Let’s Blame Generation Beta

Blaming the younger generation is nothing new. “They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it,” Aristotle wrote in ancient Greece. But naming distinct generations is a novelty. Credited to Gertrude Stein, it began with more sympathy than blame. “All of you young people who served in the war . . . You are all a lost generation,” Stein told Ernest Hemingway to describe the cynicism and disillusion of the 1920s.

Shared historical experiences give any generation a distinct consciousness, Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannhein wrote in 1923. Each cohort who grew up during wars, depression, the baby boom, rapid technological change, or the Covid pandemic shared a different life experience. Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation (1998) honored the men and women who fought in the Second World War and labored on the home front.

Next came the more traditional, conformist generation of the 1950s. After a childhood of depression and war, they craved quiet family life with economic security. An article in Time Magazine in 1951 stated, “The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence.” A high birth rate (baby boom) in families of the silent generation gave rise to a large, rebellious cohort of young adults in the 1960s. They weren’t called boomers till long after the fact.

The slightly bizarre practice of naming and dating every generation is largely a 21st century phenomenon. Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) unintentionally popularized a title for his own cohort, born after the baby boom. The theory of archetypal cycles in Neil Howe’s and William Strauss’s Generations (1991) didn’t catch on, but their term millennials did, meaning those who would come of age around the year 2000.

Classing individuals by year of birth (listed here) risks stereotyping. It also offers a shorthand for real differences, like the job security of the boomers vs. the social media of the millennials. It has become so entrenched that we now name a cohort before it takes form. Instead of “lost,” “great,” or “silent,” after millennials came the placeholder Generations Z and Alpha. Our only certainty about Gen Beta, present-day infants, is that they will think they know everything, and will always be quite sure about it.

Image: Photo by Bill Fairs on Unsplash.