Defining generations is all about division. We are classified into groups based on when we were born, these are given snappy, headline-friendly labels, and all our attention is directed to the supposed conflicts between them.

We find it much easier to blame particular generations for changes we don’t like than any other kind of demographic grouping. Baby boomers, for example, have taken all the houses, stolen all the wealth and destroyed the planet; millennials are responsible for the end of marriage, the demise of office parties and even marmalade (sales have been falling since 2013).

Of course, older people have always denigrated the young: in 400BC Socrates moaned about the youth of his day and their “bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for elders”. But now we have the tools to communicate these perennial biases at scale.

This is a key feature of what has become a generationally tinged culture war. We’re bombarded with stories of a “woke” generation obsessed with “safe spaces” and fostering a “cancel culture”. But this is a misdirection. It is true that younger people have a different perspective on shifting social norms – but that has always been the case.

Younger generations are just more comfortable with new cultural ideas, because they didn’t grow up with the older ones. In fact, in my analysis of long trends, it’s pretty much a constant that the youngest generation will be twice as comfortable with the latest cultural norm than the oldest: the emergent issues when baby boomers were young adults in the 1980s were women’s roles in the workplace and the acceptability of homosexuality; for young people today, it’s more likely to be gender identity, or how we interpret history. The issues change, but the generational patterns are eerily similar.

The fact that we feel so unusually divided right now has more to do with the period we’re living through than any fundamental generational characteristics.

There are two vital changes in context that help explain this. The first is economic. We have seen an extraordinary increase in private wealth among older people, with baby boomers particular beneficiaries. As a recent Resolution Foundation report shows, this older group owns more than half of all private wealth, seven times the amount owned by millennials. Of course, there is a strong lifecycle element to wealth, in that we build it up as we age. But the chasm is of a different scale to the past, and it’s a pattern repeated in many countries. For example, in the US, when baby boomers were an average age of 45, they owned 42% of the US’s total private wealth. When generation X got to the same milestone, they owned just 15% – and millennials are sure to take this even lower. This is a significant new division, the result of historical circumstance and the protection afforded to the boomers’ interests due to their electoral weight.

Secondly, however, our increased sense of inter­generational division can’t be separated from our new, incredibly divisive information environment. Conflict is clickable, and generational groups are often in the frontline.

I inadvertently created a small example of that fake division through a survey we conducted in 2022, which examined how different generations in the UK viewed each other. One question tested a statement based on an interview with TV personality Kirstie Allsopp, in which she seemed to suggest young people couldn’t afford their own homes because they spent too much on Netflix, gym subscriptions, fancy coffees and foreign holidays. Distressingly, half the public agreed – and, even more distressingly, generation Z were just as likely to agree as older generations.

The current cohort of young people have clearly internalised a sense of self-blame, when the much more important explanations for lower levels of home ownership, for example, are the extraordinary decades-long surge in house prices, stagnating wages and stricter lending rules.

But the key lesson for me wasn’t the rights and wrongs of the assertion – it was how the results of our poll were reported. The headlines across various outlets were all variations of: “Boomers blame Netflix and takeaways for young not owning homes” – despite boomers being no more likely to think that way than anyone else. News sites know a piece that invents a generational division, particularly with boomers as the villains, will be read and shared more.

However, despite all the engineered, exaggerated, and indeed real divisions, we are unlikely to see a breakdown in relations between generations, or even much of a political fightback from younger people. That’s partly because of the tendency they have to blame themselves for their bad fortune – but there are a number of other reasons.

Despite the rhetoric, we’re actually more deeply connected up and down the generations than across them, because of our families. We love our parents and grandparents, and, more selfishly, we want them to keep what they’ve accumulated, or for them to continue to receive all the support they can – because if they don’t, it will reduce what we get or leave us footing the bill. The mindblowing amount of wealth at the top of the age range will flow down eventually. The problem is that it will do so very unevenly – and that also fractures any concerted will for change among younger generations.

The lack of anger and action from young people is frustrating for those of us who believe we desperately need a better generational settlement. But for that to occur, two policy graveyards would have to be traversed: the questions of how to tax wealth, and how to fix the broken housing market. Wealth and housing have become so tied to when you were born that radical action to break the chain of inter­generational privilege seems warranted. Yet this is unlikely given the lack of bitterness we feel towards the people in our lives who would be affected by such a breach. Ironically, the divisions between generations are neither clear nor passionate enough to make a fairer deal inevitable. The task before us is therefore to find another way of bringing that about.

Further reading

Who Are We Now? by Jason Cowley (Picador, £20)

Poles Apart by Alison Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne and Alexandra Chesterfield (Penguin, £10.99)

The Power of Us by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic J Packer (Wildfire, £10.99)

• Bobby Duffy is professor of public policy and director of the policy institute at King’s College London and author of The Generation Divide (Atlantic Books, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.