The sneaky new friendship divide between millennials and Gen Z
Whether to share your location is a heated topic, especially among millennials and Gen Z.
As a Gen Zer, I share with 18 people, which my older friends may view as excessive.
Gen X is indifferent, seeing both pros and cons, as social connections evolve post-pandemic.
Do you want to share your location with me? Eighteen of my closest friends and family already do.
On a Tuesday evening in early June, I can map a digital town square of that real-life network. One friend is still at the office; two are at Central Park; another is at home hundreds of miles away from me. These are people who share their location with me, not just for directions, but in perpetuity through the Find My Friends app. I think it strengthens our bonds to observe each other's routines and special outings — even when there's no practical need for it.
To others, location sharing is a nightmare. They see it as an extension of the surveillance state, with their college roommate, jealous partner, or overbearing parent acting as Big Brother. The Washington Post proclaimed that it's "making us miserable."
How you feel about your friends and loved ones being able to see where you are at any given time may represent your current lifestage, how friendships evolve, and technology's role in our relationships.
"This is brand new culturally, historically," Anna Goldfarb, the author of "Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections," told me of the confluence of friends and location-sharing technology. "And it makes sense that people are like, 'what does this mean?' This is something we haven't ever had that technology to do before — much less the space and freedom to do it."
While it's impossible to generalize entire generations' attitudes toward anything, I wanted to find out how location sharing shakes out across the age spectrum. So, I spoke to seven people spanning three generations to get a sense of their feelings about sharing their location. Gen Zers were chill about it; so are Gen Xers. But as millennials approach middle age, location sharing highlights how their friendships are growing — or growing apart.
The location sharing debate represents the journey of growing up in a digital age.
As a geriatric Gen Zer, I'm still at a stage in life where the majority of my friends are single or unmarried, and pretty much none of them have kids. We're living similar lifestyles, often out and about, and I don't encounter many issues with my friends knowing my whereabouts at all times.
That mid to late 20s uncoupledness and childlessness aligns with historical trends: On average, each generation gets married and has kids later in life.
For Aiden Lewis, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student in the Boston area, sharing his location with his family is a matter of convenience.
"The positives really far outweigh the negatives," he said, adding that while it's unlikely he'll be in danger, if he is, his parents would know his whereabouts. "But otherwise, the only risk on my part is minor embarrassment that they saw me out late drinking too much."
A 2022 Harris Poll found that Gen Z, born 1997 to 2012, was the most likely generation to say it was convenient to share their location. For folks like Lewis, location sharing is just another digital tool in their belt.
As Goldfarb, on the border between Gen X and the millennials, said, "When I was younger in my 20s, I would've absolutely loved to know where all my friends are at all times."
As I've progressed through my 20s, location sharing has shown me some shifts that are harbingers of what's to come in the next decade: Couples are together more often. My higher-earning friends, or those in more corporate roles, might show up at nice hotels on a work trip or a more upscale vacation. Others might still be on campus for their graduate degrees. And it felt symbolic when I revoked a former college friend's location-viewing privileges — a sort of closure for a specific period in my life.
Millennials, born 1981 to 1996, are in a life stage that's as bifurcated as their views toward location sharing.
Meranda Hall, a 33-year-old in Brooklyn, operates more like a Gen Zer in this realm. She doesn't have any married friends, and she said she never plans to marry. She and her friends have no qualms about sharing their locations.
"All the people that I share mine with, they're super open about it, and no one is ever anywhere particularly interesting for it to be too much of a debate," Hall said.
For her peers of similar ages but a different life stage, like Goldfarb, location sharing might be more fraught. After age 30, Goldfarb said, friendships start falling off a cliff; people move, have kids, take on different jobs, or prioritize relationships relevant to their careers.
"When you get older, you tend to have different perspectives on your friendships," she said. "You don't need your friends to know where you are at all times when you're older, because you probably have children, spouses, in-laws, there's just different relationships that bubble to the surface in my opinion,"
In my informal surveying, which also included several coworkers, millennials were the most likely to have very strong thoughts on location sharing. Some outright hated it, although still shared with one or two friends, and others felt no need for it, unless they were happily coupled and shared with spouses. Some said they found it to be strangely intimate.
Olivia Bethea, 31, said she only shares with four people. She said she's noticed location sharing coming up more in regular conversations, with people offhandedly referencing that they checked where someone else was. She doesn't see herself expanding her location-sharing circle more.
"A lot of people end up sharing where they are anyway on Instagram and stuff, but I'm finding myself to be a little bit more protective over it," she said. "People can make a lot of inferences from your location, and I just don't want to invite those inferences."
Millennials grew up before everyone carried an always-on GPS device at all times. A concern that I heard repeatedly was about surveillance and willingness to constantly reveal where they were, which doesn't seem to bother the always-tracked and always-online Gen Zers.
"Millennials, it wasn't something that we always had. I guess if you're Gen Z, it's kind of always been a thing," Hall said, adding, "I guess it's just something to be skeptical about."
When I spoke to Gen Xers about location sharing, I was met with a proverbial shrug. The forgotten generation, born 1965 to 1980, doesn't seem to be too pressed about location sharing, although they're not eager to adopt the practice either.
Meredith Finn, a Gen Xer in her 50s in Maine, said she thinks she missed the location-sharing bandwagon completely. It would've been more fun in college, on a night when all her friends were out at different bars.
"I remember nights when we'd go from bar to bar looking for some of our friends, and we'd just miss them," she said. "And it just would've been kind of nice to be able to see where everybody was hanging out. Of course, we didn't have anything like that. We didn't even have cellphones when I was in college."
She said that she'd probably be willing to share her location with a few friends. But if anyone came up to her and asked to share her location, "I think I would say, 'Why? Just send me a text and ask me where I am.'"
Leslie Lancaster, a 47-year-old in California, felt similarly — she said she's shared location when she's navigating somewhere difficult to find on a map, or trying to find friends in rural locations. Lancaster said she can see the benefits of it, but also how it could become controlling in the wrong hands.
"For myself, my husband and I, I don't need to know where he's at all the time. So that's why I probably wouldn't share my location with him, unless I were potentially off on a vacation or a trip where I was not with him," she said.
Both Gen Xers said they could see its utility in a time when folks are struggling to connect or feeling more isolated. Lancaster said she could understand the impulse to see where your friends are, even if you're not actively communicating.
"People are so isolated now. I mean, since the pandemic and a lot of work from home, a lot of people are just in their little bubbles," Finn said, adding that it's rarer to pop into your regular coffeeshop and run into five friends. "It doesn't happen the way it used to."
Like many technological advances, your thoughts on location sharing are a reflection of your own situation. It's at a crossroads of issues facing our social lives: The lack of third spaces has put them into our phones, social circles are shrinking, and we've had to use technology to fill the gaps.
I'm sure Gen Alpha, born 2010 to 2024, will come up with something that horrifies and shocks me (they're already back on Snapchat). As I creep toward age 30, I am thinking about the ways the social contours of my life have changed; in speaking with other Gen Z peers, we all realized we had a few friends we'd fallen out of touch with who were still lingering on Find My Friends. Right now, though, it feels mean to pull the cord.
"I predict that this is something that you're going to change your relationship with," Goldfarb told me. She added, "I think that it's more likely that it's going to be a more concentrated friend group that will need to know this about you."
Do you have strong thoughts or feelings about location sharing? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@businessinsider.com.
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And I thought it'd be really cool if we do something that's a chronological look at the life of an artist — [something that] focuses mainly on comics, [with] a lot of stuff that people have either never seen or it's hard to find. It's the first of a number of chess moves that I've been setting up for a long time. And the gallery is — I would call it a second chess move. I have another announcement later in the summer for a new project. Making graphic novels is not like making comics. You're basically writing a novel, it can take years, and you work with a contract. No one can see the work, so it can be very frustrating. This stack here, this is my current work, and it's all stuff that basically hasn't been published yet. So I thought this was a great way to either reintroduce my work or — I hate the term 'rebrand,' but rebrand myself. In your essay 'Weapons of Choice,' you talk about all these different tools you use, the brushes and pens, the Sumi ink. Has your working style been pretty consistent, pretty analog, for your entire career? I would say mostly. I did start incorporating Photoshop for coloring and textures, kind of late to the game — I'd say it was not 'till around 2003 or so. I developed carpal tunnel around 2010, so I've tried to steer away from digital as much as I can, but I still use it. I mean, I use Photoshop every day. It's just [that] most of what I do is the comics purism of ink on a paper. Do you think of ink on paper as objectively better, or it just happens to be how you work? I don't think it's better, to be honest. I think any tool that works is good. You know, Moebius used to say that sometimes he would draw with coffee grinds, he drew with a fork. And I have some friends, in fact, a number of friends, who are doing highly popular mainstream books, who have gravitated toward digital work, or its various advantages. And I just don't like that. But one thing [is,] I sell original art, and if you have a digital document, you might be able to make a print of it, but there is no drawing. It's binary code. Also, I feel an allegiance to the guys like Alex Toth and Steve Ditko, who took time to teach me things. Moebius, I was friends with him. Frank Miller. We all work in traditional analog art. I feel like I want to be a torchbearer for that. How do you feel about the fact that comics-making is increasingly digital? I think it's inevitable. The genie is out of the bottle at this point. So now it's a matter of being given a new, vivid array of tools that artists can choose from. When you talk to younger artists, do you feel like there's still a lane for them to do analog work? Absolutely. One of the challenges now is, you can download an app, or you can get an iPad Pro and start drawing. I think the learning curve in some ways is a little quicker, and you can fix, edit, and change things that you don't like. But it also means the drawing never ends. One thing I really like about analog art is, it's punishing. [One] piece of advice I got early on was, your first 1,000 ink drawings with a brush are going to be terrible, and you just have to get through those first 1,000. And it was true, it was humiliating — every time I sat down and tried to draw with the brushes, a lot of the work is going to be in your your fingers or your wrists, and it's easy to make mistakes, but gradually you get an authority over the tool, and then you can draw what it is you really see in your mind. Before we started recording, we were also talking about AI, and it sounds like it's something you've been aware of and thinking about. Yeah, sure, I use it all the time. I don't use it for anything creative outside of research. For example, I just wrote an essay on one of my favorite cartoonists, Attilio Micheluzzi. His library is being published by Fantagraphics right now, and I did the intro for the second book. It's amazing, because there's a lot of personal detail about the man that was really, really hard to find, unless you could literally go to — he died in Naples, but he spent a lot of his time in North Africa and Rome. This guy's a man of mystery. But you now can get the dates of his birth and his death, what caused his death, what did he do? And AI helps with that. Or sometimes, I work on story structure. But I don't use it directly to create anything. I use it more like, let's say it's a consultant. My nephew writes [code] and he describes AI as a sociopath personal assistant that doesn't mind lying to you. I've asked AI at times like, 'What books has Paul Pope published?' It's kind of strange, because maybe 80% of it will be correct, and 20% will be completely hallucinated books I've never done. So I tend to take my nephew's point of view on it. You have this skepticism, but you don't want to rule out using it where it's useful. No, absolutely not. It's a tool. It's a very contentious point with cartoonists, and there are important questions about authorship, copyright protection. In fact, I just had dinner with Frank Miller last night, we were talking about this. If [I ask AI to] give me 'Lady Godiva, naked on the horse, as drawn by Frank Miller,' I can spit that out in 30 seconds. Some people might say, 'Oh, this is my art.' But AI doesn't generate the art from the same kind of place that humans would, where it's based on identity and personal history and emotional inflection. It can recombine everything that's been known and programmed into the database. And you could do with my stuff, too. It never looks like my drawings, but it's getting better and better. But I think really, speaking as a futurist, the real question is killer robots and surveillance and a lot of technology being developed very, very quickly, without a lot of public consideration about the implications. Here in New York, at the moment, there's a really great gallery on 23rd Street called Poster House. It's pretty much the history of 20th-century poster design, which is right up my alley. So I went there with my girlfriend last week, and they currently have an exhibit on the atom bomb and how it was portrayed in different contexts through poster art. There was this movement 'Atoms for Peace,' where people were pro-atomic energy [but] were against war, and I kind of liked that, because that's how I feel about AI. I would say, 'AI for peace.' I'm less concerned about having some random person create some image based on one of my drawings, than I am about killer robots and surveillance and drones. I think that's a much more serious question, because at some point, we're going to pass a tipping point, because there's a lot of bad actors in the world that are developing AI, and I don't know if some of the developers themselves are concerned about the implications. They just want to be the first person to do it — and of course, they're going to make a lot of money. You mentioned this idea of somebody typing, 'Give me a drawing in the style of Paul Pope.' And I think the argument that some people would make is that you shouldn't be able to do that — or at least Paul should be getting paid, since your art was presumably used to train the model, and that's your name being used. It's a good question. In fact, I was asking AI before our talk today — I think the best thing is to go to the source — 'compare unlicensed art usage [for] AI-generated imagery with torrenting of MP3s in the '90s.' And AI said that there's definitely some similarities, because you're using work that's already been produced and created without compensating the artist. But in the case of AI, you can add elements to it that make it different. It's not like [when] somebody stole Guns N' Roses' record, 'Chinese Democracy,' and put it online. That's different from sitting down with an emulator for music with AI [and saying,] 'I want to write a song in the style of Guns N' Roses, and I want the guitar solo to sound like Slash.' Obviously, if somebody publishes a comic book and it looks just like one of mine, that might be a problem. There's class action lawsuits on the behalf of some of the artists, so I think this is a legal issue that is going to be hammered out, probably. But it gets more complicated, because it's very hard to regulate AI development or distribution in places like Afghanistan or Iran or China. They're not going to follow American legal code. And then on the killer robot side, you've written a lot and drawn a lot of dystopian fiction yourself, like in 'Batman: Year 100.' How close do you feel we are to that future right now? I think we're probably, honestly, about two years away. I mean, robots are already being used on the battlefield. Drones are used in lethal warfare. I wouldn't be too surprised, within two or three years, if we start seeing robot automation on a regular basis. In fact, where my girlfriend lives in Brooklyn, there's a fully robot-serviced coffee shop, no one works there. And the scary thing is, I think people become normalized to this, so the technology is implemented before there's the social contract, where people are able to ask whether or not this is a good [thing]. My lawyer, for example, he thinks within two or three years, Marvel Comics will replace artists with AI. You won't even have to pay any artists. And I think that's completely conceivable. I think storyboarding for film can easily be replaced with AI. Animatics, which you need to do for a lot of films, can be replaced. Eventually, comic book artists can be replaced. Almost every job can be replaced. How do you feel about that? Are you worried about your own career? I don't worry about my career because I believe in human innovation. Call me an optimist. And the one distinct advantage we have over machine intelligence is — until we actually take the bridle off and machines are fully autonomous and have a conscience and a memory and emotional reflections, which are the things that are required in order to become an artist, or, for that matter, a human — they can't replace what humans do. They can replicate what humans do. If you're trying to get into the business of, let's say comics, and you're trying to draw like Jim Lee, there's a chance you might get replaced, because AI has already imprinted every single Jim Lee image in its memory. So that would be easy to replace, but what is harder to replace is the human invention of something like whatever Miles Davis introduced into jazz, or Picasso introduced, along with Juan Gris, when they invented Cubism. I don't see machines being able to do that. You were talking about the discipline needed to draw with a brush, and one of the things I worry about is, if we increasingly devalue the time and the money and everything it takes for somebody to get good at that, you can't decouple the inventiveness of the Paul Pope who comes up with these cool stories with the Paul Pope who spent all his time making drawing after drawing with brushes and ink. If we think we can just focus on coming up with cool ideas, it's not going to work like that. I do think about this. I think it would be very challenging to be 18, 19, having grown up with a screen in front of you, you can upload an app to do anything, within seconds, and that's just not the way most of human history has worked. I mean, I don't think we're at that term 'singularity' yet, but we're getting really close to it. And that's the one thing that worries me is whether we talk about killer machines or machine consciousness overtaking human ingenuity, it would almost be a forfeit on the part of the people to stop having a sense of ethics, a sense of curiosity, determination — all these old school, bootstrap concepts that some people think are old-fashioned now, but I think that's how we preserve our humanity and our sense of soul. The first big collection of your 'THB' comics is coming this fall, and it sounds like that's also a big part of the Paul Pope rebrand or relaunch, the next chess move. Is it safe to assume that one of the other next chess moves is 'Battling Boy 2'? Yes. It's funny, because for a long time, we had it scheduled — 'Battling Boy 2' has to come out before 'THB' comes out. But there was some restructuring with [my publisher's] parent company, Macmillan, and my new art director came on in 2023 and he said, 'You know what, let's just move this around. We're going to start putting 'THB' out. It's already there.' And I was so relieved because, again, 'Battling Boy' is 500-plus pages, and I'd work on it, then I'd stop working to do commercial work. I work on it. I stop. I work on the movie. It's like I'm driving this high performance car, but it doesn't have enough gas in it, so I have to keep stopping and putting gasoline [in it]. So it's been reinvigorating [to have a new book coming out], because it kick-started everything.
