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A new generation has been born. "Generation Alpha" is the latest term denoting a distinct group of people born in a specific period. I was curious to know more about this new generation. Fortunately, one of the world’s leading authorities on generational issues, Dr. Sean Lyons, is a colleague and good friend of mine. I asked Sean a few questions about this new generation.
How did you get started studying generational differences?
When I was a Ph.D. student in the 1990s, I was in a class while Bill Clinton was being impeached, and as I spoke with my fellow students about his leadership style and where it came from, one of them said, “Well, this is what happens when you have a baby boomer for president.” At that moment a light bulb went off in my head and I realized that generation talk was something people were starting to use to explain differences between people. So, I started pulling at this thread to see if there are differences in generations, things like attitudes and worldviews. I settled on values as the core issue and off I went. That was 30 years ago.
People tend to be familiar with Generation Y, Generation Z, and the Boomers, but these days there is a lot of talk about a new generation. What is it called and what characterizes it?
With the baby boom, that was a demographic phenomenon. There were just a lot of people born at the same time. Generation X was named after a book by Douglas Copeland which is really just a book about people who are not baby boomers. When the next generation came, lazy marketers just added new letters and we got Generation Y and Generation Z. I guess we started this process too deep into the alphabet and have run out of letters so we are now starting at the beginning with Generation A—Alpha. It’s the pinnacle. Everyone want to be the Alpha. We pin our hopes and dreams on each new generation hoping they will resolve all of our problems, but we are eventually disappointed, and then we look to the next generation to do the same thing. Rinse and repeat.
What are some of the differences about this generation?
These Generation Alpha kids have not even hit adulthood yet. They are 15 years old at their oldest, so we don’t know if there is anything very different about them as adults. This is how the game has changed. We no longer wait to see how the generations emerge as adults and look back to see what context created them and made them different from the generations that preceded them. We just assume that every 15 years, a new generation comes along. I was even speaking with a reporter recently who told me that Generation Beta is coming and asked me for my thoughts. I think this is ridiculous. What can I say about how babies who were born two days ago and different from babies born four days ago?
That said, there are trends that push generations to change, so when we talk about generation we are really talking about social change. We can identify a number of current trends. Individualism is one of them. This has been growing for a long time. We teach our kids to look out for themselves. The collectivism we might have had during World War II has given way to an attitude of “what about me?”
Technology is another huge trend. Today’s technologies are much more transformational than the technologies that affected our great grandparents, like refrigerators or cars. Modern technologies like artificial intelligence change the way we work, the way we interact with each other, and the way we interact with the world. These technologies change rapidly and alter the way people think and act. It’s changing the way people are. So, we will soon have a generation that grew up in a world where you can’t trust your eyes. Where everything you see could be manufactured and not real. They will mistrust their own senses and their sense of reality itself might change.
What do you think might be some of the psychological outcomes associated with this generation?
Fundamentally the concept of generations hits on identity. We’re trying to make sense of a world that is changing faster than our bodies and minds can adapt. So, we’re accumulating stress. We’re not meant to adapt to constant change. It creates anxiety and we are seeing a lot more people reporting mental health issues. We are seeing people struggle with social interaction. Loneliness of the rise. Suicidal ideation is off the charts relative to prior generations. Phones, social media, all this immersion in all this change becomes part of one’s identity. So, for me a key research question is how do people come to identify with a generation and identify other generations?
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In some of your work, you have questioned the value of the very concept of generational differences. Why is that?
The word generations is a misnomer. A social generation does not align with genealogical generations. We are not cicadas. We don’t all have babies at the same time and they are not a cohort that run together, which makes it hard to chop up generations into categories. The generational concept is inherently flawed. It’s like asking when does a wave start?
