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Just one minute after midnight on Jan. 1, as Times Square revelers danced under a shimmering ball, a couple from Crown Heights welcomed twin daughters into the world at a Brooklyn hospital. Sarai and Sienna, born at 12:01 and 12:02 a.m., were reported as New York City’s first babies of 2025. Not only that, based purely on the fact that they were born just after midnight instead of at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31, Sarai and Sienna were also the city’s first members of a brand new generation.
That’s the case, at least, according to Mark McCrindle, an Australian social researcher, futurist, and TEDx speaker who is widely credited with giving generations their names. Although 2025 babies can’t yet form words, he’s already dubbed them Generation Beta. “It’s sort of absurd to think that we can define a generation in terms of who they are when they’re just a few months old,” McCrindle told me. “And yet we can say a lot about Generation Beta.” According to him, Betas will be shaped by parents who are “tech skeptics,” perhaps leading to a more analog lifestyle.
While there’s no arbiter or official designation for the name or time frame of any generation, McCrindle’s labels have stuck: He also coined Gen Alpha, which has been widely adopted to describe kids born from 2010 to 2024, and news outlets like Axios, Business Insider, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal have already used Gen Beta to describe the latest batch of newborns. McCrindle’s naming system designates each generation with successive Greek alphabet letters, timing each generation in 15-year increments. So, after the Betas (2025–39) will come Generation Gamma (2040–54.) He says this approach reduces people’s tendency to disparage other generations, allows for a more scientific model that describes generations at a global scale, and gives them a blank canvas that can be colored in with characteristics as the years go on.
Here, though, seems like a good time to mention that McCrindle runs a firm that sells generational insights, including “The Generations Defined Masterclass” and “Generation Alpha Masterclass,” both of which cost $250 and are aimed at showing leaders, marketers, and educators how to “unlock the full potential” of how different generations act as consumers. He’s not the only one who compiles generational traits for sale: Market research agency Opinium recently worked with Visa on a survey of 8- to 14-year-olds that found Gen Alpha was “set to be the most entrepreneurial yet.” And by surveying 500 children who were 8 to 10 years old, the agency Razorfish discovered that Alphas were “motivated by a greater sense of purpose” and recommended that businesses “recognize that Alphas have accelerated brand maturity.”
This is why I cringe when I hear the labels Gen Alpha and Gen Beta. Besides being a lame way to name generations, this sequential, alphabetical structure—which follows the path of Gen X and Gen Z—heightens opportunities for market researchers and consultants to quickly categorize subsets of people by the goods and services they’ll consume instead of the meaningful traits that really define them. This contradicts what other experts have found, which is that it’s important cultural movements and historical events that tie generations together—not arbitrary names or age cohorts. Needless to say, those phenomena usually don’t occur before a generation has learned to crawl.
Sixty years from now, if teenage Gen Epsilons (born 2070–84) are making fun of their gray-haired elders by saying, “OK, Beta,” we’ll know at least one thing about Betas: The marketing machine will have won.
To trace the real roots of generation names, it makes sense to start with one name: Karl Mannheim.
In the late 1920s, he published an essay called “The Problem of Generations.” Mannheim was a thirtysomething Hungarian sociologist living in exile in Germany, a country he’d soon have to flee for Great Britain to escape the Nazis. The paper theorized that simply being born and growing up at the same time didn’t form generational bonds. “What does create a similar [generational] location is that they are in a position to experience the same events and data, etc., and especially that these experiences impinge upon a similarly ‘stratified’ consciousness,” Mannheim wrote. There were limits to his theory about historic events as shapers of generations: He didn’t think people who lived on separate continents or even those separated by the urban-rural divide shared much in common.
For Mannheim and his peers, World War I was the crucial, generation-defining event. Eventually, his shell-shocked cohort earned the name the Lost Generation, popularized by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. But hardly anyone outside of intellectuals and sociologists thought much about generations in the next few decades. The Greatest Generation, those who came of age during the Depression and World War II, didn’t become a common nickname until Tom Brokaw used that title for his 1998 book. Meanwhile, baby boomers got their label early on because it described a measurable phenomenon of elevated birth rates from roughly 1946 to 1964.
But unlike the Lost Generation and the Greatest Generation, which were evoked for purposes of literature, history, and sociology, the baby boomer label came to be applied for other purposes. The late, famed linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, whom I interviewed in 2019, told me that in the 1970s, marketers took over the generation game. What had started as a sociological concept became a way to define and label a group “as much as anything by (what) they buy and consume.”
Pepsi did this by glorifying young people in “Pepsi Generation” advertisements meant to counteract the traditional, Norman Rockwell–influenced imagery of rival Coca-Cola. In the 1980s, the company hired Michael Jackson, a boomer, to dance with a “Pepsi Generation” of teens and tweens (including future Fresh Prince star Alfonso Ribeiro). That generation, stereotyped as jaded, averse to corporate America, and allergic to labels, was designated as Generation X in Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Coupland’s project started out as a nonfiction book inspired by an essay and ended up as a fictional tale of rudderless twentysomethings searching for meaning in the Coachella Valley.
The X was meant to represent the undefinable identity of Coupland’s generation. Instead, it offered a handy label for marketers and media personalities to set about defining them. In a 1992 ABC News special, Barbara Walters described Generation X as just looking to “cope,” rather than pursue money or peace. In 1994, some 69,000 furniture executives discussed how they’d sell to Generation X at a conference, with La-Z-Boy deciding that they could reach the group by using distressed bomber-jacket leather on recliners, and Universal Furniture by hiring the same designer who styled Jason Priestley of Beverly Hills, 90210.
Coupland reportedly turned down consulting opportunities from the Gap and the Republican and Democratic parties, who wanted to use his supposed knowledge of Gen X to target consumer and voting bases. “My phone started ringing with corporations offering from $10,000 and up to talk on the subject of how to sell to Generation X,” he wrote in a 1995 Details magazine op-ed exhorting his age group to “refuse to participate in all generational debates.” Around the same time, Thomas Frank and Keith White, the cofounders of the Baffler magazine, wrote a blistering 1993 essay criticizing Coupland’s novel and dismissing the whole idea of Generation X. They saw it as nothing more than a convention set up by boomers who believed it convenient to have “names for the young, prefab identities by which people may be molded, manipulated, and sold for the rest of their lives.”
This commodification reached new levels with millennials, who were first called “echo boomers” by health research groups and educators to reflect baby boomers having children en masse. By the late 1990s, stories about echo boomers focused on companies figuring out how to sell them their products. Ford executives camouflaged themselves in wind breakers and ballcaps—the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme made incarnate—and interviewed echo boomers about their taste in cars at a Lower Manhattan coffee shop, Chicago movie theater, and Texas amusement park. The brand also plied them by giving away trips to Wilmington, North Carolina, for a Dawson’s Creek–inspired concert. Agencies such as U30 and Youth Intelligence, which was later acquired by Creative Artists Agency, hired young people across the country to send reports on what was in and out, so they could sell insights to corporations about these supposedly elusive young people. “Buzz is more important today than it’s ever been,” Youth Intelligence founder Jane Buckingham told 60 Minutes in 2004. The bestseller associated with the echo boom wasn’t a novel like Generation X, but David Foot’s 1996 book Boom, Bust & Echo: How to Profit From the Coming Demographic Shift.
Around this time, the name Generation Y kicked in as a substitute for echo boomer (sample headline: “Cashing in on Generation Y”), but it was the term “millennial” that really stuck. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe are credited with coining the label. Their 1991 book Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 posited that generations represented certain archetypes that repeated throughout history. Millennials, for instance, are considered a “civic” or “hero” generation that, after being born into a period of unraveling, become self-reliant and optimistic as adults.
The word millennial at least stood for the time frame in which many members of the generation grew up or entered the workforce. But why did the name millennial win out over time? Nunberg suspected it was “a useful hook”: It conveyed the grandeur and freshness of a new millennium and was therefore an impressive-sounding title for market researchers and consultants to pitch to businesses.
McCrindle got the idea for Gen Alpha a couple years before the generation’s youngest children were born. In the late 2000s, one of his surveys asked people what they’d name the generation after Gen Z. The highest vote-getter, above titles like Generation Hope and Onliners, was Generation A. The survey came not long after a severe hurricane season in which the United States exhausted all 26 names from the designated alphabetical list and started naming storms with the Greek alphabet. McCrindle says he thought Alpha, rather than A, did a better job of symbolizing a new century and a new start for the generation.
As Alphas enter their teen years, the label’s staying power remains to be seen. Over a decade ago, Howe, credited with coining “millennial,” proposed Homeland Generation for children born from roughly 2005 to 2020, a moniker meant to signify the war on terror and the world’s increasing bent toward nationalism and localism. Economist Noreena Hertz wanted Gen Z to be “Gen K,” as in Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor and well-known generational researcher, picked “iGen,” a name that fits with her theory that generations are defined by technological changes. It didn’t catch on. Neither has “polars,” Twenge’s idea for Alphas and Betas.
McCrindle says he’s not “arrogant enough” to think his naming system will endure, though he believes Alpha and Beta have gained acceptance because people are familiar with letter-naming sequences after Gen X and Gen Z. Plus, McCrindle gets his labels out there quickly and effectively. His firm operates the website generationalpha.com, which was first registered in 2008. McCrindle did an interview with the New York Times about Gen Alpha in 2015, when the oldest Alphas were 5. About the time those children reached middle school, in 2023, he co-authored a book about them.
Bobby Duffy, who wrote The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think, told me the alphabetical designations aren’t necessarily any worse than naming generations after historic events, technology, or whatever else. But designating and discussing Betas while they’re still in the crib, Duffy says, doesn’t offer any new understanding of societal change and is essentially a marketing gimmick. “There’s money to be made here on saying, ‘We’ve got this new generation coming through. We’ve named them this. They’re completely different from other generations.’ ”
Businesses crave generational insights because they believe it’s necessary to understand differences between generations in order to know what people will buy and how they can be reached—or at least that’s what market research firms tell them. The actual differences between generations, and therefore the value of these insights, is debatable. “Corporations don’t want to hear that generations don’t exist because that makes their work harder,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. “Because if you don’t have generations by which to plan out your marketing and advertising plans, you might have to do more work to find out where the differences are in people’s attitudes, instead of assuming these big stereotypes hold true.”
When I asked McCrindle what he thinks of skeptics who consider generational naming and grouping little more than a marketing exercise, he told me he’s not a market researcher and that his work is for charities, nonprofits, and community organizations. After our interview, I noticed his LinkedIn profile describes him as a market researcher whose firm’s clients have included Apple and Oracle. I don’t mean to be overly harsh to McCrindle: His belief in generational differences seems genuine, rooted, he says, in data he observed while doing social research early in his career. It’s also not his fault that media outlets are obsessed with generational labels, or that brands likely find his data useful.
Frank, whose Baffler essay excoriated the idea of classifying Gen X, told me over email he doesn’t consider the study of generations to be invalid, especially considering how epochal events like the world wars and the Depression shaped people. His problem is that the way we discuss generations is based mostly on superficial differences that take precedent over more important designations. “At the same time that we talk on and on about generations, speculating happily about tastes and consumer choices, we have so much trouble talking about class,” Frank said. “I often suspect that, in America, the one category replaces the other, that we talk about generations where people in the past or in other lands talked about social class.”
And generational-based discussions and depictions often flatten an entire generation’s characteristics and preferences into what fits with the upper middle class. That’s certainly been the case with generation-defining shows and films, from the Reality Bites Gen Xers, to the Girls Brooklyn millennials, and the Booksmart Gen Zers who somehow all got into elite colleges. Says Vaidhyanathan, “Every time we talk about a generation we’re tending to pay attention to overeducated white people—their parents, their children, themselves—because frankly those are the people who buy the most stuff.”
Thankfully, some influential groups have grasped this problem. In 2023, Pew announced it would minimize usage of generational labels and only compare generations when they’re at similar stages of life. It didn’t want to shun generational research entirely, noting that “the eras in which we come of age can leave a signature of common experiences and perspectives.”
But being born in 2025 doesn’t count as a signature experience, so there shouldn’t be a rush to name babies with Greek letters or forecast how they and the world around them will turn out. Something will come along. After all, if today’s children end up living in a jobless, joyless future dominated by A.I., “GenPT” will be right there.
