13 to 30 Is Not a Generation

We have become very comfortable talking about generations. Gen Z believes this. Gen Alpha behaves like that. Millennials ruined something else. The categories are convenient because they turn hundreds of millions of people into something that can fit inside a headline.

They are also a strange way to understand a 13-year-old growing up today.

Consider what sits inside the age range of 13 to 30. At thirteen, somebody may still have their phone taken away by a parent before bed. At seventeen, they may be choosing subjects that supposedly determine the rest of their life. At twenty-one, they may be leaving university, caring for family, working full-time, looking for work or doing all four. At twenty-nine, they may be managing people at work while still wondering whether they can afford a home, whether they want children and what exactly being an adult was supposed to feel like.

Calling all of them a generation tells us something about when they were born. It tells us surprisingly little about the lives they are living.

The differences become much larger when we leave the boundaries of a single country. A teenager growing up in a wealthy neighbourhood of Toronto may have more material circumstances in common with a teenager in Singapore than with another teenager several hundred kilometres away. A young woman and young man born on the same day may inherit radically different amounts of freedom. A twenty-four-year-old in a country with a shrinking workforce may enter a labour market desperate for workers; another in a country with a rapidly expanding youth population may be one of thousands competing for each formal job.

This divergence will matter more. UNICEF estimates that the world's child population will remain roughly 2.3 billion into the 2050s, but where those children live will change considerably. South Asia will remain home to one of the world's largest child populations, while Eastern and Southern Africa and West and Central Africa will become increasingly important. At the same time, children will make up a smaller share of many ageing societies. Three in five children are projected to live in cities by the 2050s.¹

The experience of being young is not converging toward one universal childhood. In several important ways, it may be diverging.

Technology complicates this further. Young people are the most connected age group humanity has ever produced. In 2025, 82 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 used the internet globally, compared with 72 per cent of the rest of the population.²

But even that apparently global experience conceals enormous inequality. Youth internet use was estimated at 99 per cent in high-income countries and 38 per cent in low-income countries in the same ITU dataset.² A supposedly shared digital generation does not share the same digital world.

So perhaps generation is not the most useful unit of analysis.

What seems more interesting is transition.

Between roughly 13 and 30, human beings pass through an unusual concentration of transitions. They move from dependence toward autonomy. From education toward work. From families they inherit toward relationships and perhaps families they choose. From identities largely organised for them toward identities they construct for themselves.

They acquire political beliefs, sexual identities, professional ambitions, financial responsibilities and ideas about what a good life looks like.

And the institutions surrounding these transitions are changing at different speeds.

A teenager can access more information than the largest libraries available to previous generations, but still attend a school organised around information scarcity.

A university graduate can use artificial intelligence capable of performing professional tasks that previous generations spent years learning, then discover that employers still want experience for an entry-level position.

A young adult can encounter thousands of potential romantic partners through a screen while finding stable relationships difficult to build.

Someone can technically work from almost anywhere while being unable to afford a home anywhere near the economic centre where the work exists.

This is what interests me about young people now. Not whether they are softer, smarter, more anxious, more entitled or more progressive than the people who came before them.

The more useful question is what happens when the environment in which people are expected to grow up changes faster than our ideas of what growing up is supposed to look like.

There are real reasons for concern. Globally, one in seven 10-to-19-year-olds experiences a mental disorder. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29.³ One in five young people globally was outside employment, education or training in 2023.⁴

But beginning with crisis would be a mistake.

In one of the largest recent surveys of young adults, UNFPA heard from more than 108,000 internet-connected people aged 18 to 39 across 73 countries. Two-thirds said they felt somewhat or very positive about the future despite worries about conflict, economic insecurity and inequality. More than two-thirds wanted to marry or live with a partner. The survey is not nationally representative, but its geographical breadth is a useful warning against assuming that young adulthood is simply collapsing into despair.⁵

Young people are not merely victims of technological and economic change either. They are often its earliest experimenters. They build communities in places adults barely understand, learn skills through systems schools did not create, invent new kinds of work and routinely use tools that institutions are still holding committees to discuss.

The point of Youthful Futures is therefore not to diagnose a generation.

It is to look closely at the environments in which young people are becoming themselves.

Sometimes that will mean asking uncomfortable questions about schools, employers, technology companies, cities and families. Sometimes it will require asking uncomfortable questions about young people themselves. Most often, I suspect, it will mean discovering that the familiar argument between "young people need to change" and "society needs to change" is less useful than we think.

The people who are thirteen today will be thirty in 2043.

Instead of asking what generation they belong to, perhaps we should be asking a harder question.

What kind of adulthood are we preparing them for?