and many other functions of the app. Later, she took her cellphone and just pressed on it casually trying to use the phone herself. This makes me think that the elders are still very curious to learn new things and look forward to more connections with others so as not to be disconnected from society.

Although she still struggles with using keyboards, my grandma has greatly increased her ability to use her phone. Now she is able to shop online and play simple games on her phone like mahjong and Candy Crush. She sends us many photos of places she has visited and writes that she wishes to take me on one of her trips. Communication is a bridge to build interpersonal relationships. From sharing feelings to expressing ideas, the world requires us to communicate with others. Not just through face-to-face communication, but also through technologies, we are able to share our feelings with others through a simple call or message. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, we find communication important with family members or friends or co-workers through technologies. We have stayed home for more than one and a half months, and we would need to communicate with our parents almost every day and stay with them 24/7 face-to-face. We might not know how to have a conversation with them before, but with this pandemic, we might have no choice but to speak with them. We have learned that communicating with them is not as hard as we thought, and moreover, it is enjoyable to hear stories from our parents or other elders in the family. The elders are aging every day and we are growing up every day. It is hard for us to frequently see each other in real life, so technology is how we would connect and communicate with them.

What a sensational experience, Jordan! I enjoyed reading your stories, and I was astonished at how your involvement with elders related to mine.

As another member of Generation Z, technology and the rapid advancement of modern devices have always piqued my interest. Due to my eagerness, I grew up as a tech nerd, earning the title of “tech guy” in the family. “Alvin, why is my wifi not connecting?” “Alvin, what’s wrong with our TV?” “Alvin, why is my Bluetooth not connecting?” At least five times a day, I would hear such questions from my parents and brothers. From simple wifi connection problems to complicated home appliance control systems, I had to be present if the issues involved technology.

My title became significant as COVID invaded our lives. Similar to your experience, my grandparents struggled the most as the majority of platforms and services turned online. Since my grandparents were in a higher-risk group for exposure to COVID, they had to be extremely cautious. They could not go outside to get food or to their workplace. Whether they liked it or not, they had to stay home and adapt to online platforms to order food and attend Zoom meetings. And, as the “tech guy” of the family, I was responsible for providing comfort for my grandparents. Starting from scratch, I had to water down difficult technological terminologies such as Airdrop, iCloud, and Bluetooth to help them rapidly adapt to new lifestyles. Such experiences were similar to teaching elementary schoolers about calculus, in which I realized how uncomfortable it was for my grandparents to utilize new technologies. For instance, Bluetooth features offer wireless connections within the comfort of one’s own vicinity, which is one of the reasons why younger generations utilize Bluetooth: it provides comfort. On the other hand, older generations have an arduous time figuring out how to connect devices using Bluetooth since they are unfamiliar with such features. It is true that consumers are attracted to more comfortable features, and businesses provide new technologies that could reduce time management for consumers. However, it creates a downside for older generations, making them take longer to do something. While convenience for the younger generations increases with the use of technology, the older generations are having difficulty adapting to rapid technological advancement.

By observing the hardships of older generations from my grandparents’ perspective, I thought there was a need for action. Although there are various ways to address such issues, I focused on a fundamental need for everyone: food.

Therefore, I gathered up my close friends, Robert and Kaiden, who shared similar visions regarding this issue, and we came up with an accessible software that will make it approachable for elders to order food from nearby food centers. Essentially, our solution focused on a sustainable, healthy, and accessible approach that is similar to your experience helping elders order groceries. We developed a food ordering app that sends prepackaged, nutritious meals to seniors who sign up for it. Our sign-up system is very simple since it could be pre-installed on phones, involves one click of a button, and has well-explained and accessible payment methods; for example, this service allows the program to automatically extract money from the elder’s source of payment which minimizes the complicated process of payment process every. Ultimately, elders can readily receive healthy and hearty meals at their doorstep. We also utilized the Zoom recording function to create tutorials to help elders navigate through our process. These methods of solution could sound ironic at first, but I believe the most effective solution for elders who are uncomfortable with technology is to expose them to an extent of unfamiliarity to reduce their discomfort.

Like most other start-ups, our application lacks feasibility, so initially, we must test it on a small group of elders and make adjustments. If our test proves to be successful, we will launch our application, which will familiarize elders with technology and aid them in accepting and embracing modern devices. Moreover, I would like to expand this business into providing food and holding online classes about ordering goods, entertainment, media, and safe technology use for elders. I would happily like to share words with you about this matter, and I want to resemble your helping and enthusiastic attitude towards social advancement.

Wow! This is a really beautiful essay. It inspires me to see a fellow teenager making such a positive impact in the world today.

Technology is one of the major generational gaps we have today, and it is very refreshing and encouraging to see someone trying to bridge that gap. I love your teaching strategy of showing instead of just telling. That is truly one of the best ways to explain. You made an astounding impact in a dreary and challenging time for many. As someone who teaches children in a local orphanage home, I can relate to the indescribable feeling of joy you get when your student finally understands.

I will also like to place emphasis on not just teaching seniors how to navigate the internet, but also on teaching them how to be safe while navigating the internet! Cyber crimes are increasing in a very tremendous way all over the world, as more people look for illegal means to usurp unknowing people. This is one of the major fears of seniors and the older generation concerning technology. I believe that teaching them how to best stay safe in the ‘dangerous’ global world provided by the internet would not just be beneficial to them, but it would also help in further bridging the generational gap.

Chidera, your comment is one that caught my attention. Your comment highlights a crucial aspect of our society today: the technology generation gap. Most importantly, the issue of cyber crimes. Indeed, with the rapid advancement of technology, it becomes increasingly challenging for elderly to keep up. Even some of us from younger generations struggle with mastering the intricacies of various tools and software, like navigating Google spreadsheets.

But you draw attention to the pressing issue of cybersecurity and cybercrime, which poses a significant threat to people of all ages, including the elderly. Even myself, who is clearly not an elderly person, receives tons and tons of spam messages and emails trying to trick me of my money. While these scams may not work on us, they can be extremely tempting for the elderly, who may be more vulnerable to such tactics.

For example, my friend’s grandma was a victim to these scams, falling victim to a company promising to save money for her granddaughter’s college tuition fee. This just highlights your point on the emphasis and awareness that should be put on cyber crimes. It demonstrates how easily elderly individuals can be targeted and deceived and the urgency of addressing the dangers they face while navigating the Internet.

Likewise, in the effort to bridge the technology generation gap, I believe that it is crucial to not only teach the elderly how to use technology but also raise awareness to the public about the prevalence of cybercrime and the importance of robust cybersecurity. By empowering people of all ages with knowledge and strategies to protect themselves online, we can help them become more confident and secure users of digital tools.

I truly believe that with stronger cybersecurity implementation and the awareness we can teach people about, the challenges of cyber crimes is one we can focus less on. Allowing us to focus more on bridging this generational gap, being able to facetime our loved ones, and even send them cool gadgets.

I think this is an amazing and much needed program! People tend to alienate the elderly from our evolving world, waving them off as they say, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” This is incredibly isolating and unfair to them. A month ago, I helped organize a ceremony for my high school, and many senior citizens came to support their grandchildren. The program for the ceremony was online, and I watched many of them struggle to scan a QR code. It was clear they were embarrassed, and they deserve to spend the day celebrating their family rather than feeling ashamed.

It’s also important to recognize that technology can help them stay busy. Many of the elderly cannot drive or live very far from their families. My grandparents live across the world in India. They are retired, and travel is very hard for them. They don’t typically have much to do, and they can get bored and demoralized. However, my grandpa stays busy and keeps his mind sharp by playing sudoku on his iPad. My grandma loves to play candy crush or call her relatives. Teaching the elderly how to use technology can be more helpful than most realize.

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How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward

Journalists, researchers and the public often look at society through the lens of generation, using terms like Millennial or Gen Z to describe groups of similarly aged people. This approach can help readers see themselves in the data and assess where we are and where we’re headed as a country.

Pew Research Center has been at the forefront of generational research over the years, telling the story of Millennials as they came of age politically and as they moved more firmly into adult life . In recent years, we’ve also been eager to learn about Gen Z as the leading edge of this generation moves into adulthood.

But generational research has become a crowded arena. The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology. There’s also been a growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.

Recently, as we were preparing to embark on a major research project related to Gen Z, we decided to take a step back and consider how we can study generations in a way that aligns with our values of accuracy, rigor and providing a foundation of facts that enriches the public dialogue.

A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations.

We set out on a yearlong process of assessing the landscape of generational research. We spoke with experts from outside Pew Research Center, including those who have been publicly critical of our generational analysis, to get their take on the pros and cons of this type of work. We invested in methodological testing to determine whether we could compare findings from our earlier telephone surveys to the online ones we’re conducting now. And we experimented with higher-level statistical analyses that would allow us to isolate the effect of generation.

What emerged from this process was a set of clear guidelines that will help frame our approach going forward. Many of these are principles we’ve always adhered to , but others will require us to change the way we’ve been doing things in recent years.

Here’s a short overview of how we’ll approach generational research in the future:

We’ll only do generational analysis when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life. When comparing generations, it’s crucial to control for age. In other words, researchers need to look at each generation or age cohort at a similar point in the life cycle. (“Age cohort” is a fancy way of referring to a group of people who were born around the same time.)

When doing this kind of research, the question isn’t whether young adults today are different from middle-aged or older adults today. The question is whether young adults today are different from young adults at some specific point in the past.

To answer this question, it’s necessary to have data that’s been collected over a considerable amount of time – think decades. Standard surveys don’t allow for this type of analysis. We can look at differences across age groups, but we can’t compare age groups over time.

Another complication is that the surveys we conducted 20 or 30 years ago aren’t usually comparable enough to the surveys we’re doing today. Our earlier surveys were done over the phone, and we’ve since transitioned to our nationally representative online survey panel , the American Trends Panel . Our internal testing showed that on many topics, respondents answer questions differently depending on the way they’re being interviewed. So we can’t use most of our surveys from the late 1980s and early 2000s to compare Gen Z with Millennials and Gen Xers at a similar stage of life.

This means that most generational analysis we do will use datasets that have employed similar methodologies over a long period of time, such as surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau. A good example is our 2020 report on Millennial families , which used census data going back to the late 1960s. The report showed that Millennials are marrying and forming families at a much different pace than the generations that came before them.

Even when we have historical data, we will attempt to control for other factors beyond age in making generational comparisons. If we accept that there are real differences across generations, we’re basically saying that people who were born around the same time share certain attitudes or beliefs – and that their views have been influenced by external forces that uniquely shaped them during their formative years. Those forces may have been social changes, economic circumstances, technological advances or political movements.

When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

The tricky part is isolating those forces from events or circumstances that have affected all age groups, not just one generation. These are often called “period effects.” An example of a period effect is the Watergate scandal, which drove down trust in government among all age groups. Differences in trust across age groups in the wake of Watergate shouldn’t be attributed to the outsize impact that event had on one age group or another, because the change occurred across the board.

Changing demographics also may play a role in patterns that might at first seem like generational differences. We know that the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, and that race and ethnicity are linked with certain key social and political views. When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

Controlling for these factors can involve complicated statistical analysis that helps determine whether the differences we see across age groups are indeed due to generation or not. This additional step adds rigor to the process. Unfortunately, it’s often absent from current discussions about Gen Z, Millennials and other generations.

When we can’t do generational analysis, we still see value in looking at differences by age and will do so where it makes sense. Age is one of the most common predictors of differences in attitudes and behaviors. And even if age gaps aren’t rooted in generational differences, they can still be illuminating. They help us understand how people across the age spectrum are responding to key trends, technological breakthroughs and historical events.

Each stage of life comes with a unique set of experiences. Young adults are often at the leading edge of changing attitudes on emerging social trends. Take views on same-sex marriage , for example, or attitudes about gender identity .

Many middle-aged adults, in turn, face the challenge of raising children while also providing care and support to their aging parents. And older adults have their own obstacles and opportunities. All of these stories – rooted in the life cycle, not in generations – are important and compelling, and we can tell them by analyzing our surveys at any given point in time.

When we do have the data to study groups of similarly aged people over time, we won’t always default to using the standard generational definitions and labels. While generational labels are simple and catchy, there are other ways to analyze age cohorts. For example, some observers have suggested grouping people by the decade in which they were born. This would create narrower cohorts in which the members may share more in common. People could also be grouped relative to their age during key historical events (such as the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic) or technological innovations (like the invention of the iPhone).

By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they’re not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people’s complex lived experiences.

Existing generational definitions also may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts. A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations. The key is to pick a lens that’s most appropriate for the research question that’s being studied. If we’re looking at political views and how they’ve shifted over time, for example, we might group people together according to the first presidential election in which they were eligible to vote.

With these considerations in mind, our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.

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Kim Parker is director of social trends research at Pew Research Center

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Essay on Today’s Generation

Students are often asked to write an essay on Today’s Generation in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

Understanding today’s generation.

Today’s generation, often called Generation Z, is a tech-savvy group born between 1997 and 2012. They are digital natives, growing up with the internet, smartphones, and social media.

Adapting to Change

This generation adapts to change quickly. They are used to fast-paced technological advancements and are comfortable learning new things. They value diversity and inclusivity.

Challenges Faced

Despite their adaptability, they face challenges like online bullying and mental health issues. The pressure to always be ‘connected’ can be overwhelming.

Understanding today’s generation helps us to nurture their talents and address their challenges effectively.

250 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

Introduction.

Today’s generation, often referred to as Generation Z or the iGeneration, is a demographic cohort following the millennials. Born between the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2010s, they are the first generation to be raised in the era of smartphones and social media, which has significantly impacted their communication styles, values, and worldviews.

Characteristics of Today’s Generation

One of the defining characteristics of today’s generation is their digital nativeness. They are comfortable with technology, having grown up with the internet, smartphones, and social media as integral parts of their lives. This has led to a generation that is highly connected, with global perspectives and a strong sense of social responsibility.

Challenges and Opportunities

However, this digital immersion also presents challenges. The over-reliance on technology can lead to issues like cyberbullying, privacy concerns, and mental health problems. Yet, it also presents opportunities. Today’s generation is adept at multitasking, quick to adapt to new technologies, and skilled at leveraging digital platforms for creative expression and social activism.

The unique characteristics and challenges of today’s generation are shaping the world in new ways. As digital natives, they are redefining communication, education, and work, and are poised to drive significant societal and technological advancements. Understanding and addressing their needs and aspirations is crucial for creating a future that leverages their strengths and mitigates their challenges.

500 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

The characteristics of today’s generation.

Today’s generation, often referred to as Generation Z or the iGeneration, is markedly different from its predecessors. Born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s, this generation is the first to grow up in a world where the internet, social media, and advanced technology are the norm rather than the exception.

One of the defining characteristics of today’s generation is their digital nativity. Unlike previous generations who had to adapt to the digital world, today’s youth are born into it. They are comfortable navigating the digital landscape, be it for communication, education, or entertainment. This has enabled them to develop skills such as multitasking and information filtering at an early age.

Impact of Technology on Today’s Generation

The impact of technology on today’s generation is profound and multifaceted. On one hand, it has made information access unprecedentedly easy. The internet has become the primary source of knowledge, and with the advent of online learning platforms, the traditional boundaries of education have been expanded.

However, the ubiquity of technology also brings challenges. Cyberbullying, online privacy threats, and the potential for misinformation are significant concerns. Moreover, the overuse of technology can lead to issues like decreased physical activity and face-to-face social interaction. Balancing the benefits and drawbacks of technology is a unique challenge for today’s generation.

Societal and Environmental Consciousness

Today’s generation is remarkably conscious of societal and environmental issues. They are more likely to champion causes such as climate change, mental health, and social justice. This heightened awareness and activism are largely facilitated by social media, which provides a platform for sharing information, rallying support, and mobilizing action.

The Future and Today’s Generation

Despite the challenges they face, today’s generation is resilient and adaptable. They are problem solvers who are not afraid to challenge the status quo. As the most educated generation to date, they are poised to bring about significant changes in various fields.

However, it’s crucial to remember that today’s generation is not a monolith. Their experiences and perspectives are diverse, shaped by factors like race, gender, socioeconomic status, and geography. As such, it’s essential to avoid overgeneralizing and to appreciate the richness of their individual experiences.

In conclusion, today’s generation is a dynamic and complex group. They are digital natives, navigating a world interwoven with technology. They are socially and environmentally conscious, driven to make a positive impact on the world. And despite the challenges they face, they are resilient, adaptable, and poised to shape the future. Understanding them is not just an academic exercise, but a necessity for anyone looking to stay relevant in an ever-evolving world.

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Internet — The Impact Of Internet On Younger Generations

The Impact of Internet on Younger Generations

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Essays on New Generation

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Introduction In this technological age, people are becoming increasingly reliant on technological devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the like. The younger generation in particular are becoming more technologically savvy and dependent on technology and internet compared to the older generations. However, it can be observed that the younger generation are becoming increasingly bored and have a shorter attention span. This study aims to determine whether limiting the exposure to the Internet can improve the attention span of the new generation.

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The new class war: A wealth gap between millennials

The wealth gap between rich millennials and the rest of their age group is the largest of any generation, creating a new wave of class tension and resentment, according to a  recent study .

Even as the vast majority of millennials struggle with student debt, low-wage service-jobs, unaffordable housing and low savings, the millennial elite are surpassing previous generations. According to the study, the average millennial has 30% less wealth at the age of 35 than baby boomers did at the same age. Yet the top 10% of millennials have 20% more wealth than the top baby boomers at the same age.

“Millennials are so different from one another that it is not particularly meaningful to talk about the ‘average’ Millennial experience,” wrote the study’s authors, Rob Gruijters, Zachary Van Winkle and Anette Eva Fasang. “There are some Millennials who are doing extremely well—think Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman—while others are struggling.”

The study finds that millennials — typically defined as those between the age of 28 and 43 today — have faced repeated financial headwinds. Coming of age during the financial crisis, they have lower levels of homeownership, larger debts outweighing assets, low-wage and unstable jobs, and lower rates of dual-income family formation.

At the same time, the authors say the top 10% of millennials have benefited from greater rewards for skilled jobs. As they put it, “The returns to high-status work trajectories have increased, while the returns to low-status trajectories have stagnated or declined.”

The millennials who “went to college, found graduate level jobs, and started families relatively late,” ended up with “higher levels of wealth than Baby Boomers with similar life trajectories,” according to the report.

The great wealth transfer

There may be another factor creating so much wealth among millennials: inheritances. In what’s known as “the great wealth transfer,” baby boomers are expected to pass down between $70 trillion and $90 trillion in wealth over the next 20 years. Much of that is expected to go to their millennial children. High-net-worth individuals worth $5 million or more will account for nearly half of that total, according to Cerulli Associates.

Wealth management firms say some of that wealth has already starting trickling down to the next generation.

“The great wealth transfer, which we’ve all been talking about for the last 10 years, is underway,” said John Mathews, head of UBS’  Private Wealth Management division . “The average age of the world’s billionaires is almost 69 right now. So this whole transition or wealth handover will start to accelerate.”

Tensions between millennial classes are likely to escalate as more wealth is transferred in the coming years. Wealth displays on social media by millennial “nepo babies” could add to the intra-generational class war and drive nonwealthy millennials to overspend or create the appearance of lavish lifestyles to keep up.

A survey by Wells Fargo found that 29% of affluent millennials (defined as having assets of $250,000 to over $1 million of investible assets) admit they “sometimes buy items they cannot afford to impress others.” According to the survey, 41% of affluent millennials admit to funding their lifestyles with credit cards or loans, versus 28% of Gen Xers and 6% of baby boomers.

The battle between rich millennials and the rest could also shape their attitudes toward wealth. For over four decades, the vast majority of millionaires and billionaires created in America have been self-made, mostly entrepreneurs. A study by Fidelity Investments found that 88% of American millionaires are self-made.

Yet inherited wealth could become more common. A study by UBS found that among newly minted billionaires last year, heirs who inherited their fortunes racked up more wealth than self-made billionaires for the first time in at least nine years. And, all the billionaires under the age of 30 on the latest Forbes billionaires list inherited their wealth, for the first time in 15 years.

'Extreme' wealth

The surge in wealth among millennial heirs is also creating a lucrative new market for wealth-management firms, luxury companies, travel firms and real estate brokers.

Clayton Orrigo, one of the top luxury real estate brokers in Manhattan, has built a thriving business on moneyed millennials. The founder of the Hudson Advisory Team at Compass has sold over $4 billion in real estate and regularly brokers deals over $10 million. He says the “vast majority” of his business lately is from buyers in their 20s and 30s with inherited wealth.

“I just sold a $16 million apartment to someone in their mid-20s, and the buyer accessed the family trust,” he said. “The wealth that is behind these kids is extreme.”

Inherited wealth has become Orrigo’s specialty. He says he works on forging close relationships with family offices, trusts and young money elite mingling at New York membership clubs like Casa Cipriani.

The pattern is familiar: A wealthy family calls wanting a rental for their son or daughter; a few years later, they want a $5 million or $10 million two-bedroom condo to buy in a new, high-security building downtown.

“My gig is working very quietly and very discreetly with the wealthiest families in the world,” Orrigo said.

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We in the Israel-politics ‘sandwich generation’ need our Jewish institutions to change how they define antisemitism

( JTA ) — I am the only Jewish elected official in Rochester, the third-biggest city in New York State. I am 38 years old, which when it comes to Israel can feel like the political “sandwich generation” — old enough to know that Israel was once seen as vulnerable, and young enough to understand that many cannot remember an Israel before Benjamin Netanyahu. The generational differences can feel massive at times, including at this moment when communities like Rochester are struggling to define and explain antisemitism.

Rochester has a Jewish community of roughly 20,000, with strong, well-resourced institutions. Antisemitism lurks here like it does in many American cities. When an incident occurs, like swastika graffiti appearing in a Jewish cemetery, the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester typically takes the lead to publicly call out antisemitism and mobilize the community. The federation carved out a niche as the leading Jewish institution in the fight against antisemitism, even starting a Center to End Hate that strives to “unite the community in overcoming hate through education, dialogue and positive action.” 

But in recent years — and more acutely in recent weeks — the federation has not kept up with the changing political landscape affecting discussions and definitions of antisemitism.

In 2019, the Monroe County Republican Party sent out advertisements in support of their candidate for district attorney that included familiar antisemitic dog whistles. The ads depicted George Soros as the “globalist” pulling the strings of the Democratic nominee because he wanted to “buy this election to install a far-left puppet.”

I shared my anger and concern about this advertisement with the federation and Center to End Hate leadership. They promised to have private conversations with the GOP leadership, although if they did they never reported back to me. I co-wrote an oped about the subject with a local rabbi and attorney and asked the federation if they wanted to join. They declined. The GOP never apologized, and the federation never publicly uttered a word about this antisemitism. 

Last month the Rochester City Council, like so many other cities across the country, considered a symbolic ceasefire resolution . I was reluctant to welcome international politics into City Hall. When it became clear that a majority of the council wanted to pass a resolution, I decided to get involved in crafting the language to help ensure it did not include antisemitic language I had seen in other resolutions. 

I vetted resolution language with Jewish lay and religious leadership, academics and Israelis. I sought to avoid some of the specific language that has proven so divisive in the discourse about Israel, like apartheid and genocide, and focus narrowly on the goal of a ceasefire. I discussed the language with the federation multiple times to get feedback. I did not expect the federation to be supportive, but I was surprised to learn that they found the idea of a resolution antisemitic regardless of the language.  

The federation chose to rally against the idea of a resolution. Leadership sent talking points directly from the Jewish Federations of North America to members of the Jewish community here. These talking points, written far away from Rochester, stated: “the proposed resolutions City Council is being asked to consider are antisemitic at their core. The resolutions demonize, delegitimize and apply a double standard to Israel – the ‘three Ds of antisemitism.’ If these resolutions are adopted, City Council will be empowering terrorist sympathizers and Jew haters.” 

I found the “three D’s” — a formulation popularized by former dissident Natan Sharansky — to be an odd choice for a definition because it has rarely been cited in the last few months of very public, national discourse about antisemitism. But even by those standards the proposed resolution was not antisemitic. To many supporters of a ceasefire, it is not a double standard to ask Congress to stop shipping weapons to Israel while Gaza is facing imminent famine and a chronic shortage of medical supplies. I trust that my colleagues would demand the same of any country that was supplied with billions of dollars of armaments from the United States while civilians experienced dire humanitarian crises like famine.

Council members received hundreds of comments echoing the federation’s talking points and accusing the entire City Council of antisemitism for even considering the resolution. We also received hundreds of comments in favor of a ceasefire resolution, with many commenters citing their Jewish identity and values as reasons for support. (Ultimately, the council approved two non-binding resolutions, including one written and co-sponsored by me.)

We held a public meeting with so many speakers that it lasted over five hours. The meeting affirmed the challenges of being a leader in the sandwich generation. I watched as different generations spoke past each other with anger and sadness in their voice. It reminded me of Peter Beinart’s essay in the New York Times about the “great rupture in American Jewish life,” when he wrote, “ For many American Jews, it is painful to watch their children’s or grandchildren’s generation question Zionism … It is tempting to attribute all of this to antisemitism, even if that requires defining many young American Jews as antisemites themselves.”

The division in Rochester’s Jewish community is happening as we speak. It’s painful to experience. It must be confusing for our non-Jewish neighbors, who are left wondering what is or is not antisemitism. And the well-organized institution that once served as a leading voice has squandered credibility to arbitrate antisemitism.

I share these stories about the federation’s challenges because I suspect they are symptomatic of problems that other Jewish communities are facing today. If Jewish communities cannot properly diagnose antisemitism, then we cannot propose real solutions. And if leading Jewish institutions like federations cannot effectively identify antisemitism, how can we expect policymakers, community members, and activist groups to help us combat it?

This question is central to how we relate to the world around us, and how we understand each other within our own community. We in the sandwich generation have work to do.

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• 5 Steps to Getting Started with Llama 2
• The Llama Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future
• Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding
• Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama
• Today, we’re introducing Meta Llama 3, the next generation of our state-of-the-art open source large language model.
• Llama 3 models will soon be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM, and Snowflake, and with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
• We’re dedicated to developing Llama 3 in a responsible way, and we’re offering various resources to help others use it responsibly as well. This includes introducing new trust and safety tools with Llama Guard 2, Code Shield, and CyberSec Eval 2.
• In the coming months, we expect to introduce new capabilities, longer context windows, additional model sizes, and enhanced performance, and we’ll share the Llama 3 research paper.
• Meta AI, built with Llama 3 technology, is now one of the world’s leading AI assistants that can boost your intelligence and lighten your load—helping you learn, get things done, create content, and connect to make the most out of every moment. You can try Meta AI here .

Today, we’re excited to share the first two models of the next generation of Llama, Meta Llama 3, available for broad use. This release features pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned language models with 8B and 70B parameters that can support a broad range of use cases. This next generation of Llama demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of industry benchmarks and offers new capabilities, including improved reasoning. We believe these are the best open source models of their class, period. In support of our longstanding open approach, we’re putting Llama 3 in the hands of the community. We want to kickstart the next wave of innovation in AI across the stack—from applications to developer tools to evals to inference optimizations and more. We can’t wait to see what you build and look forward to your feedback.

Our goals for Llama 3

With Llama 3, we set out to build the best open models that are on par with the best proprietary models available today. We wanted to address developer feedback to increase the overall helpfulness of Llama 3 and are doing so while continuing to play a leading role on responsible use and deployment of LLMs. We are embracing the open source ethos of releasing early and often to enable the community to get access to these models while they are still in development. The text-based models we are releasing today are the first in the Llama 3 collection of models. Our goal in the near future is to make Llama 3 multilingual and multimodal, have longer context, and continue to improve overall performance across core LLM capabilities such as reasoning and coding.

State-of-the-art performance

Our new 8B and 70B parameter Llama 3 models are a major leap over Llama 2 and establish a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales. Thanks to improvements in pretraining and post-training, our pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned models are the best models existing today at the 8B and 70B parameter scale. Improvements in our post-training procedures substantially reduced false refusal rates, improved alignment, and increased diversity in model responses. We also saw greatly improved capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction following making Llama 3 more steerable.

*Please see evaluation details for setting and parameters with which these evaluations are calculated.

In the development of Llama 3, we looked at model performance on standard benchmarks and also sought to optimize for performance for real-world scenarios. To this end, we developed a new high-quality human evaluation set. This evaluation set contains 1,800 prompts that cover 12 key use cases: asking for advice, brainstorming, classification, closed question answering, coding, creative writing, extraction, inhabiting a character/persona, open question answering, reasoning, rewriting, and summarization. To prevent accidental overfitting of our models on this evaluation set, even our own modeling teams do not have access to it. The chart below shows aggregated results of our human evaluations across of these categories and prompts against Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and GPT-3.5.

Preference rankings by human annotators based on this evaluation set highlight the strong performance of our 70B instruction-following model compared to competing models of comparable size in real-world scenarios.

Our pretrained model also establishes a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales.

To develop a great language model, we believe it’s important to innovate, scale, and optimize for simplicity. We adopted this design philosophy throughout the Llama 3 project with a focus on four key ingredients: the model architecture, the pretraining data, scaling up pretraining, and instruction fine-tuning.

Model architecture

In line with our design philosophy, we opted for a relatively standard decoder-only transformer architecture in Llama 3. Compared to Llama 2, we made several key improvements. Llama 3 uses a tokenizer with a vocabulary of 128K tokens that encodes language much more efficiently, which leads to substantially improved model performance. To improve the inference efficiency of Llama 3 models, we’ve adopted grouped query attention (GQA) across both the 8B and 70B sizes. We trained the models on sequences of 8,192 tokens, using a mask to ensure self-attention does not cross document boundaries.

Training data

To train the best language model, the curation of a large, high-quality training dataset is paramount. In line with our design principles, we invested heavily in pretraining data. Llama 3 is pretrained on over 15T tokens that were all collected from publicly available sources. Our training dataset is seven times larger than that used for Llama 2, and it includes four times more code. To prepare for upcoming multilingual use cases, over 5% of the Llama 3 pretraining dataset consists of high-quality non-English data that covers over 30 languages. However, we do not expect the same level of performance in these languages as in English.

To ensure Llama 3 is trained on data of the highest quality, we developed a series of data-filtering pipelines. These pipelines include using heuristic filters, NSFW filters, semantic deduplication approaches, and text classifiers to predict data quality. We found that previous generations of Llama are surprisingly good at identifying high-quality data, hence we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.

We also performed extensive experiments to evaluate the best ways of mixing data from different sources in our final pretraining dataset. These experiments enabled us to select a data mix that ensures that Llama 3 performs well across use cases including trivia questions, STEM, coding, historical knowledge, etc.

Scaling up pretraining

To effectively leverage our pretraining data in Llama 3 models, we put substantial effort into scaling up pretraining. Specifically, we have developed a series of detailed scaling laws for downstream benchmark evaluations. These scaling laws enable us to select an optimal data mix and to make informed decisions on how to best use our training compute. Importantly, scaling laws allow us to predict the performance of our largest models on key tasks (for example, code generation as evaluated on the HumanEval benchmark—see above) before we actually train the models. This helps us ensure strong performance of our final models across a variety of use cases and capabilities.

We made several new observations on scaling behavior during the development of Llama 3. For example, while the Chinchilla-optimal amount of training compute for an 8B parameter model corresponds to ~200B tokens, we found that model performance continues to improve even after the model is trained on two orders of magnitude more data. Both our 8B and 70B parameter models continued to improve log-linearly after we trained them on up to 15T tokens. Larger models can match the performance of these smaller models with less training compute, but smaller models are generally preferred because they are much more efficient during inference.

To train our largest Llama 3 models, we combined three types of parallelization: data parallelization, model parallelization, and pipeline parallelization. Our most efficient implementation achieves a compute utilization of over 400 TFLOPS per GPU when trained on 16K GPUs simultaneously. We performed training runs on two custom-built 24K GPU clusters . To maximize GPU uptime, we developed an advanced new training stack that automates error detection, handling, and maintenance. We also greatly improved our hardware reliability and detection mechanisms for silent data corruption, and we developed new scalable storage systems that reduce overheads of checkpointing and rollback. Those improvements resulted in an overall effective training time of more than 95%. Combined, these improvements increased the efficiency of Llama 3 training by ~three times compared to Llama 2.

Instruction fine-tuning

To fully unlock the potential of our pretrained models in chat use cases, we innovated on our approach to instruction-tuning as well. Our approach to post-training is a combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT), rejection sampling, proximal policy optimization (PPO), and direct preference optimization (DPO). The quality of the prompts that are used in SFT and the preference rankings that are used in PPO and DPO has an outsized influence on the performance of aligned models. Some of our biggest improvements in model quality came from carefully curating this data and performing multiple rounds of quality assurance on annotations provided by human annotators.

Learning from preference rankings via PPO and DPO also greatly improved the performance of Llama 3 on reasoning and coding tasks. We found that if you ask a model a reasoning question that it struggles to answer, the model will sometimes produce the right reasoning trace: The model knows how to produce the right answer, but it does not know how to select it. Training on preference rankings enables the model to learn how to select it.

Building with Llama 3

Our vision is to enable developers to customize Llama 3 to support relevant use cases and to make it easier to adopt best practices and improve the open ecosystem. With this release, we’re providing new trust and safety tools including updated components with both Llama Guard 2 and Cybersec Eval 2, and the introduction of Code Shield—an inference time guardrail for filtering insecure code produced by LLMs.

We’ve also co-developed Llama 3 with torchtune , the new PyTorch-native library for easily authoring, fine-tuning, and experimenting with LLMs. torchtune provides memory efficient and hackable training recipes written entirely in PyTorch. The library is integrated with popular platforms such as Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, and EleutherAI and even supports Executorch for enabling efficient inference to be run on a wide variety of mobile and edge devices. For everything from prompt engineering to using Llama 3 with LangChain we have a comprehensive getting started guide and takes you from downloading Llama 3 all the way to deployment at scale within your generative AI application.

A system-level approach to responsibility

We have designed Llama 3 models to be maximally helpful while ensuring an industry leading approach to responsibly deploying them. To achieve this, we have adopted a new, system-level approach to the responsible development and deployment of Llama. We envision Llama models as part of a broader system that puts the developer in the driver’s seat. Llama models will serve as a foundational piece of a system that developers design with their unique end goals in mind.

Instruction fine-tuning also plays a major role in ensuring the safety of our models. Our instruction-fine-tuned models have been red-teamed (tested) for safety through internal and external efforts. ​​Our red teaming approach leverages human experts and automation methods to generate adversarial prompts that try to elicit problematic responses. For instance, we apply comprehensive testing to assess risks of misuse related to Chemical, Biological, Cyber Security, and other risk areas. All of these efforts are iterative and used to inform safety fine-tuning of the models being released. You can read more about our efforts in the model card .

Llama Guard models are meant to be a foundation for prompt and response safety and can easily be fine-tuned to create a new taxonomy depending on application needs. As a starting point, the new Llama Guard 2 uses the recently announced MLCommons taxonomy, in an effort to support the emergence of industry standards in this important area. Additionally, CyberSecEval 2 expands on its predecessor by adding measures of an LLM’s propensity to allow for abuse of its code interpreter, offensive cybersecurity capabilities, and susceptibility to prompt injection attacks (learn more in our technical paper ). Finally, we’re introducing Code Shield which adds support for inference-time filtering of insecure code produced by LLMs. This offers mitigation of risks around insecure code suggestions, code interpreter abuse prevention, and secure command execution.

With the speed at which the generative AI space is moving, we believe an open approach is an important way to bring the ecosystem together and mitigate these potential harms. As part of that, we’re updating our Responsible Use Guide (RUG) that provides a comprehensive guide to responsible development with LLMs. As we outlined in the RUG, we recommend that all inputs and outputs be checked and filtered in accordance with content guidelines appropriate to the application. Additionally, many cloud service providers offer content moderation APIs and other tools for responsible deployment, and we encourage developers to also consider using these options.

Deploying Llama 3 at scale

Llama 3 will soon be available on all major platforms including cloud providers, model API providers, and much more. Llama 3 will be everywhere .

Our benchmarks show the tokenizer offers improved token efficiency, yielding up to 15% fewer tokens compared to Llama 2. Also, Group Query Attention (GQA) now has been added to Llama 3 8B as well. As a result, we observed that despite the model having 1B more parameters compared to Llama 2 7B, the improved tokenizer efficiency and GQA contribute to maintaining the inference efficiency on par with Llama 2 7B.

For examples of how to leverage all of these capabilities, check out Llama Recipes which contains all of our open source code that can be leveraged for everything from fine-tuning to deployment to model evaluation.

What’s next for Llama 3?

The Llama 3 8B and 70B models mark the beginning of what we plan to release for Llama 3. And there’s a lot more to come.

Our largest models are over 400B parameters and, while these models are still training, our team is excited about how they’re trending. Over the coming months, we’ll release multiple models with new capabilities including multimodality, the ability to converse in multiple languages, a much longer context window, and stronger overall capabilities. We will also publish a detailed research paper once we are done training Llama 3.

To give you a sneak preview for where these models are today as they continue training, we thought we could share some snapshots of how our largest LLM model is trending. Please note that this data is based on an early checkpoint of Llama 3 that is still training and these capabilities are not supported as part of the models released today.

We’re committed to the continued growth and development of an open AI ecosystem for releasing our models responsibly. We have long believed that openness leads to better, safer products, faster innovation, and a healthier overall market. This is good for Meta, and it is good for society. We’re taking a community-first approach with Llama 3, and starting today, these models are available on the leading cloud, hosting, and hardware platforms with many more to come.

Try Meta Llama 3 today

We’ve integrated our latest models into Meta AI, which we believe is the world’s leading AI assistant. It’s now built with Llama 3 technology and it’s available in more countries across our apps.

You can use Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the web to get things done, learn, create, and connect with the things that matter to you. You can read more about the Meta AI experience here .

Visit the Llama 3 website to download the models and reference the Getting Started Guide for the latest list of all available platforms.

You’ll also soon be able to test multimodal Meta AI on our Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

As always, we look forward to seeing all the amazing products and experiences you will build with Meta Llama 3.

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Home ▪ Curlreading ▪ Retexturizing ▪ Texture: Not Your Mother’s Perm

Texture: Not Your Mother’s Perm

Learn more about Texture! , a collaboration between CurlStylist, NaturallyCurly and Modern Salon

According to Darby Shields, associate artistic director for ISO, there are two 4-letter words in hairdressing: bangs and perms.

When it comes to perms “We now say ‘body’ or ‘movement’ or ‘texture’,” says Shields.

Whatever you choose to call them—texturizers, waves or perms—the technology has come a long way. Unlike the poodle perms of the past, today’s perms have the ability to deliver sexy, fashion-forward texture without sacrificing the health of your hair. They are definitely not our mothers’ perms.

Demand is on the rise as texture—from beachy waves to curls—has become increasingly fashionable.

The whole process has changed dramatically from the day of strong chemicals, perm rods and end papers.

In 1938, Arnold F. Willatt invented the cold wave, the precursor to the modern perm. It used no machines and no heat. The hair was wrapped on rods and a reduction lotion containing ammonium thioglycolate was applied. This chemical breaks open the disulfide linkages between the polypeptide bonds in the keratin (the protein structure”> in the hair. The disulfide bonds give hair its elasticity, and can be reformed with chemicals. Next, an oxidation lotion was applied, (hydrogen peroxide”>, to close the disulfide bridges again and the hair was reformed to the shape of the rod. The entire process took 6–8 hours at room temperature. These treatments evolved into perms using ammonium thioglycolate, and then sodium thioglycolate, which cut processing time.

The new generation of perms are much gentler, with lower pH and low ammonia, giving the stylist more control over the outcome. ISO’s Option Wave, for example, is an award-winning professional perm system completely free of thio, the activator found in many traditional perms. It uses ISOamine, an exclusive technology that allows for deeper and more even penetration into the hair’s cortex with minimal swelling of the cuticle. Minimal swelling means hair’s internal and external structures and condition are maintained.

And the application also has changed dramatically from the day of perm rods and end papers. Today’s tools are flexible and soft, or no tools at all are used.

“You can make pin curls and process that, if you want,” Sheilds says. “You can do just about anything you want.”

Steve Goddard was working at Redken in 1994—“the day perms died.” He recalls working with chemists to come up with a new type of permanent rave. While talking to a focus group of 12 young stylists, he asked them for feedback on anmes and positioning.

“I started the presentation and notice that they’re all looking at me like I stepped off the moon,” says Goddard, president and founder of Pravana Naturceuticals.

“They all said ‘We don’t do perms,’”Goddard recalled.

Goddard asked, “None of you do perms?”

“None of us do perms,” they replied.

“Absolutely none?” he asked.

“We don’t do them and we don’t want to do them,” the stylists replied.

For the next 14 years, stick straight hair was the trend. But two years ago, he started to notice celebrities wearing soft waves. Goddard started looking and listening, and realized this trend was different than the perm trend that had caught fire in the 1980s. These waves were longer and less defined—beachier.

Goddard decided to create a product that could give women this beachy look—the Pravana Beach Wave . With that mission in mind, he realized he would have to create a formula different than the alkaline waves, which create a firmer, crisper curl than he wanted for this look An acid wave would provide the softness, but wouldn’t be firm enough for longer hair.

“We would lose the wave because of the weight,” he says. “We realized we needed to come up with a hybrid in terms of a wave solution. We developed a wave that uses amino acid technology to replace thioglycolate, giving the firmness of a wave without the crispness and definition.”

In addition to the actual solution, Goddard wanted to create an easy-to-use way to wrap the hair that wouldn’t leave marks The answer was to use wave blocks. Rather than the 70 to 80 rods used for a traditional perm, a stylist can use as few as 18 wave blocks to wrap up the head in a matter of 10 minutes.

“There is so much variety now, and that carries over to the textural spectrum,” Goddard says. “It’s not just about different cuts today. It’s about different textures. It’s our job to find out what people are doing and what they want, and then come up with a way for them to do it easily.”

In 1938, Arnold F. Willatt invented the cold wave, the precursor to the modern perm. It used no machines and no heat. The hair was wrapped on rods and a reduction lotion containing ammonium thioglycolate was applied. This chemical breaks open the disulfide linkages between the polypeptide bonds in the keratin (the protein structure”> in the hair. The disulfide bonds give hair its elasticity, and can be reformed with chemicals. Next, an oxidation lotion was applied, (hydrogen peroxide”>, to close the disulfide bridges again and the hair was reformed to the shape of the rod. The entire process took 6–8 hours at room temperature. These evolved into perms using ammonium thioglycolate, and then sodium thioglycolate.

But stylists still have some image hurdles to overcome to get the word out about this new generation of perms.

“People do come in for perms, but they don’t want to say it,” Shields says. “They may bring in a picture of Taylor Swift or Kate Hudson, and I tell them I can make their hair look like that chemically.”

Shields also having some examples by your chair of the results that can be achieved with texturizers. She suggests wrapping hair pieces with different tools and have them hanging around your station to show the different types of waves and curls you can create.

“It’s a huge opportunity,”says Shields. “Judging from the way people are asking for texture on both coasts, I’m sure it will permeate the rest of the country in short order. To be on the leading edge of that can be a huge advantage. You can really build your business if you become known for this new generation of retexturizers.”

The chemicals being used also are much different, with less ammonia and lower pHs. ISO’s Option Wave, for example, This award-winning professional perm system completely free of thio, the activator found in many traditional perms, and also Damage-free, low ammonia formulation. It uses ISOamine™, an exclusive technology that allows for deeper and more even penetration into the hair’s cortex with minimal swelling of the cuticle. Minimal swelling means hair’s internal and external structures and condition are maintained.

And the application also has changed dramatically from the day of perm rods and end papers. Today’s tools are flexible and soft or no tools.

A Perm Primer

A savior for those with short, flat hair—the root perm helps add volume at the root of the hair to give lots of body. It’s also perfect for already permed hair that’s looking for a little pick-me-up. Because only the roots are treated, it saves the rest of the lady’s locks from another treatment.

Body Wave Perm

Creating big, bouncy curls as opposed to tight, spring curls – the body wave perm is for curl-lovers who want a more modern curly look. The goal is to inject body and a little curl without adding a ton of ‘poof’ to the hair. Because this perm uses larger perm rods than traditional perms, the length of your client’s hair will determine how curly it will be: the shorter, the curlier.

Because you’re curling only partial sections of the hair, the weave perm will give your client a fabulous, fusion look with both textured and straight pieces in her hair. She’ll be treated with great versatility by choosing how much of her hair is treated for this modern look.

Finally a solution for women without layers, the stack perm is made for women who have a one-length cut. The treatment creates soft, layered curls for a natural look and is achieved by the use of differently sized rollers to the middle and bottom sections of the hair. The top is typically left flat to create a more a more natural look.

While it sounds harsh, the acid perm is actually gentler than the traditional alkaline perm as it has a lower pH level. It is specifically made for those with sensitive, fragile, or damaged hair. This perm will still create beautiful curls without as much damage to the hair follicle.

Exothermic Perm

Referring to the gentle, internal heat that is characteristic of this treatment, the exothermic perm helps speed up the processing time. The heat helps to allow the lotion to absorb quickly into the hair, conditioning and strengthening the cuticle from the inside. Your client will walk out with beautiful, bouncy curls from this innovative treatment.

Mitch Albom: The perm is making a comeback, but not to this head

When it comes to hair, some men have a sense of adventure. I am not one of them. While others shave the sides, gather it in ponytails, or dye it blue, I am boring. Predictable. I have had the same haircut since college. You can compare photos of me today with those from my 20s and say, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he goes to the same hairstylist.”

Uh, actually, I do.

I bring this up only because of recent news articles citing the return of the “the perm” for men . Suffice it to say, I will not be getting one. I still have PTSD from the first time around.

Like many boys who grew up in the '60s, hair has been an oversized focus for me. We began that decade with buzz cuts as tight as beard stubble. We ended it with hair down to our shoulders.

In between, we tried pretty much everything. The high pompadour that Elvis sported, the moptops made popular by the Beatles. The bangs in your eyes. The “parted in the middle.” The “long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratsy, matsy” versions that were celebrated in the musical “Hair.”

I mean, we made a musical about hair ! What does that tell you?

Still, those styles were all about how short or long you cut it. The perm? That was something else. Popular in the '70s, the perm was a process in which you sat in a chair for a long time while they used chemicals, rods and heat, until eventually your hair went from nice and straight to stupidly curly.

Mike Brady, the dad in “The Brady Bunch,” had a perm.

Need I say more?

How did this start back up again?

I remember when some of my high school friends got perms. It was bizarre. One day they had straight hair that followed the laws of gravity, the next day there was a feathery nest around their ears. It was often high and rounded. They looked like hairy ice cream cones.

Sometimes, the permed hair puffed out so far, you couldn’t fit a helmet over it. Other times the curls were so tight, I expected the guys to be wincing.

I suppose there were a few handsome men whose looks didn’t suffer from the perm. David Bowie tried one. George Harrison did, too. But even to them, the style looked phony. And most guys I knew just looked stupid.

So why on earth are they bringing the perm back?  Well, near as I can tell, it’s become huge in Korea, which somehow now sets the tone for pop culture. The “Korean Perm” is a real thing, defined by one website as “carefree, natural-looking waves that look so effortlessly chic.” 

And while it’s true, this new perm has come a long way from those wispy mops of the '70s, still, in the famous words of Hall and Oates, I can’t go for that.

But then, as I said, I am follicly boring. The truth is, back in college, when my male peers began pulling their bangs back to see if their hairlines were receding, I made a deal with the future. Let me keep my hair, and I’ll never do anything stupid with it, like get a mohawk.

So far, the future has kept its end of the bargain.

I have tried to do the same.

If it's not broke ...

This meant I passed up many fashionable waves. When men started slicking their hair back Gordon Gecko-style, I passed. When rock bands like Poison and Aerosmith teased their locks to neatly horizontal lengths, I stayed flat.

I never frosted my tips. Never went blond or purple. Never had a fade. Never did the undercut. A mullet? No thanks. Not even when all the Red Wings were wearing them. And a ponytail? Even a fashion-ignoramus like me could tell that was a bad idea.

I stood pat, watching my hairstylist named Laura go from single woman to married woman to mother of many kids. When she said she was leaving the salon to focus on her family, I begged her to keep cutting my hair. I wanted no change. So for decades, she has been coming to the house every few weeks to snip a style she could do in her sleep. Boring bangs pushed to the side, slight part, hair half-an-inch over the ears. I’d like to flatter myself by calling it “timeless.” The truth is, I’m too scared to change.

Especially to a perm.

Which reminds me of conversations I had with my father years ago. He, too, now that I think of it, wore the same hairstyle his whole life, if you can call it a “style.” He washed his hair, combed it straight back, and spayed it neatly in place, behind the ears, above the collar line. I would often say to hm, “Dad, why don’t you try something new?”

“Nope,” he’d say, reading his newspaper.

“But you could blow dry it.”

“Grow it longer.”

He’d lower the page, and give a slightly annoyed look.

“Because I don’t need to,” he’d say.

I’m going with that.

Contact Mitch Albom:  [email protected] . Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at  MitchAlbom.com . Follow him  @mitchalbom .

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With a Fresh Look and Recipes, Manischewitz Courts a New Generation

The 136-year-old company’s products have been staples in American Jewish households for generations. After a major rebranding, the matzo ball soup comes with merch.

By Remy Tumin

Reporting from Bayonne, N.J.

Something wasn’t quite right about the chicken soup.

The team at Manischewitz had gathered in the test kitchen at the company’s headquarters in Bayonne, N.J., last year to taste the latest version of one of their new offerings. But it wasn’t hitting the notes they were aiming for.

“We were tasting it against our grandparents’ and saying, ‘No, that’s not it; it’s just not like our Friday night chicken soup,’” said Shani Seidman, the chief marketing officer for Kayco, which owns Manischewitz.

More vegetables. More chicken. A little salt.

“A lot of times you think of improvement and innovation as extra or modern,” Ms. Seidman said in an interview this month. “But we’re going back to go forward.”

And chicken soup is only the start of it. Would your bubbe like a side of merch with that gefilte fish?

Manischewitz , the 136-year-old brand that has been a staple in American Jewish households for generations, is looking to go beyond Passover, which begins on Monday evening, with a top-to-bottom rebranding and an expansion of its product range.

Cans are out. Resealable bags are in. New products include grapeseed oil; frozen, gluten-free knishes and frozen matzo balls (don’t tell your mother!).

There is a new brand identity, with a color palette that leans heavily on the company’s signature orange, meant to evoke the appearance of its matzo ball soup. It includes a custom typeface with Hebrew-inspired details, Yiddishisms (“There’s bupkis like it!”) and whimsical doodled characters, reminiscent of Jewish cookbooks and prayer books from the 1950s, that are meant to invite everyone into the tent.

The idea, Ms. Seidman said, is not just to target “culturally curious” gourmands. It is also an attempt to tee up a new generation of hosts: millennials.

“When you host someone, you want to give them wholesome foods, things that you would cook,” she said. “We want to provide the next generation of consumers food they’d be proud to serve.”

In doing so, Manischewitz faces the difficult balancing act of preserving its legacy as a trusted brand and the most recognizable name in Jewish food, while dusting off a reputation that even its top executives acknowledge had become, well, dusty.

Amanda Dell, the vice president of programs and communications at the Jewish Food Society, said that many Jews connect to their cultural identity through the meals they share with their families. “My hope,” she added, “is that this rebrand can instill a new sense of pride in Jewish food.”

From Humble Beginnings to a Household Name

Manischewitz was founded in 1888 by Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz, a Prussian immigrant who scaled a small matzo bakery in Cincinnati into a large, standardized operation with a gas-fired oven and mechanized conveyor belt system. Manischewitz became a household name among American Jews and, by 1990, when the company was sold to a private equity firm, it controlled 80 percent of the matzo market in the United States.

Kayco, whose holdings include Sabra, Fox’s U-Bet and Kedem, is among the largest kosher food distributors in the United States. When it bought Manischewitz in 2019, it was seen in the kosher world as the equivalent of General Motors acquiring Ford .

“To us, we always looked up to Manischewitz as this legacy brand which had so much history in it,” said Charles Herzog, the president of Kayco, which was founded in 1848.

Mordy Herzog, the chief executive officer of Kayco and Royal Wine, felt that the Manischewitz brand “kind of drifted” under its previous owners.

“Their philosophy always was to modernize the brand, to make it more appealing to American consumers,” he said. “We want to do the same thing, but our way of doing it is by doubling down on who we are.”

To revamp its look, Manischewitz turned to Jones Knowles Ritchie , a branding agency that led redesigns for other legacy companies, including Dunkin’ and Budweiser.

JKR convened focus groups, consulted culinary experts and combed the Manischewitz archives. They decided to lean into, and amplify, the orange color that had been a staple of Manischewitz’s packaging for decades, said Lisa Smith, JKR’s global executive creative director. Phonetic spellings (“laat-kuh”) were added to the packaging to welcome new consumers.

The rebranding also includes a new series of drawn characters, including a family gathering around a dinner table and a figure hugging a cup of soup, that are meant to evoke illustrations from The New Yorker, she said. They have been featured on billboards in New York City and on digital screens in its subway system.

Jake Cohen , a Jewish cookbook author, was struck by Manischewitz’s new look during a recent visit to Whole Foods, comparing it favorably to other kosher brands that he said suffered from “an aesthetic that is so old.”

“The rebrand fit in so much better with the rest of the aesthetic of the average grocery store,” he said, “versus old-school Manischewitz branding, which looked like it belonged in a D’Agostino’s .”

Leaving the Matzo Alone

At Manischewitz, there was a recognition that kosher food as a category was “generally in decline” even as consumers were showing more curiosity about different types of food and experiences, Ms. Smith said.

“It feels the cultural tailwinds that are happening seem to be aligning with the right time” for a new look and approach, she said.

Still, it was vital to keep the essence of the brand, Ms. Smith said.

“You can’t make something trendy and cater just to specific up-and-coming generations,” she said. Instead, she said, JKR and Manischewitz focused on “savoring our traditions” and “pausing to appreciate and pay attention to the food.”

That meant leaving some things as they were. Recipes for core items like matzo, gefilte fish and borscht will remain the same.

“If it worked for 130 years, it would be ridiculous to change it,” Charles Herzog said.

(Another thing Manischewitz won’t be touching is Manischewitz wine, which the company doesn’t make. It has licensed its name to a separate wine manufacturer since shortly after the repeal of Prohibition.)

The team at Manischewitz doesn’t have to look far for feedback. Their focus groups are sitting at their dinner tables.

“What we eat on Sabbath is what we sell,” Mr. Herzog said. “If we know that the matzo doesn’t taste good, it’s not from a study, it’s at the table.”

Beyond Passover, Mr. Herzog said the focus will be on expanding the company’s reach to emphasize that Manischewitz is not just a kosher brand, but also a Jewish food brand whose products can be enjoyed by anyone year-round. Think franks and blanks (a take on pigs in a blanket, but with beef) for the Super Bowl, mini potato puffs and cheese blintzes as a passed appetizer, or babka and (frozen) challah at brunch.

Manischewitz will roll out a new line of soups — chicken, tomato and vegetable — this summer, before the fall Jewish holidays. Manischewitz, which makes its matzo in Israel, will make the soups in a new factory it has built there.

“It’s opening the gates,” Mr. Herzog said. “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy a good bowl of chicken soup. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy matzo balls.”

Remy Tumin is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics. More about Remy Tumin

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