B8: The Advent of Gen Alpha
We’ve all made memes and relatable posts about Gen Z and millennials. More often than not, unconventional, outlawed, or non-traditional views and opinions are labelled as Gen Z things.
I consider myself Gen Z. Being a 2000s-born kid, I suppose I qualify. And although I’d consider myself a fairly obedient kid, I do have my Gen Z side. I like to believe I’m reasonably relatable to school kids and the generations coming after us. After all, I grew up with the internet, social media, and all the cultural developments that came with them. I feel like I have a fairly good grasp of the latest terms and concepts surrounding dating, friendships, breakups, and everything in between.
Or so I thought.
We hosted a house party last night, where I happened to meet a few old neighbourhood kids I barely remembered. Except they weren’t really kids anymore. They were all grown up, still in school, and fully fledged teenagers. Being the curious and occasionally bored guy that I am, I leaned in to listen to what they were gossiping about. I assumed it wouldn’t be anything particularly surprising. Surely, I had a few years of college experience and an entire internet’s worth of knowledge over them.
Boy, was I wrong.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more intense, twist-filled, diabolically motivated piece of lore. The kind of folklore that had almost every component of modern day social chaos: fallouts, breakups, backstabbing, situationships, questionable alliances, and probably a few plot twists that even Netflix would struggle to justify. The sheer complexity of what they were casually discussing made me realise that the knowledge I had accumulated over the past few years in college, supposedly making me well-versed in these matters, didn’t even come close to what these kids were casually sharing.
That was when I took a moment to put myself into perspective. Could I really consider myself a ‘Gen Z’? Because there was no way I was in the same league as these kids. But I wasn’t quite ready to associate myself with the adults from the 1980s either. I was too young for that generation and apparently too old for this one.
And then it struck me. These were the Gen Alphas. The upcoming generation. Gen Z, the generation I had always considered the young, rebellious, internet-savvy bunch, was already past its upcoming phase. We were growing into adulthood, figuring out careers, relationships, responsibilities, and eventually, a settled life.
Get Aryan Vijaykumar’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Somewhere along the way, we had become the “boomer” generation. The gossip itself wasn’t really the point. What fascinated me was the level of awareness and understanding these kids seemed to possess. Their grasp of social dynamics, relationships, and human behaviour was far beyond what I remember having at their age, and, in some ways, even beyond what I have now.
It felt like I was looking at a version of myself, except that it was a version of myself now. Or perhaps, more accurately, I was looking at different versions of myself, had I grown up in their time, with their surroundings, their influences, and their experiences.
And that is both beautiful and slightly terrifying. Terrifying, because I genuinely cannot imagine what these kids will be like when they reach our age. What will their ideas of relationships, careers, friendships, and happiness look like? Will they be okay? Will they figure things out, or will they have an entirely new set of problems that we cannot even begin to comprehend?
And beautiful, because they seem to be so much more intuitive about so many things. They are exposed to ideas, conversations, and experiences much earlier than we were. They question things, form opinions, challenge conventions, and seem to have a vocabulary for experiences that we probably wouldn’t have known how to describe at their age.
Of course, they lack maturity. But maturity and the ability to grasp to memory are not necessarily the same thing. Their capacity to absorb, process, and grasp concepts seems considerably faster and broader. Their questions and opinions might not always come with well-founded arguments or perfectly articulated explanations, but the fact that they are thinking beyond what we would traditionally expect from someone their age is impressive in itself.
Perhaps that’s what growing up in a different time does to you. Every generation inherits a world that the previous one has already figured out, questioned, or complicated, and then proceeds to take it a little further. And maybe that’s the funny thing about generations. We spend so much time trying to understand the ones before us and label the ones after us, only to eventually realise that we’ve become someone else’s reference point.
I walked into that house party thinking I was one of the young, internet-literate, culturally updated people in the room. I walked out with a new appreciation for the generation after mine, a slightly bruised ego, and the uncomfortable realisation that I might already be someone’s “back in my day” person.
I would like to end it by saying,
“Every generation believes it has finally figured things out. Then another generation arrives with a different set of mistakes.”
