You're probably sick of reading reports about this generation or that generation. Great. Let's stop. The phrase "delayed life stages" doesn't capture what's actually happening — it implies people are doing something wrong, deviating from a proper timeline. What I'd rather call these are Modern Milestones. The milestones haven't gone away. They've just moved.
Demographics Are Destiny
As Auguste Comte observed, demographics are destiny. Let's use 1970 as a baseline — it's when most of today's workforce was born, and it sits right at the border between the youngest Baby Boomers and the oldest Gen-Xers.
In 1970, the average American got their driver's license at 16. Got married and had a kid at 21. Bought a home by 28. Reached peak income between 45 and 54, hit peak net worth about a decade after that. Their health span — the period of genuinely healthy living — ended around 61. Men retired at 65 and died around 75. Women retired earlier, at 56, and lived longer, to about 84.
Now fast-forward to today. The average American gets a driver's license at 19. First marriage is at 29. First child at 28. First home at 35. Peak income is roughly the same — but peak net worth has shifted a full decade, to 65–74. Health span now ends closer to 66. The gender gap in retirement age and life expectancy has both narrowed. Men now die around 85, women around 89.
Those are averages. Beneath them are stories. The share of 18-year-olds with a driver's license fell from 80% to 60% between 1983 and 2022. The share of Americans with a college degree nearly quadrupled. The share of 30-year-olds who own a home dropped from roughly half to one in three. And the share of 25-to-34-year-olds living with their parents was at an all-time low of 8% in 1970. Now it's closer to 25%.
One stat underlies all the rest: 1970 is also when income inequality really started to widen. Since 1979, the top 1% have seen their income rise over 300%. For the middle 60% of households, it's gone up about 75%. The wealth disparity is even starker. This isn't just a generational story. It's an economic one.
A New Model of Life Stages
The net effect is that we have life stages that are compressed, stretched, and in two cases, entirely new.
Twentysomethings. This is the biggest and most misunderstood new life stage. As major milestones shift from their historical timing to their modern timing, a space opens up that simply didn't exist before: nearly a decade between finishing school and taking on the responsibilities of marriage, kids, and homeownership. This group has some income, relatively low obligations, and is making early decisions about everything from finances to brand loyalty. They're not a generation — they're a life stage, and they'll cycle through it and into the next one.
Parenting. This is now a compressed life stage, squeezed between when your kids are born and when your own parents reach the end of their health span and start needing care. You have less breathing room than your parents did.
Stuck-in-the-Middle-Ages. This is the sandwich generation — but it's not a generation, it's a life stage. A much longer one than it used to be, because as you have your kids later (at 30 instead of 20), those kids are now 30-year-olds still living at home at the same time your parents are in their 70s and 80s and need more support. You are simultaneously a caregiver on two fronts, and you haven't hit peak net worth yet.
Empty Nests. This is now compressed. Your kids move out later, and your parents are still with you longer. The window where you have the house to yourself and no one to care for has shrunk considerably.
Omnigenarians. On the far end of the spectrum, this is the new extended life stage that nobody talks about nearly enough. It's my blanket term for septuagenarians, octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians — the growing population living in the gap between their health span and their lifespan. The United States has the largest gap between health span and life expectancy in the industrialized world. This is a fast-growing group with distinct needs, and it's largely ignored by marketers still designing for people in their thirties.
The Cohort vs. Life Stage Question
Here's where it gets strategically important — and where a lot of research goes wrong. It's very easy to look at data comparing 18-to-24-year-olds and 25-to-34-year-olds, see a difference, and conclude "oh, this generation is just different." When in reality, all that's different is the older group has kids.
At Ipsos, we call this the cohort-versus-life-stage distinction. Cohort effects are things genuinely different about one generation versus another. Life stage effects are things that change predictably as people age. Mistaking one for the other leads to bad strategy.
Take alcohol. Gen Z is drinking less than other generations drink now — and less than those generations drank when they were the same age. Is this a permanent cohort shift, or is it a life stage thing that will change once they have more stress, more social obligations, more occasions? Probably some of both, but we won't know for years. The right answer for a brand isn't to panic or celebrate — it's to keep asking the question and watch the trend line.
Take investing and risk. Young men in particular are over-indexing on prediction markets, crypto, sports betting, and high-risk financial products. Overconfidence is what makes those markets work — as Dartmouth professor Eric Zitzewitz has pointed out, the business model of prediction markets depends on most people losing. Is that overconfidence a generational trait or a life stage one? To me, it looks like life stage. No demographic in human history has been more overconfident than young men before they have obligations. As they age through Modern Milestones — as they have kids, take on mortgages, accumulate something to actually lose — their relationship with risk will change. The question for financial services is whether you're going to be there when it does, or whether you've written off the relationship because they weren't buying what you were selling at 24.
I shot The Rolling Stones when I was a concert photographer. If the Baby Boomers had smartphones at Woodstock, do you think they would've kept them in their pockets? Or would they have been taking selfies and streaming the music, exactly like today's concert-goers? Some of what we call generational behavior might just be human behavior at a particular life stage, with whatever technology happens to be available.
What Teens Tell Us About the Future
One hopeful data point: teenagers today aspire to the same milestones their parents reached. They want to get married. They want kids. They want to own a home. The Modern Milestones framework isn't describing a break in the chain — it's describing a shift in the timeline. About 85% of women eventually become mothers. The catch-up rate has remained strong. People are not opting out of life's major events, they're arriving at them later and with different economic circumstances than the model was built around.
What teens are also telling us, though, is that they're going to get there through a very different set of experiences. During a pandemic-era panel I attended, a teenager said something that stuck with me: "We're the guinea pig generation for all of this tech. You have no idea what growing up with social media will do to us." She was right. We won't know for decades. That's not a reason to ignore them — it's a reason to keep watching.
What This Means for Your Business
I've adapted this from urbanist Gil Peñalosa: design for 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds, and you'll likely work for everyone in between. The same principle applies here. If you're building products, messaging, or research around a model of adulthood from 1970, you're designing for a life that most people aren't living anymore.
Practically speaking: understand which of your customers are in which life stage, not just which generation they were born into. Be there at the right transitions. If your model is to grow with customers over time, recognize that "growing up" means something different for them than it meant for you. The milestones are still coming — they're just arriving on a different schedule.
And if there's a trend line you wish you had started a decade ago, start it now. The best time to put a question in the field is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.