The Rest Is Politics - Divided or Dependent? The Real Gen Z Story

Episode Date: May 9, 2026

Are the challenges faced by Gen Z unique or have we seen them before? Do workplaces need a Gen Z strategy, or is there something bigger at play? And, why does it feel like young people's attitudes are becoming more traditional? Vicky Spratt, investigates the Gen Z story and how bad are things really for young people? This week she is joined by generations expert, Professor Bobby Duffy. To hear the whole episode, and the rest of the series sign up at therestispolitics.com STUDENT DISCOUNT: Sign up here with your student email address for a year of TRIP Plus for just £20 Instagram: ⁠⁠@restispolitics⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠@restispolitics⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠ __________ Hosted by: Vicky Spratt Producer: India Dunkley Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Adam Thornton, Lorcan Moullier Researcher: Olivia Taylor Hooper Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Editorial Director: Emily Kent Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to the rest is politics.com. That's the rest is politics. That's the rest is politics, the Gen Z story with me, Vicky Spratt. This week, in divided or dependent, the real Gen Z story, we're going to be unpacking some big myths about generations. We're going to be separating fact from fiction. What do we think we know about Gen Z and what do we really know about them? Are they work shy and difficult to have in the workplace too dependent on their parents?

Or are they a generation that have grown up differently to everybody who came before them? I've just finished interviewing Professor Bobby Duffy. And what he had to say about this was absolutely fascinating. In case you're not familiar with his work, he's the director of the King's Policy Institute. He's written six books, three of which are about generations and the differences or not between them. And really, the message I've taken away from him is we've got far more in common than we like to think. So here's episode two. Have a listen and let us know what you think. And if you are a student and you want to subscribe so you can hear the full episode, you can use your student email at the rest ispolitics.com and you'll get a subscription for the whole year for just £20.

You said something to me recently that I found really, really striking when we were researching this series, which is that one of the biggest mistakes made with Gen Z is assuming that they're completely different to the generations that when we were researching this series, which is that one of the biggest mistakes made with Gen Z is assuming that one. went before them. What did you mean by that? I thought it was fascinating. I just get really tired because I get asked a lot about generational differences and what's real and what's not. And so often people are asking me about things that they ask me exactly the same questions about millennials. I'm very old now. So I've seen this go through a few cycles of generations. And it comes to those points where, you know, the entitled label was exactly the same for millennials. Millennials were called Generation Me. when it first started.

So we just repeat these cycles of putting these types of characteristics on the younger generation, whether that's lazy, entitled. But then on the more positive side that they're particularly socially conscious or they're really into brand purpose and that's all they care about, or they're very entrepreneurial. And hardly any of this stacks up against the data that these kind of cliched shifts are not really backed up. And I just get tired because it keeps coming back generation after generation.

I guarantee it will be the same for Generation Alpha in 10 years or so. People will be making the same claims about these big breaks that we're suddenly seeing. And the reason I suppose the reason I get across about it a little bit is that people try to sell stuff on the back of this. It's whether it's just stories or whether it's a particular brand or product or whether it's consultancy and people saying Gen Z are completely different in the workplace. I need to come in and teach you how to engage with this new cohort of people who have different values, different behaviours. Otherwise, your workforce won't work together. And that makes me really upset because it's kind of exactly the wrong way to frame it. Because if you're coming in and say Gen Z are

really peculiar, all you're doing is adding to that sense of generation separation. and conflict, which is the last thing we need and really not held up by the data. I'm shocked to learn that brands and consultants are trying to monetise generational warfare's and misunderstandings. But there is something going on in the workplace, right? There does seem to be a disconnect between older people and younger people. What can we put that down to? Well, I think the big conclusion I came to in the book is that a real problem is not generational conflict. generational separation. We have drifted apart by age group in a way that we just haven't really

noticed. So if you go back to the 80s and even early 90s and you looked at the age profile of villages through small towns, bigger towns, up to the big cities, there was no difference in measures like the old age dependency ratio, so the proportion of retired people to the proportion of working age people. They were all the same. But then since then, we've just spayed apart in an incredible way where towns and villages are getting older and cities and large towns are getting younger to really big degrees. And I say we haven't noticed it because when we poll people on this and you ask them, do young people tend to live in cities and older people outside?

They say, yes, of course. That's the case. But then if you ask them, was that always been the case? They also say, yes, of course, that's always been the case 50 years ago. And it wasn't. We used to live much more mixed by age. On top of that, I would say, you know, our digital lives are much more important to who we are nowadays. And still the biggest gaps I see in any of my generational analysis is between use of social media platforms and other technological communication behaviors.

So, you know, huge take up among Gen Z steps down to millennials, then bigger steps down to Gen X. And then Baby Boomers and pre-war really not engaging that much. So we're on different platforms doing different things, the very different. intensities in our digital lives too. And then third factor, on top of that, we've lost a lot of the kind of community support connections, whether that's religion, trade unions, more as a social thing rather than a work-based thing, so many community groups. So we've lost a lot of the scaffolding that pushed lots of young people and older people together

in our day-to-day lives. We're still very connected in the home through the family, even more connected than in the past. But outside of the home, we have very little contact across. the age groups compared to the past. Do you think that's because of the decline of community spaces or the third space, as we would call it in sociology? I mean, I remember as a teenager, before I was legally able to drink and after, there was a social club in the town where I lived

that we would go and you would have everybody from 16 through to 90 years old playing pool, cards, drinking, but also not drinking. And those spaces have closed down. Definitely. That is definitely part of it. I mean, I think, and then even a step back from that is those people are no longer living in the same towns and villages or cities to the same degree. So we've actually kind of completely physically separating them, but definitely the loss of our community infrastructure has been part of that too. So you end up with a workplace where people just have had much less contact with people of other age groups outside their own family being pushed together in the workplace and really not understanding each other as much as.

you should. So this is why when I try to talk to people about Gen Z workplace strategies, which is what it's often framed at, is I try to get them to realize that's exactly the wrong question. What you should be talking about is an intergenerational workplace strategy that brings people together. Don't do something special for Gen Z. Try to bring the different generations together. Not just the oldest, include the middle two in this. Trying to get people to that kind of idea is, I think, incredibly helpful and people get it intuitively, but it's so interesting that all the background noise about difference in conflict colors people's view so they don't really see that, that actually it's separation, not conflict, that's the issue.

Sounds like we're trading in quite a lot of lazy stereotypes, which ultimately are making the division greater rather than bringing us closer together. We've had a lot of responses from the trip audience for this series. And just on social media, I wanted to tell you. tell you what Luke, a 23-year-old graduate from Newcastle, had to say essentially that he's incredibly lonely. I can't overstate how lonely the modern world feels. Moving somewhere new, it's hard to find community in the real world, making it difficult to find and make friends. No wonder so many people my age are driven to social media and into their own tribes. What influence and impact has growing up on social media had for this younger cohort.

Yeah, it's definitely huge. It is a completely different way to live, which we haven't really prepared ourselves for. We haven't really changed much about our other behaviours. And I have some issues with the kind of Jonathan Haid thesis about an anxious generation, but it is more sophisticated than it's often discussed. What Jonathan talks about is we have underprotectives, people on young people online particularly children but overprotected them in the real world and it's those two things together that have left people feeling a bit lost and lonely or having to hold on to an identity and you know small niche groups that can lead people astray so I I do recognize that I think that is a really important is those two things together that we've

effectively let the online space run wild while um young people's freedom within the real world. And that has left them quite scared and anxious, as your listener says. So, yeah, it is a key part of shaping this generation. And in a way, definitely more digitally native to that world than previous generation, most of the previous generations, even in millennials. So this is something that they've grown up with as completely, natural, but we've done nothing, I think, to consider the implications of that. And we have let it

rip quite a bit. It's really interesting. What do you think stepping in sooner might have looked like? I mean, I do think, when you think about Jonathan Heights kind of points about how, you know, there is no age of adulthood on the internet. And we just have let people get access to content in a way that we just would not in the real world. So we didn't think enough about how. How do we protect young people and get some proper age verification into these systems sooner? I mean, they're starting it now, but it's really hard. The trouble is, I mean, a lot of our work is more generally on culture wars, and which includes that sense of loneliness and loss that people feel,

because that is a key part of people looking for tribal identities. The trouble is the big answers are around proper regulation and control of these global platforms. When you get to that, you get incredibly stuck on what strengths do we have, what capabilities do we have to control something that is truly global. And again, you're starting to see things inching forward from European Union and others, but they are inching forward 10, 15 years after this has actually been a life-shaping technology for lots of people. So we're way behind on that.

And it looks increasingly difficult for nation states, they have the power to, you know, control that? I mean it's shutting the door after the horse has bolted, right? It's really interesting because what I'm hearing from you is that on the one hand we've got this generation who see really clearly because they've been exposed to so much information, but there is division in the world between older people and younger people, some of it manufactured, some of it down to what they've experienced. But then there's this dependency that's been created for young adults because they've been, you know, wrapped in cotton wool or molly coddled a bit in some ways, but then exposed to quite extreme political material, material about

relationships, pornography, online. And then they are also, many of them, more dependent on their parents, certainly than I was and older generations were financially because of the economic climate, they're entering adulthood in, more likely to live at home longer, more likely to be able to move out and buy a house of their own if they've got homeowner parents who can give them some money, more likely to end up in a good job if they've got wealthy parents who can help them at university and they don't have to work part-time during their degree to pay off their loans. It's a really, really difficult situation to be in and it's not entirely fair, is it? Yeah, no, that dependence on family is a real thing.

So we've seen a massive shift in the past couple of decades to that utter reliance on family to, say, support your first home. So it's now a third of new homeowners rely on gifts from family or friends, and it's almost always parents. So you've got a third of people relying on that now. And it was like 4% in a couple of decades ago. But it is only people at the top end of the wealth spectrum who can afford that. So the vast majority of that comes from the top third of the wealth spectrum in that baby boomer cohort.

So yes, you've got this sense of reliance, but also great inequality and unfairness within the generation on who actually can get that sort of support. Otherwise, then you are stuck with people living at home to much, much longer. So we've gone from about one in five young people living at home in my generation up until their late 20s. And now you've got two and five young people living home. And that's the extra two million people living at home 10 years into their adulthood, 10 years and more into their adulthood. So you've got that kind of choice on the one hand, a lot of support from some parents. And then on the other hand, no choice at all for other groups of just having to stay at home, try to save up. etc. So yes, it's like it is an aggregate overall level. It's giving that sense of greater

dependence on parents. But for some people, that works out really well and it gets them, gets them the leg up. But for other people, it forces you into a situation where it's not one that lots of people would choose. I talk about delayed adulthood in this. And it's a kind of broader theme than just being stuck at home. We are just doing lots of things later. So people are getting married eight years later, having kids four years later than 20, 30 years ago. And all of those changes are just slowing down the development of younger people. So the death of the Saturday job is a real thing. Half of older millennials had a Saturday job. It's a quarter of older children. It's a quarter of older Gen Z had a Saturday job.

We've just seen this collapse in it for all sorts of reasons. And that just gives a bit less exposure to the workplace. So when Gen Z are coming into the workplace or going to university, they've got a little bit less of that real life experience. That does have an effect on how fast people are growing up, how independent they are, et cetera. I mean, I do have a take on that, though, because it is a kind of personal one from just looking at my family,

where my mum left school at 15, went to work in a factory full time at 15, and then that was more or less her career. By the time I was 17, I'd had like 12, 15 terrible jobs, lots that I probably shouldn't have done, dodgy temp agency type work that I shouldn't have been doing and boots and Sainsbury and all those types of things. My daughter at 17,

the only commercial thing that she's ever done is selling stuff on D-pop and Vintyed, and it's stuff that we bought her, and we do all the admin for that, for her. And when I say that to people, it's kind of like, obviously, it's slightly at my daughter's expense, but it's also, but it's more to point out to people that we think that the way we grew up just happened to hit upon the right speed of development for young people. We'd, I think we'd all agree my mum leaving school and working full time at 15 is not a model that we would support. We've got a slight sense, oh, are we Molly coddling this young generation because we're not asking them to do as much? And just by sheer coincidence, the model

we grew up with is exactly the right one. But my daughter has got a 50% chance of living to 90. She's probably going to work for 45 years. Going a little bit slower at the beginning may not be such a stupid choice. It may actually be more natural going forward. So I'm quite relaxed about slowness in some ways for young people in general. The trouble is there's these incredible structural inequalities where some young people are getting loads of help to get started and other young people are getting no help at all. And I think that is a real problem.

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