I called it!
Back when I was a teenager, we were called "Generation X," which was a name that we definitely did NOT choose for ourselves, but was assigned to us pretty much before we were even born by sociologists in the late 1960s. However, by the 1990s, the letter X was showing up like crazy in advertising media (Elon Musk still thinks it's cool). Everything in the 90s was "eXtreme!!!!" Xtreme Ghostbusters. Xtreme Football. The X games. If you were to judge a generation by watching Mountain Dew commercials, you would think that Gen-Xers were proud to be adrenaline junkies, jumping out of airplanes, snowboarding, doing flips on skateboards, bungee jumping, and being totally out of control. I, being somewhat typical for my generation, was sitting on my ass on the couch watching these ads, thinking to myself, "Is this supposed to represent me? Do they really think I'm relating to this???"
Sometime later, in the mid-2000s-2010s, I was informed that the children being born at the time were called "Gen-Alpha," in keeping with the tradition of starting the English alphabet too close to the end, and having to switch to Greek letters. About the same time, there was a surge in social media ads and "informative" videos reviving the outdated concept of "how to be an alpha male," accompanied by a bunch of pseudoscience about wolf packs and alphas, betas, sigmas, omegas, and whatever else. I, being fairly good at pattern recognition, said to myself, "I see what's going to happen. They're going to wait until these Gen-Alpha kids are a little older, and then reframe all this macho-man pseudoscience as the mindset of today's teens, and then years later, retroactively pretend that Gen-Alpha was called that BECAUSE they were obsessed with being hypermasculine, and believing in this complicated Greek-lettered wolf pack social hierarchy, leaving the actual teens wondering, "Is this supposed to be us? Are we supposed to relate to this???"
Well, just recently, I saw a video clip about today's teen youth slang, which included "skibidi," (which is is a meme, not a slang; that's like saying "where's the beef" was a Gen-X slang for something), but also included Alpha, Beta, Sigma, etc. with their wolf-based descriptions, as though they were entirely new concepts invented by the young generation. Yep, the pattern is unfolding exactly as before! I suppose that Generation Beta is going to be the generation that beta tests operating systems. Generation Gamma is going to turn into the Hulk. Generation Delta is going to live near the mouth of a river.
