Intergenerational Friendships

The individual and collective value of having friends across different age groups

Photo by Thuận Minh on Unsplash

Dear City Person,

Growing up, my relationship with people who were significantly older or younger than me was limited to family members. I come from a Middle Eastern culture where there is a hierarchy based on age, with older individuals placed higher in the hierarchy.

While I value respecting elders, I find that this hierarchy limits the interactions between generations to a formal level, building a wall that does not let people fully experience or understand and learn from each other. It makes “respect” into a one-way relationship as opposed to a mutual one.

As the younger person, I often felt that I had little to nothing to contribute in conversations with elders and any disagreement with them was seen as disrespectful.

In my undergraduate years in the US, my relationship with anyone significantly older than me was limited to professors, mentors, internship supervisors, family friends, and anyone who could be seen as a “network.”

This created another wall where my relationship with anyone older than me can only be transactional—again not fully experiencing, understanding, or learning from each other. When I started to become more aware of my transactional ways of relating with people older than me in my early 20s, I started to practice being more curious about the other person’s life which helped me experience them in another light as a fellow human being.

As the older person, I have at times found myself mourning what I assumed the younger generation must be missing out on and positioning myself as their “mentor” and “big sister” instead of being curious about what I can learn from them.

We may assume that being older must mean we have seen more of life. While living for more years will make it more likely that we will “see more of life,” this does not mean that we will not miss things on the way. Perhaps the younger person may have had certain experiences or insights that we may have missed on the way to growing up. With the constant societal, technological, and scientific changes that are hard to keep up with, the younger person may be more up to date than us.

In my US years, I had a culture shock about the lack of respect towards elders. In my return to my home country, I had a reverse culture shock about the lack of respect towards youngsters.

I became an adult in the US but when I returned to the UAE, I noticed that I was subconsciously reverting to a child-like way of relating to those older than me. This reduced as I reacclimated to the UAE and reconnected with my confidence but it still has not shifted much with certain family members.

One thing I miss from my Boston years was how much easier it was for me to find spaces where I can connect with people from different age groups in one place. While my social circles and close relationships outside of family and work are still dominantly millennial like me, I am grateful for the few intergenerational friendships I have made on the way especially during my masters degree and beyond.

You may be wondering what is the value in making friends with people from different generations. I will be sharing some of my thoughts on that question here.

Questions for readers before I proceed…

1. Have you had similar or different observations about intergenerational relationships where you live?

2. If you have lived in different cultural contexts, what most surprised you about how people related to each other across age differences in these different cultural contexts?

3. What factors helped or hindered your ability to form intergenerational connections?

You may share your responses by either replying privately to this email using your email provider or clicking on the button below to post a public comment on Substack.

Some house keeping before I dive in…

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The Value of Intergenerational Relationships

1) Expand your perspectives:

I observe that the limited willingness to form intergenerational connections is one among many things that stops urban dwellers from forming connections with their neighbors. We may assume that because of our age difference we will have nothing to bond over. But this is far from true.

One of my elderly friends told me how connecting with her neighbors after her husband left her was cathartic for her. She started by sitting in her front porch more and greeting her neighbors before decorating her front porch to host them there. As a creative person, she was active with fellow artists and performed with fellow musicians whom I observed came from different age groups. In my last visit, she told me how she stopped recording or taking photos of those performances as she believed that doing so would make them “dead.”

Prior to hosting international graduate students in her house, she used to live in an intergenerational community co-op where residents frequently cooked and had meals together. She told me how enriching both experiences have been for her and how much she learned from people of different cultures and age groups.

I myself also learned a lot from her. For one, it was my first time hearing about the concept of a co-op with a shared dining space. I also appreciated how she tries to recreate this in how she eats with the international students she hosts in her dining room. I loved learning about this alternative way of living rather than through living in silos in rented apartments or in privately owned homes.

As a younger woman who at the time of meeting her was living away from family, I got to see a real-life model of how else life can be meaningful outside of traditional expectations of womanhood and adulthood. I also got to learn how one can flourish even after experiencing a heartbreak as great as a life partner of many decades suddenly leaving you.

She herself appreciates learning about my cross cultural experiences and at times asks me questions about social issues millennials and gen Z often bring up in social media and the new terms they are using. But our relationship was not built up from our differences. We bonded over our shared love for the outdoors, herbs, meditation, creativity, cooking, and communal ways of living and were introduced to each other via one of the students she used to host.

A question for readers before I continue…

Have you heard of communal housing alternatives to renting or private ownership? If yes, please do share with me whether in private or in Substack comments!

Click here to read the following article on Vox which confirms how age need not be a barrier to friendship. It also shares tips on how to navigate intergenerational friendships.

Also click here to read another article on Women’s Health that mentions more individual benefits to intergenerational friendships and how to form them. This quote from the article most stands out to me:

“…friendships with those around your age ‘can be challenging because you’re wondering if you’re keeping up with friends’ in similar life stages, says Charlynn Ruan, PhD, a clinical psychologist and founder of Thrive Psychology Group. Like, if you’re single but your friends are all getting engaged, you might have anxiety that you’re “falling behind” in life. However, this pressure doesn’t exist with friends in a different generation because you’re on separate life paths.

Additionally, ‘we may feel the need to change our personalities or behavior because we’re expected [to] show up a certain way around our peers,” says Minaa B. People naturally seek a sense of belonging amongst peers, so you may feel more pressure to abide by your peers’ cultural norms, fashion trends, and hobbies.” —Jacqueline LeKachman (2024), Intergenerational Friendships Offer Countless Benefits—Here’s How to Form your Own, Women’sHealth

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

2) Create a better workplace environment:

Holding biases about our younger or older work colleagues can hurt our ability to work as a team. Friendships or at least friendly interactions with colleagues across generations can help bridge this divide.

According to a Harvard Business Review article, today’s workplaces are the most age diverse compared to the past. Unfortunately, as the author states, not many managers are well versed with how to lead such a generationally mixed workplace which can increase age-based discrimination and poor job satisfaction, teamwork, and performance. What most stands out to me in the article is the following quote:

“Research indicates that younger individuals particularly prefer working with people in their age range. Older individuals also have reasons for not actively seeking age-diverse friendships at work. As seasoned workers climb the organizational hierarchy, their responsibilities and demands increase, limiting their time and interest in connecting with younger colleagues. These trends contribute to a natural age polarization within organizations.

Once established, however, intergenerational friendships can provide a less judgmental or competitive relationship than employees may experience with coworkers of a similar age. Research shows that when we consider someone a peer, we are more threatened by their chances for upward mobility, especially when compared to our own, than with people who are in different life stages and at differing levels of their careers.” —Megan W. Gerhardt (2024), Why We Need Intergenerational Friendships at Work, Harvard Business Review

Click here to read the full article and to find tips on how managers can foster better intergenerational relationships between team members.

Click here to read another article on how to navigate intergenerational clashes in the workplace. This article especially emphasizes the importance of getting to know your colleagues personally “to build trust and find common ground” across the differences which are essential in navigating these clashes.

Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash

3) To improve our communities:

In a world where life expectancy continues to grow at all ages¹, we need to learn how to live together across our generational divides. As our world faces and will continue to face political, economic, climatic, and health crises, we need to learn how to collaborate across our differences, including our differences in age, as it is impossible to tackle any of this in isolation. Friendships, or at least friendly dynamics, across generations are essential in sustaining collaboration through mutual trust and common ground. There are consequences at both an individual and collective level when we operate in silos by age.

For a collective example of one of these consequences, click here to read this 2011 article by David Kingman from Intergenerational Foundation. The article discusses the Arab Spring from the perspective of intergenerational clashes and notes how it parallels with other times in history in other societies. To me this illustrates the importance of listening to and integrating young people’s voices, especially in societies like the Middle East and North Africa that are experiencing a youth bulge unlike in Western countries which are following a different trend.

While the article focuses on the macro impact of excluding youth, I imagine that it would have implications at smaller levels too. Imagine how the people who set policies and lead workplaces and organizations and communities will change what they do if they had more mutually respectful relationships with people across age groups outside their hierarchal family circles. It is hard to care for others whose stories are not a part of your day to day relational circles.

For another collective example, click here to read a 2024 article by David Schultz on The University of Michigan Press Blog on political polarization in America. While the author mentions different economic, historic, and political, and demographic changes that have lead up to polarization, he also emphasizes the strong role that intergenerational clashes have played as illustrated in this quote from the article below:

“The demographic and political orientations of the older Silents and Baby Boomers clash with those of the Millennials and Gen Z. It is this generational clash that is one of the powerful contributing causes of political polarization in the US today, carrying over into partisan identification and policy.” —David Schultz (2024), Generational Politics and Political Polarization in America, University of Michigan Press Blog

A 2022 US national survey of 1,549 respondents aged 18 to 94 on intergenerational collaboration had the following findings I quote below:

“More than four-fifths (80.6%) of survey respondents say they want to work with others 25 years older or younger than themselves to improve the world around them. Majorities say that working together across generations will be good for individuals and the nation. More than half of adults of all generations “strongly agree” that working together is important because it helps generations better understand each other (71.4%), enriches the lives of older and younger (67.7%), and produces better solutions (67.0%). Well over half (60.0%) “strongly agree” that America can better solve its problems if younger and older work together.” —Cogeneration, March 2022 Report, Page 4

However, all participants across all age groups in the survey cited lack of opportunities to connect with people from different generations as the top barrier that prevented them from acting on their desire for intergenerational collaboration. I wonder how much political polarization would be impacted if more people had such opportunities. Click here to read the full report.

Two questions for readers before I end…

1. Do you have experiences with intergenerational friendships whether with someone significantly older or younger than you? Feel free to share with me and let me know if you would like to have your story featured in a future newsletter!

2. What other benefits would you say intergenerational friendships can have individually and collectively?

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I will be taking a break from posting on March 2025 to focus on resting after resigning from my job by end of this month. I will also be taking a break from tech with a few exceptions so I may not be immediately responsive to emails or messages until after April 1st. I wish all who celebrate an early Ramadan Kareem and Eid Mubarak!

April’s newsletter will explore the notion of “third spaces” and “right to the city” and what can we do to create them.

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Hayyakum,

Reema

1. Saloni Dattani, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Hannah Ritchie, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2023) - “Life Expectancy” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy' [Online Resource]