How is a new generational boundary decided on before the kids are even born? I have the same question regarding the boundary between Gen Z/α. How can we, right now, know that a kid born in 2022...
How is a new generational boundary decided on before the kids are even born? I have the same question regarding the boundary between Gen Z/α. How can we, right now, know that a kid born in 2022 will belong to a different generation than one born in 2025?
Broadly speaking, in my mind, generations should be split based on shared experience or cultural events. E.g. the Greatest Generation came of age or fought WWI, the Silent Generation came of age during the Great Depression or fought WWII, the Boomers came of age after WWII, etc. You could generally determine someone's generation based on their response to, "Which of the following events was most impactful to you - WWI, the Depression, WWII, the Kennedy assassination, the space shuttle explosion, 9/11, or COVID?" How can we possibly know that some important event will differentiate between Gen α/β?
Generational boundaries are extremely arbitrary anyway, and they would be no less arbitrary if they waited to decide when a new one starts. They're pretty much all a 20-year-ish span, and the...
Generational boundaries are extremely arbitrary anyway, and they would be no less arbitrary if they waited to decide when a new one starts. They're pretty much all a 20-year-ish span, and the borders between generations have always been pretty silly. I'm born in 1996 and it's patently ridiculous to argue over whether I have more in common with someone born in 1982 or someone born in 2010 -- they're both going to have had extremely different experiences than me in many ways. Your "shared experiences" metric has the same problem, unless we get much more granular with the categories. And that's assuming people agree with you on what the cornerstone experiences for each category should be
Generations are just things we made up, though, so we can determine what generation someone's in pretty much whenever we feel like defining them. They are not categories that people are assigned to based on anything more rational or granular than very broad time-based categorization, so there is no reason to artificially delay deciding when the new 20-year category is.
Neither someone born in 2022 nor someone born in 2025 would be considered someone whose childhood was during COVID. They're both post-COVID. Covid didn't line up neatly with generations, so kids...
Neither someone born in 2022 nor someone born in 2025 would be considered someone whose childhood was during COVID. They're both post-COVID. Covid didn't line up neatly with generations, so kids who grew up during COVID are split between younger gen Z and older gen alpha.
That’s true, I think in my mind COVID ends in 2023 when China stops the lock downs as well (although I acknowledge the impact of this in the west will have been minimal).
That’s true, I think in my mind COVID ends in 2023 when China stops the lock downs as well (although I acknowledge the impact of this in the west will have been minimal).
I was surprised to read on one of the articles that they chose to restart the naming convention as generations Alpha and Beta are so shaped by the technological change they’re born into. This...
I was surprised to read on one of the articles that they chose to restart the naming convention as generations Alpha and Beta are so shaped by the technological change they’re born into. This allows for a visual representation that they’re going to be very different from previous generations.
It's not just because they reached the end of the alphabet, and using letters rather that other markers like greatest generation or baby boomers means that people can apply the widest span of...
It's not just because they reached the end of the alphabet, and using letters rather that other markers like greatest generation or baby boomers means that people can apply the widest span of meanings to generational cohorts that don't exist as monoliths?
One thing to add that I haven't seen mentioned in skimming: Writers are always looking for something to write about. Often they're hoping for clicks and engagement. Generation group articles and...
One thing to add that I haven't seen mentioned in skimming: Writers are always looking for something to write about. Often they're hoping for clicks and engagement. Generation group articles and posts get a lot of clicks, have done for a while now.
It's trite and shallow and silly but people respond to it so writers fill the demand and help create more demand in the process.
I agree with others who suspect it has something to do with ancient group/tribe impulses. Personally I'm finding it increasingly boring and I doubt I'm alone, maybe we'll start to see less of it.
One other bit: generational trends are big in marketing and branding. So there's a lot of attention focused on generations to figure out if we need new ways to sell them shit. You don't need to name and separate generations to accomplish the goal though, it's really about cultural trends which are driven in part by the generation most recently entering the conversation but not anywhere close to wholly. For example hipsterism dramatically changed marketing once they got ahold of it and started co-opting it but it comfortably spanned generations and is still impacting trends in gen Z.
As a casual way to refer to big groups of people generically I'm ok with generation names, as a topic for clickbait I put it only slightly above listicles on the content generation food chain.
As vague slang, sure, why not, though the last few names have been disappointingly lazy. This is the first I've seen anyone claim there are well-defined boundaries to them, though, and I...
How do you feel about generational naming?
As vague slang, sure, why not, though the last few names have been disappointingly lazy.
This is the first I've seen anyone claim there are well-defined boundaries to them, though, and I emphatically don't like it. None of this works that way. Humans aren't born in distinct waves like that. A pair of people born in similar circumstances on 31 December 2024 and 1 January 2025 will live through essentially the same timeline; a pair born on opposite ends of any explicitly defined generation won't. My partner and I are both "millennials", only four years apart, and I remember lots of things she doesn't.
The grumpy old lady in me says this is yet another effort to assign pointless labels to groups of people because humans love having ingroups and outgroups.
I don't necessarily believe this to be a practice humans actively enjoy, but that this cataloguing is a byproduct of the "rationalizing" human mind. To comprehend something is to define it, and to...
The grumpy old lady in me says this is yet another effort to assign pointless labels to groups of people because humans love having ingroups and outgroups. (emphasis added)
I don't necessarily believe this to be a practice humans actively enjoy, but that this cataloguing is a byproduct of the "rationalizing" human mind. To comprehend something is to define it, and to define it means identifying the place in our lives it exists.
Human categorization has big downfalls, past that of the arbitrary markers of social generations, we can point to. The fact that there is no such thing as fish (as we understand this group collectively), or vegetables. I think back to the funny story involving Diogenes', BEHOLD, A MAN! *holds up a plucked chicken*, fiasco.
Anthropologically, there is an argument that the categorizing of people is a left-over genetic imprint on humans from our origin as tribal-unit/family-unit style of creature.(this being necessary to the survival of the species in the early Homo scene. We psychologically require a group to belong to as a result.)
From the tone portrayed in your commentⁿ, it feels like your attitude would be to describe this trend in humans as a purposeful attempt to marginalize groups perceived as "other", is this the case?
n: "Yet another effort", "assign pointless labels", "love having".
I think even the vague type can be used for marginalization ("ok boomer") but mostly this is one of the less harmful sorts of group-forming. I grumble about it because I think it's a bad habit...
From the tone portrayed in your commentⁿ, it feels like your attitude would be to describe this trend in humans as a purposeful attempt to marginalize groups perceived as "other", is this the case?
I think even the vague type can be used for marginalization ("ok boomer") but mostly this is one of the less harmful sorts of group-forming. I grumble about it because I think it's a bad habit that we shouldn't be encouraging at scale, not because every instance of it is harmful.
As for whether it's purposeful: I don't know, what is "purposeful"? If people do something knowingly and intentionally, but they're doing it due to mostly-invisible psychological or social pressures, is that "purposeful"? I tend to answer this sort of semantic question by just shrugging and switching to more precise language.
It's a worthy grumble. Your well-reasoned grumbling about it opened up this avenue of discourse I get to enjoy with you, which I find valuable. I've seen the results of this, like your example of...
I grumble about it because I think it's a bad habit that we shouldn't be encouraging at scale, not because every instance of it is harmful.
It's a worthy grumble. Your well-reasoned grumbling about it opened up this avenue of discourse I get to enjoy with you, which I find valuable. I've seen the results of this, like your example of "OK Boomer", or that we perceive younger people as less worldly°, or older generations as the cause of our problems°. I could yammer about this for ages. It's exciting material to philosophically wax on. I agree with you, though, I don't believe this is behavior we should encourage.
As for whether it's purposeful: I don't know, what is "purposeful"? If people do something knowingly and intentionally, but they're doing it due to mostly-invisible psychological or social pressures, is that "purposeful"? I tend to answer this sort of semantic question by just shrugging and switching to more precise language. (emph. added)
Wow! I understand this is likely a rhetorical question. If we take it as non-rhetorical, though, there are so many conversations that could be had, so many arguments to be made for either side.
What are your thoughts on that question?
To provide a lexical definition, being purposeful means to do something…
…in a thoughtful and focused way, with a serious desire to accomplish something.
Now, I have personal problems with holding lexical definitions as an absolute authority on word-meaning, but I think it's a good platform to expand upon.
I'd think to consideration on whether or not something is "purposeful" would depend on what level, or category, of social pressure it comes from. Like, bullying a classmate is a result of unspoken social pressure, and I'd consider that purposeful.
I'd have to develop my line of thinking on this more to be able to have a concrete answer for you, even if that answer is to shrug and switch to more precise language.
It depends. You can do something with a purpose, and then have different effects come of it than you intended. Are you asking about the action or its effects? (Behold, I have invented...
It depends. You can do something with a purpose, and then have different effects come of it than you intended. Are you asking about the action or its effects? (Behold, I have invented consequential and deontological ethics.)
Like, if I come from a weird alien culture where we all lack facial pain receptors and greet each other with a slap to the face, and I land on your planet and walk up to you and intentionally slap you in the face really hard, that's clearly purposeful in the sense that I definitely meant to do it, but I didn't purposefully cause the resulting facial pain.
Or more relevantly, one can purposefully draw lines around various groups of humans as a means of categorization (ideally more fuzzy lines than the nonsense this article is doing), without intending any resulting marginalization. Or one can draw those same lines with the explicit intent to marginalize people. Both happen all the time, with any conceivable type of lines you can draw between groups of humans, and aiming for the first doesn't mean you won't hit the second or your grouping won't get co-opted by people to do the second. Hopefully, having the group defined was beneficial enough to offset those negative effects.
I think my gripe with this article specifically, then, is the lack of effect-purposefulness. You can study the effects of things on different generations, but the buckets here are entirely too wide to do so effectively. That sets off my "we don't actually have a good reason for drawing the category lines where we did" alarms in much the same way e.g. zodiac signs do. The best case for that sort of grouping is when they turn out pointless but harmless.
Naming is meh, but it kinda got baked in with Gen X. As a generation, stories of a pre-internet time (especially in Western countries) will be relegated to their grandparents (late Boomers,...
Naming is meh, but it kinda got baked in with Gen X.
As a generation, stories of a pre-internet time (especially in Western countries) will be relegated to their grandparents (late Boomers, early/mid Gen X). That will be quite interesting.
I think there's plenty of millennials who will have children in the next few years that still remember a time before the internet was a part of their daily lives, even if it technically existed....
As a generation, stories of a pre-internet time (especially in Western countries) will be relegated to their grandparents
I think there's plenty of millennials who will have children in the next few years that still remember a time before the internet was a part of their daily lives, even if it technically existed. After all, the trend is people becoming parents later in life, and plenty of people born in the 1980s and early 90s could still have children. I found a US Census survey from 2000 that said only 30% of children aged 3-17 used the internet at home at the time. And the US was one of the earliest adopters of private internet access. The internet has only been available to the general public since around 1990, and didn't really become an everyday fixture of most children and young adults' lives until the early 2000s. Even in highly developed countries.
Maybe this is a good time and place to ask this. Why are generations being described/defined as 15 years in length? I was just looking at the Wikipedia chart on [western] generations and, while...
Maybe this is a good time and place to ask this. Why are generations being described/defined as 15 years in length? I was just looking at the Wikipedia chart on [western] generations and, while the timelines don't match up exactly with the article(s) linked, it also shows a new generation beginning every 15 years.
I always grew up with this definition, knowing that there was some wiggle-room (20-35 years):
The average amount of time needed for children to grow up and have children of their own, generally considered to be a period of around thirty years, used as a measure of time.
Growing up, I remember my parents saying that my cohort was on the cusp of Gen X. The chart above puts me solidly in the middle of Gen Y. Crazy. It seems like the whole generational chart on Wiki is aligned to 15-year stints beginning with the birth year of 1927 being the last year for the generation that could have served in WWII (1927 + 18 = 1945, the year that all remaining Axis powers capitulated). If one were to take today as the actual start of Gen β (which is going to be such a toxic term in today's internet, lmao), then you'd have to walk Gen GI back 3 whole years, so the last of that cohort would be 1924? It doesn't make sense.
I feel like this has jumped the shark. Much like how people were celebrating Y2K as the beginning of the new millennia.
I feel the same way. Generations are defined by the World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, 9/11, the Mortgage Depression, COVID, etc etc, not by a round number of years. We have no way of...
I feel the same way. Generations are defined by the World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, 9/11, the Mortgage Depression, COVID, etc etc, not by a round number of years. We have no way of knowing (but apparently plenty of people guessing) what will be the defining event for the generation being born today.
How is a new generational boundary decided on before the kids are even born? I have the same question regarding the boundary between Gen Z/α. How can we, right now, know that a kid born in 2022 will belong to a different generation than one born in 2025?
Broadly speaking, in my mind, generations should be split based on shared experience or cultural events. E.g. the Greatest Generation came of age or fought WWI, the Silent Generation came of age during the Great Depression or fought WWII, the Boomers came of age after WWII, etc. You could generally determine someone's generation based on their response to, "Which of the following events was most impactful to you - WWI, the Depression, WWII, the Kennedy assassination, the space shuttle explosion, 9/11, or COVID?" How can we possibly know that some important event will differentiate between Gen α/β?
We can't know the difference. This is just someone talking to talk.
Generational boundaries are extremely arbitrary anyway, and they would be no less arbitrary if they waited to decide when a new one starts. They're pretty much all a 20-year-ish span, and the borders between generations have always been pretty silly. I'm born in 1996 and it's patently ridiculous to argue over whether I have more in common with someone born in 1982 or someone born in 2010 -- they're both going to have had extremely different experiences than me in many ways. Your "shared experiences" metric has the same problem, unless we get much more granular with the categories. And that's assuming people agree with you on what the cornerstone experiences for each category should be
Generations are just things we made up, though, so we can determine what generation someone's in pretty much whenever we feel like defining them. They are not categories that people are assigned to based on anything more rational or granular than very broad time-based categorization, so there is no reason to artificially delay deciding when the new 20-year category is.
I agree with you. However, in this case could you not argue that being a child during Covid and post Covid is very different?
Neither someone born in 2022 nor someone born in 2025 would be considered someone whose childhood was during COVID. They're both post-COVID. Covid didn't line up neatly with generations, so kids who grew up during COVID are split between younger gen Z and older gen alpha.
That’s true, I think in my mind COVID ends in 2023 when China stops the lock downs as well (although I acknowledge the impact of this in the west will have been minimal).
I was surprised to read on one of the articles that they chose to restart the naming convention as generations Alpha and Beta are so shaped by the technological change they’re born into. This allows for a visual representation that they’re going to be very different from previous generations.
It's not just because they reached the end of the alphabet, and using letters rather that other markers like greatest generation or baby boomers means that people can apply the widest span of meanings to generational cohorts that don't exist as monoliths?
One thing to add that I haven't seen mentioned in skimming: Writers are always looking for something to write about. Often they're hoping for clicks and engagement. Generation group articles and posts get a lot of clicks, have done for a while now.
It's trite and shallow and silly but people respond to it so writers fill the demand and help create more demand in the process.
I agree with others who suspect it has something to do with ancient group/tribe impulses. Personally I'm finding it increasingly boring and I doubt I'm alone, maybe we'll start to see less of it.
One other bit: generational trends are big in marketing and branding. So there's a lot of attention focused on generations to figure out if we need new ways to sell them shit. You don't need to name and separate generations to accomplish the goal though, it's really about cultural trends which are driven in part by the generation most recently entering the conversation but not anywhere close to wholly. For example hipsterism dramatically changed marketing once they got ahold of it and started co-opting it but it comfortably spanned generations and is still impacting trends in gen Z.
As a casual way to refer to big groups of people generically I'm ok with generation names, as a topic for clickbait I put it only slightly above listicles on the content generation food chain.
What's in store for them do you think? How do you feel about generational naming?
As vague slang, sure, why not, though the last few names have been disappointingly lazy.
This is the first I've seen anyone claim there are well-defined boundaries to them, though, and I emphatically don't like it. None of this works that way. Humans aren't born in distinct waves like that. A pair of people born in similar circumstances on 31 December 2024 and 1 January 2025 will live through essentially the same timeline; a pair born on opposite ends of any explicitly defined generation won't. My partner and I are both "millennials", only four years apart, and I remember lots of things she doesn't.
The grumpy old lady in me says this is yet another effort to assign pointless labels to groups of people because humans love having ingroups and outgroups.
I don't necessarily believe this to be a practice humans actively enjoy, but that this cataloguing is a byproduct of the "rationalizing" human mind. To comprehend something is to define it, and to define it means identifying the place in our lives it exists.
Human categorization has big downfalls, past that of the arbitrary markers of social generations, we can point to. The fact that there is no such thing as fish (as we understand this group collectively), or vegetables. I think back to the funny story involving Diogenes', BEHOLD, A MAN! *holds up a plucked chicken*, fiasco.
Anthropologically, there is an argument that the categorizing of people is a left-over genetic imprint on humans from our origin as tribal-unit/family-unit style of creature.(this being necessary to the survival of the species in the early Homo scene. We psychologically require a group to belong to as a result.)
From the tone portrayed in your commentⁿ, it feels like your attitude would be to describe this trend in humans as a purposeful attempt to marginalize groups perceived as "other", is this the case?
n: "Yet another effort", "assign pointless labels", "love having".
I think even the vague type can be used for marginalization ("ok boomer") but mostly this is one of the less harmful sorts of group-forming. I grumble about it because I think it's a bad habit that we shouldn't be encouraging at scale, not because every instance of it is harmful.
As for whether it's purposeful: I don't know, what is "purposeful"? If people do something knowingly and intentionally, but they're doing it due to mostly-invisible psychological or social pressures, is that "purposeful"? I tend to answer this sort of semantic question by just shrugging and switching to more precise language.
It's a worthy grumble. Your well-reasoned grumbling about it opened up this avenue of discourse I get to enjoy with you, which I find valuable. I've seen the results of this, like your example of "OK Boomer", or that we perceive younger people as less worldly°, or older generations as the cause of our problems°. I could yammer about this for ages. It's exciting material to philosophically wax on. I agree with you, though, I don't believe this is behavior we should encourage.
Wow! I understand this is likely a rhetorical question. If we take it as non-rhetorical, though, there are so many conversations that could be had, so many arguments to be made for either side.
What are your thoughts on that question?
To provide a lexical definition, being purposeful means to do something…
Now, I have personal problems with holding lexical definitions as an absolute authority on word-meaning, but I think it's a good platform to expand upon.
I'd think to consideration on whether or not something is "purposeful" would depend on what level, or category, of social pressure it comes from. Like, bullying a classmate is a result of unspoken social pressure, and I'd consider that purposeful.
I'd have to develop my line of thinking on this more to be able to have a concrete answer for you, even if that answer is to shrug and switch to more precise language.
○: Generalization/ painting with broad strokes
It depends. You can do something with a purpose, and then have different effects come of it than you intended. Are you asking about the action or its effects? (Behold, I have invented consequential and deontological ethics.)
Like, if I come from a weird alien culture where we all lack facial pain receptors and greet each other with a slap to the face, and I land on your planet and walk up to you and intentionally slap you in the face really hard, that's clearly purposeful in the sense that I definitely meant to do it, but I didn't purposefully cause the resulting facial pain.
Or more relevantly, one can purposefully draw lines around various groups of humans as a means of categorization (ideally more fuzzy lines than the nonsense this article is doing), without intending any resulting marginalization. Or one can draw those same lines with the explicit intent to marginalize people. Both happen all the time, with any conceivable type of lines you can draw between groups of humans, and aiming for the first doesn't mean you won't hit the second or your grouping won't get co-opted by people to do the second. Hopefully, having the group defined was beneficial enough to offset those negative effects.
I think my gripe with this article specifically, then, is the lack of effect-purposefulness. You can study the effects of things on different generations, but the buckets here are entirely too wide to do so effectively. That sets off my "we don't actually have a good reason for drawing the category lines where we did" alarms in much the same way e.g. zodiac signs do. The best case for that sort of grouping is when they turn out pointless but harmless.
Naming is meh, but it kinda got baked in with Gen X.
As a generation, stories of a pre-internet time (especially in Western countries) will be relegated to their grandparents (late Boomers, early/mid Gen X). That will be quite interesting.
I think there's plenty of millennials who will have children in the next few years that still remember a time before the internet was a part of their daily lives, even if it technically existed. After all, the trend is people becoming parents later in life, and plenty of people born in the 1980s and early 90s could still have children. I found a US Census survey from 2000 that said only 30% of children aged 3-17 used the internet at home at the time. And the US was one of the earliest adopters of private internet access. The internet has only been available to the general public since around 1990, and didn't really become an everyday fixture of most children and young adults' lives until the early 2000s. Even in highly developed countries.
I thought growing up pre internet childhood was a defining feature of the millennial generation
Maybe this is a good time and place to ask this. Why are generations being described/defined as 15 years in length? I was just looking at the Wikipedia chart on [western] generations and, while the timelines don't match up exactly with the article(s) linked, it also shows a new generation beginning every 15 years.
I always grew up with this definition, knowing that there was some wiggle-room (20-35 years):
Growing up, I remember my parents saying that my cohort was on the cusp of Gen X. The chart above puts me solidly in the middle of Gen Y. Crazy. It seems like the whole generational chart on Wiki is aligned to 15-year stints beginning with the birth year of 1927 being the last year for the generation that could have served in WWII (1927 + 18 = 1945, the year that all remaining Axis powers capitulated). If one were to take today as the actual start of Gen β (which is going to be such a toxic term in today's internet, lmao), then you'd have to walk Gen GI back 3 whole years, so the last of that cohort would be 1924? It doesn't make sense.
I feel like this has jumped the shark. Much like how people were celebrating Y2K as the beginning of the new millennia.
I feel the same way. Generations are defined by the World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, 9/11, the Mortgage Depression, COVID, etc etc, not by a round number of years. We have no way of knowing (but apparently plenty of people guessing) what will be the defining event for the generation being born today.
noted, I'll post the actual sources going forward. Thanks for explaining.
If you find another source you can tag one of our helpful mods and they'll update the link
@mycketforvirrad https://www.axios.com/2025/01/01/generation-beta-born-2025-2039 might be a better source than a news aggregator in that case.
Switched!