A screaming child who had his iPad taken might come to your mind. Alpha Kids are reportedly not doing well in school and many are subject to the algorithms of today. They will have a front row seat to the future we are headed towards.
Do you have hope that Generation Alpha will live happy and fulfilling lives?
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Part of how I maintain hope for the future is not buying in to arbitrary divisions like “generations” of people. They didn’t all hatch in a clutch and aren’t remotely homogenous enough to make generalizations about. It’s right up there with race as a really fucking stupid thing to draw conclusions from
I actually do. Gen Z is lost. Social media, COVID, they got fucked.
In California schools have banned cell phones starting next school year. More laws blocking kids under 18 or 16 from using social media are popping up around the world. I think alpha is going to have a shot.
They’re gonna need all the help they can get.
I’m kind of hopeful that as we (xennials and millennials) properly seize the reins of power from the baby boomers that things might start to improve.
I mean, I know a few kids who fit within that arbitrary bracket and they all seem well adjusted. Their parents are all very strict about screen time and encourage their children to join clubs and sports and other social activities. Even all the gen z’s in my own family, and there are quite a few of them, could not care less about social media and most of them live offline lives for the most part.
I think there will of course be a significant number of kids and youths who are attached to the internet in one way or the other, but I think a lot of us in here are the terminally online types who tend to forget that there is a much bigger world out there where a significant number of people live offline lives because the internet does nothing for them interestwise.
I’m the only one in my family who is plugged in and actually knows what the internet is about. I have one other family member who really likes to post stuff on Instagram, but they don’t really know or understand much else about the internet. Not the way I do. But I’m also one of the only socially weird people in my family. I like people, I just suck being physically around them for long stretches of time so I have always leaned towards using the internet for social contact because you can always withdraw when it begins to drain you.
Almost everybody else in my family is a social butterfly who goes out and does things irl. Same with my friends and colleagues and most of my acquaintances. They enjoy offline lives, building communities and spending quality time with their kids. They go to community meetings where they discuss social media usage for their kids and how they want politicians to place more restrictions on children’s and youth’s access to those platforms. They actively work for it.
That’s why I just can’t bring myself to buy in on that whole doomer mentality that the internet loves to circle jerk. There are simply too many people out there in the real world who are too well adjusted and who are too aware of how their kids need to be protected from the internet in ways we weren’t when we were young. Mostly because our parents had no real chance to understand and take charge on the subject.
There are definitely many young people who will end up stuck in the online vortex, who will grow up as iPad babies and be used by their parents to get online attention, but I genuinely think that is a very visible and very loud minority. Most parents today are very much aware and want to give their children their privacy.
And as for all the climate change stuff. Well, that one is harder to change. That has to be a top down decision and it has to be a general willingness among the people to give up conveniences that they refuse to give up. I think that will be up to the younger generations to make that change and I believe in them. I don’t think my generation is gonna be willing to have less, but I don’t know.
In the end, and this might piss some people off, humans have always found a way to adapt and we have always had to adapt to climate change for as long as we have existed. This climate change is one we have contributed to significantly ourselves, but we will figure it out and for the younger generations they will be adjusted to the new normal from birth. It’s not an endorsement of what’s happening. I want us to go full throttle on green energy and green everything, but all the stupid war shit is disrupting the developments a bit. Not stopping them. Just slowing them down. But we will get there eventually.
A lot of things are fucked right now and we get all the bad news at once at every minute of the day to it’s easy to fall into despair, but honestly, I think a lot of things will be balanced out eventually. It just takes time and humans are not very patient when it comes to that part of the equation. Myself included.
Its so crazy to think that there are generations named for their historic “experience”.
Millennials experienced the turn of the century.
OK? Cool? Number 1>2 is apparently a defining quality?
I suppose it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because evidently, we do care about 1>2.
We could have been Generation Y2K!
Y2K panic was a real phenomenon, and it starts with Y.
Missed opportunity…
Anyway, I salute Generation AI
Most of these names are equally vague. The year starting with 1 or 2 was pretty notable for changes in technology. For western countries, very particularly the US, pre/post 2001/09/11 is a very significant divide for public settings, regulated travel, and politics.
Gen X’s name refers to the frequent use of “X” in pop culture and was coined in a book. The Boomer’s experience is being born together in a large cohort. Gen Z means they came after Y, the initial name for millenials, trailing X. Alpha just restarts the alphabet, but in Greek. They’re all vague.
That’s good for alpha!
These generations are arbitrary and just lead to sweeping inaccurate generalisations.
Ok, I’ll rephrase it for you:
Do you have hope that people born after 2013 will live happy and fulfilling lives?
I sure hope not!
I’ll say probably yes, but the world will look very different for them than it did for us. There will be far fewer younger people than today on most continents besides Africa.
They’ll have far more power to shape and change society than most previous generations. Boomers will be almost entirely dead when they Alphas reach adulthood. GenX would be next on the death chopping block, but GenX is far smaller. So lots of jobs will be open and Alphas and Millennials will be holding those positions with GenX mostly in retirement homes. Millennials are saddled with debt and a lack of lifetime earnings while Alphas are looking like they’re skipping a good chunk of that debt burden.
Taxation on working Alphas and Millennials will be monstrous dealing yet another setback for then aging Millennials. Climate change will also wipe out lots of opportunities. Alphas I think might be the generation to finally give the finger to the generations prior that kicked the can down the road and simply let parts of society they don’t care about fall away. Part of that will mean not caring for multiple generations of aging parents and grandparents where the declining birth rate means a single Alpha may have 8 to 10 aging relatives still alive and in need of some kind of support exclusively relying on the Alpha. This would mean 16 to 20 aging relatives for a married Alpha couple. There’s just no way they can support that.
you should factor in climate change and further concentration of wealth into your analysis.
I covered both in my post. One explicit one implicit.
I agree. It’s such a Gen Generation thing to say.
People born in different eras will lead very different lives. Where we choose to draw the line in order to give names to these generations is arbitrary, but the underlying concept is meaningful and we kind of have to just pick somewhere to draw those lines in order to be able to talk about it.
I wish they were at least evenly spaced. Alpha should be 2013 to 2028 rather than ensing in the ‘mid 2020s’. Everything with a 15 year gap should be wider in line with Baby Boomers and those before them, or the baby boomers should be split into two different generations.
Also if their oldest members are 13 yo, then its way too soon for me to pass judgement onto generation alpha. A teacher, parent or healthcare worker might have some insight though
As far as I can tell they’re set for marketing reasons, but they actually represent meaningful epochs and how those events effected people in different stages of life.
World war, depression, postwar expansion, civil rights, cold war, internet, smartphone.
Making them all fifteen or twenty-five years doesn’t make sense.
Is this a “plans are useless but the act of planning is invaluable” kind of thing?
Like arbitrary 15 years increments is basically worthless but you end up with a collection of meaniful epochs inside of those limited frames that it has value again?
Yeah I think so.
These generations are arbitrary
They’re not arbitrary and that’s the problem…
Up to Baby Boomers a gender was defined around cultural/technological change and social events.
WW2 ending and a resulting baby boom fit that. But then capitalism wanted easy ways to categorize consumers.
So they decided every 15 years was “better” even tho it immediately led to “generations” meaning almost nothing.
“Generations” are still valuable demographics, it’s just boomers never understood it and made up their own definition. We need to go back to naming and determining generations once they’re adults and we already know how they’re different and where to draw the line
A whole lot of our current problems are because boomers took something that worked and “disrupting it” without understanding how it works or what it even was.
yes
My daughter is Gen Alpha, 2014. It’s hard to believe she will be a teenager next year, I can’t believe how fast 12 years have flown by.
I really hope this country can start turning things around and Trump becomes a distant memory and women start getting the rights to their bodies back. Will be a long time before that happens in my state.
I think her generation is going to pay heavily for our failures but I believe they come out stronger in the end and more united against what will make their lives hard.
the education in america has been declining for decades, for public schools and many of us probably suffered from the participation grades which fast tracked you out of the school with “passing grades” only to severely struggle in community college even, ive seen so many in remedial courses taking grad school math, not even algebra. reading is a problem too, but writing essays is too advanced for remedial students.
i heard some people wanted to be influencers whent hey grow up, i dont see that much for people who graduate HS currently. not to blame them, but genz already have significant employment problems from getting a degree, as like millineals, even more so for genz. its only getting worst for gen alpha(unless u can afford private school for your children and hope the children isnt already set up to failure by the parents. i used to followed some asian yotubers they put thier child, toddler through private school, but they had to remove him because had behavioral issues due to combination of medication mental issues, the parents are extremely ill equipped to deal with the child, last thing i heard they just “sit at home and do nothing” because the mom is also “directionless in her life, so lazy”, and many of the old fans of thiers said he dint have a chance from the start, due to thier parents own problems, besides being magaty.
also besides that reading/writing, math comprehension is very low for people in HS and college, this isnt going to help them.
Influencer is just the new celebrity. How many of your peers wanted to be famous when they grew up? It is all the same.
I’m worried about the world we’re leaving them
Yes, maybe not the older alphas because they’re too close to zoomers, but definitely the younger. Growing with an enshitified internet, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ll see social media as mostly bullshit their parents are addicted to.
I wonder how will they say “OK millenial”
I believe the new “boomer” term is “unc”
I’m less concerned about the iPad than I am about the world they’re growing up into. The wealth gap keeps getting wider, the job market has made many fields into a catch 22 where you can’t get experience if you don’t have experience, the planet is buring, and fascism is happening.
No, I’ll wait for the release version.
I will always have hope for the future. My country (no, it’s not the USA), our collective global future only truly dies when I (and all of us) stop believing in it
A good point of view. Someone, somewhere will fight the odds and carry on. Someone will love, hate, create art, suffer, exploit and be exploited, create new nonsense jokes and slang, and make the same mistakes. Quite literally until the the last lights go out.
Hope is a good thing to have.
Honestly, they seem kind of dumb, which I’m not blaming them for.
But that could just be the typical “next generation sucks” vibe you get from every aging generation.
I really hope they aren’t actually dumb because that’s going to make my senior years a lot bleaker.
i think its bleaker, since reading and math comprehension is below what it should be when they reach high school. also aspiration of some gen A to be an “influencer” isnt going to help when they get disappointed, and then dont do anything.
