Blame millennials. Just add it to the list.
Before the 2010s, when the term “millennial” took off – before the online think-pieces and incendiary headlines, before the corporate-mandated workshops on how to work with this group of young, new people – the idea of “generations” was rarely discussed outside the realm of demographers or academics.
Sure, some groups, such as the baby boomers, had a general understanding around who they were and where they stood in the course of history. But to hear people describing themselves as “baby boomers” or “Gen Xers” was uncommon, at least among the masses.
Here is a look at the names and dates for the last eight generations.
Generation Beta starts this year.
Greatest
Generation
1901-1927
Silent
Generation
1928-1945
Millennials/
Generation Y
1981-1996
Zoomers/
Generation Z
1997-2010
Generation
Alpha
2011-2024
Generation
Beta
2025-2039
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: parents.com
Here is a look at the names and dates for the last eight generations.
Generation Beta starts this year.
Greatest
Generation
1901-1927
Silent
Generation
1928-1945
Millennials/
Generation Y
1981-1996
Zoomers/
Generation Z
1997-2010
Generation
Alpha
2011-2024
Generation
Beta
2025-2039
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: parents.com
Here is a look at the names and dates for the last eight generations. Generation Beta starts this year.
Greatest
Generation
1901-1927
Silent
Generation
1928-1945
Millennials/
Generation Y
1981-1996
Zoomers/
Generation Z
1997-2010
Generation
Alpha
2011-2024
Generation
Beta
2025-2039
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: parents.com
All of this changed around 2010. This is when the idea of “millennials” hit peak popularity – when Time Magazine devoted an entire cover to the “lazy, entitled narcissists,” when it became a national pastime to dunk on this new, young cohort. Suddenly, generational traits became the subject of endless discussion.
The discussion has only intensified since. Today, the names we give to the different generations, whether it’s “millennial” or “Gen Z,” have become everyday vernacular. Online, we use the names to describe ourselves and each other. They’re labels as essential to our identity as gender, race or religion. On social media, we use them as shorthand to label who we are, how we think and where we think we belong.
But somewhere along the way, things went sideways. The names, which originated as meaningful descriptors, became increasingly meaningless.
Take the experience of Sean Lyons. The University of Guelph professor, whose work focuses on intergenerational differences, was enjoying the last days of winter holiday back in December when he received an e-mail from a reporter. He’s accustomed to giving interviews on a range of topics, but this one surprised even him.
The reporter wanted his thoughts on the name “Generation Beta.” Some experts had already begun using it for the next generation of babies, who would be born as of January, 2025.
They hadn’t even taken their first breaths. Yet, there were already attempts to label and define them – to flatten the experiences of an entire group by predicting who they might one day become. And experts had somehow already concluded that they would be drastically different.
“How could we know?” Prof. Lyons said. “Beta? My God, what nonsense.”
Millennials/Generation Y were born between 1981-1996.
The idea was never meant as an exact science. In 1928, when Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim outlined his theory of generations in his essay Das Problem der Generationen, he argued that the major historical events of our formative years create a shared experience within each cohort.
The idea has broadened since. Increasingly, sociologists and demographers use generational categories to capture not only historical events, but also the broader social, economic and technological influences of a time.
Since the start, critics have seized on the obvious pitfalls of categorizing large groups based on a single variable. “There have been critiques,” said Kate Choi, a sociology professor at Western University, “with the fact that there’s considerable heterogeneity in people who are born over a 15-year to 20-year period.”
She pointed to an example that’s popular among demographers: Serena and Venus Williams. They’re sisters born just one year apart, who seemingly share so many similarities, yet are categorized, generationally, as different.
Critics have also pointed to the lack of precision around generational groupings. “It’s not really an exact science,” she said. A generation can range, depending on the source, anywhere between 15 and 30 years. And there’s little consensus around cutoffs. Statistics Canada, for instance, has defined “Generation Z” as beginning, variously, in either 1993 or 1997.
So it’s fitting, then, that the system naming the generations has been similarly haphazard.
Instead of an official group or decision-making process, said Prof. Choi, the concepts have arisen through a “consensus-building process.” The names have come from any combination of demographers, academics, writers or journalists.
“It’s really contingent on what people subscribe to,” she said. “What ends up becoming popular. What becomes the consensus in popular culture.”
In other words, whatever sticks.
The Silent Generation were born between 1928-1945.
The first one that really stuck was “baby boomers.” That was a name that followed clear logic, based around the historical and social events of the time.
After the Second World War, in the mid-1940s, researchers and writers looking for a way to describe the rapid increase in birth rate coined the term “baby boom.” The term “baby boomer” came later – depending on who you ask, from either a writer in the New York Post in the 1950s, or The Daily Press a decade later. From the birth rate to the economy, it was a moniker that fit what felt at the time like a Golden Age.
After the boom ended in the 1960s – and a decade-plus decline in birth rate began – some demographers suggested “baby busters” for the next cohort. Others suggested “the latchkey generation,” because of the increase in working mothers and dual-income households. Others still suggested “MTV Generation,” based on the rise of the television network and its massive cultural impact.
Instead, it was a novel published decades later, in 1991, that captured the collective imagination. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Vancouver writer Douglas Coupland told the story of three jaded twentysomethings living in postboom Palm Springs.
Here, the ‘X’ stood for other. Other than baby boomers. Other than mainstream. Mr. Coupland’s book, said Prof. Lyons (a self-described Gen Xer), “was really about like this jaded, cynical, left-out generation. And so if you bought into that narrative, that label really was meaningful.”
Just a few years later, in 1995, Mr. Coupland himself declared ‘X’ over. “Marketers and journalists never understood,” he wrote in Details magazine, “that X is a term that defines not a chronological age but a way of looking at the world.”
What came next was another name charged with meaning: millennials. This one, too, came from a book. For the generation born from 1981 to 1996, some demographers had tried, without success, to coin the group “Generation Y.” Instead, it was the work of two authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, that stuck.
Their 1991 book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069, outlined “millennials” (because they would graduate around the turn of the millennium) as the turning of a page. Here, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe wrote, was a cohort filled with promise – “possessed of rational minds, a positive attitude, and selfless team virtue.”
Generation X were born between 1965-1980.
The book was enormously influential in the years following. At the White House, then vice-president Al Gore called it one of the most stimulating books he’d ever read. And for Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe, who would go on to publish another bestseller about millennials, it solidified their careers.
It also signalled, to others, the power in naming. And that, Prof. Lyons said, is when everything changed.
“People saw the power of being able to create that narrative, and make that label,” he said. And now, “there is a bit of a game of trying to be the person who coins the next generation.”
This was the beginning of the hustle: An entire industry of demographers, market researchers and the like all clamouring to be the next Strauss and Howe – the next definitive expert with the next definitive book. An entire industry looking to provide simple answers for who we were and how we got this way.
The competition to name kept getting stiffer. For the group born from roughly the mid-1990s to 2012 came a list of contenders: From Jean Twenge, a prominent psychologist, “iGeneration” (a reference to smartphones), and from Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe, “Homelanders” (a reference to 9/11). Even Prof. Lyons got in the game, championing, along with others, the name “post generation” (as in postsocial media, and post-9/11).
But none of those took off. Instead – it’s not clear how, or why, other than that Z came after Y –“Gen Z” took hold.
The Pew Research Center, in 2019, attempted to explain its rationale for adopting the name. But even Pew’s president Michael Dimock could not come up with a good explanation, other than to say that the momentum was “clearly behind Gen Z.” For that reason and that reason alone, he said, Pew too would use it.
Then, social researcher Mark McCrindle came along. Until him, writers and demographers had contained their efforts to the naming and dissecting of generations who already existed – to young people who had already been born.
“We used to look at this retrospectively. We would let 18 years pass, look at a cohort of adults and say, ‘How did they get like this?’” said Prof. Lyons.
But in 2008, the Australian researcher, who runs marketing research firm McCrindle, put out a public survey asking what the next cohort (who would be born years later, beginning in 2010 and ending in 2024) should be called. The name he eventually chose came out of the Greek alphabet: “Generation Alpha.”
For whatever reason, it’s stuck – at least for now.
Zoomers/Generation Z were born between 1997-2010.
Online, young people have glommed onto these labels as indisputable facts. They’ve gone from labels that were externally imposed to ones we use to explain ourselves. Across mainstream media, they’re everywhere you look: On game shows. In podcasts. As paint colours (as in millennial pink).
And underlying much of the discussion is the same assumption: that each generation is dramatically different from the next. They’re pitted against each other, defined from the start by their differences.
Nowhere is this more evident than on social media. On Instagram and TikTok, generations are worn as identifiers. Here, any number of characteristics – from how we wear our jeans and pose for photos, to how we approach our work and think about the world – can be explained by our generation.
All of this makes sense, said Mr. McCrindle, given the context. In a world that’s rapidly changing, a world that feels increasingly confusing and scary, he said the labels and identities help to provide a sense of certainty.
“There is something of a harbour or haven in knowing where we sit in the context of history,” he said. “There are generations that went before, and there will be generations after.”
He added that there are benefits to forecasting for future generations – that predictions can mean better planning, from our cities to our infrastructure.
But others, such as Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, dismiss it all as marketing. “He wants to own the concept, of course,” said Prof. Cohen, referring to Mr. McCrindle.
“Fake generations are getting shorter and shorter as marketers try to beat other people to naming the next one,” said Prof. Cohen.
“There is money at stake. The victim is actual social science.”
Which brings us to Beta. It’s a group born, according to Mr. McCrindle, between 2025 and 2039. This name, too, comes from him.
When he coined “Generation Alpha” back in 2008, he said, it wasn’t simply about a single name.
“It was a nomenclature. A naming system.” Under his proposal, each successive generation would follow the Greek alphabet. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and so on, similar to our system for naming hurricanes. This, he said, would bring predictability and precision to the discipline: “A little more rigour to generational analysis.”
But a name, of course, is never just a name. They have inherent meanings. Just ask members of “The Silent Generation” (1928-1945), which came after “The Greatest Generation” (1901-1927). Or “Beta,” after a generation of “Alphas.”
Generation Alpha were born between 2011-2024.
Or, for that matter, millennials. “When the name is negative, you start out with low expectations,” Prof. Lyons said. “But when it’s really hopeful – as in the case of millennials – it sets the bar really high, and creates lots of room for disappointment.”
Neither Profs. Cohen or Lyons expect that “Beta” will be long-lasting.
All of the names, according to Prof. Cohen – whether it’s Gen Z, Alpha or Beta – “are ridiculous.”
And to Prof. Lyons, the alphabet names are uninspiring. “I think it’s a little bit lazy to just start moving from letters.”
More importantly, he added, it’s just far, far too early.
There’s value in studying generations, he said – in understanding which experiences we share, and where and why we differ. But the alphabet generations are still just children. The oldest of Generation Alpha are only 15 years old. The historical events that will make up their formative years are still unfolding.
The name “Alpha,” for instance, was determined well before we had knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent impacts on young people. “We called that one way too early,” Prof. Lyons says.
Instead, he said the alphabet names should be considered placeholders. That, as time marches on, new names – names with actual meanings – might one day be assigned.
But there’s one thing, he said, that will never change: No matter what, the younger groups will always be the ones to blame.
“There is a very predictable cycle,” he said. “It’s us projecting our hopes on a new generation, and then becoming disappointed in them as they get older.”
It happened to Gen X, to millennials and now Gen Z. Next will be Gen Alpha, and so on.
“It’s always ‘the young people today’ who are the problem.”
