The Decibel - Boomers, millennials, Gen Beta: Why do we name generations?

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

What’s in a name? For the past century, people have clamoured to categorize people by their age and the life events they’ve gone through – but how and why did we get so preoccupied with generations?The Globe’s Generations Reporter Ann Hui joins the show to break down where the names came from and how they play out online and in popular culture.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Ready? Swag. Drip. Besties. Bros. Win. Vivian. You've probably seen videos like this on social media.

Two people from different generations comparing their slang. Or even how they use their hand to mimic talking on the phone. When someone calls you, how do you answer the phone? Why should I do it like that? Because that's how you hold the phone. When someone calls you, how do you answer the phone? Why should I do it like that? Because that's how you hold a phone. No, you hold it like this. Hold it like that. These days, we've become accustomed to pointing out

the differences between generations. Millennial guide on how to dress like Gen Z. Yes, statistically, Gen Z is struggling with stress more than the other generations. It is the most stressed out generationally. But how accurate are these generational labels? Do they help us understand each other? Or do they actually create more distance between people?

Today, we're talking to Anne Huey, the Globe's Generations Reporter. She'll explain when we started cataloging ourselves in this way, where the names of different generations come from, and why they can change over time. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. So Anne, you're the generations reporter here at The Globe. Why do we bother with these categories? Like, what is the benefit of classifying ourselves like this? So I want to be very clear off the top that I do think that there is a very real value in studying and understanding generational labels, especially at a time

like now, where it feels like different generations are having such different experiences of the world around us. The period, the date range, you know, the major historical events that we live through, the environment around us that has a big part to play in the people that we eventually become. That's very useful information for social researchers, for demographers, for historians, etc. Furthermore, just as people being able to understand that the set of circumstances and the context in which we grow up, understanding how that context may be different than the

context for other groups, it helps us to understand why and where our perspectives may differ. Yeah, so it's twofold. It's kind of helping us understand ourselves better, but then also understanding other people better. And when did we actually start talking about our generational differences, like in the way that we talk about them today? So I think that it is, I don't think many people understand that this is a relatively recent idea. It's only been the last century or so that we've even started talking about these categories. It was a Hungarian sociologist about a century ago, Carl Mannheim, who came up with this idea, the theory of generations, and he posited that people,

based on the year that they were born or the period in which they were born, could be divided into categories because these groups of people would be shaped by the same historical events. Gradually over the decades decades the theory has kind of broadened so when we talk about generations today we're talking typically not just about specific historical events but also the broader kind of

economic, social, political climate that make up our kind of formative years. It's really only around 2010 or so when the term millennial really became popularized. That's when we hit, I would say, peak kind of consciousness around generational labels and generational terms. 2013, I think, is when Time Magazine had their infamous cover about millennials. I think the headline was,, me, me, generation. There was this real kind of obsession with trying to understand who these young people who were just graduating out of college, just coming into the workforce, this huge demographic

shift that was happening. There was a huge interest in understanding who these people were and how they may or may not be different from generations that had come before. And so it was really this interest in millennials, I would say, that really sparked a much broader interest around generations and the theory altogether. That's really interesting. Okay, so a fairly recent phenomenon then in the way that we talk about it now. And I think I also understand that they're not exactly precise categories, right? Because even when you look at the birth years, there seems to be some wiggle room there.

So it's kind of a general category, I guess, then? Yeah, it's so there's definitely been one of the most common critiques of the theory of generations is that it's not an exact science. It was never meant to be a science. And so things like the actual time periods, the specific kind of cutoffs between generations, even sometimes those names, all of that has come about in this really kind of haphazard way such that even today, you know, you can look at different reputable sources and they'll still give you different, say, time ranges for different generations. Okay.

So with that in mind, let's just go through the last century though and look at how we've segmented our generation. So obviously, yeah, the start dates and end dates kind of change, but how have these generations been labeled? Okay, so I am using Pew Research's definitions here, and Pew Research has the greatest generation. What a name. What a name indeed, starting from around 1901 until 1927.

And that's the generation that would have been actively involved with World War II. And so that's where the term kind of greatest comes from. So they would have actually gone to war then essentially. Okay. The subsequent generation is the silent generation. So again, when you said what a name, silent generation, very different kind of a name. And that's the one that was born according to Pew between 1928 and 1945. So I think about the Great Depression then and the Great Depression in the subsequent decades of economic decline.

We have the baby boomers, which is probably one of the best known after millennials or maybe even before millennials. That's the group that was born between 1946 and 1964. They were named because this is the group that was born during this period of huge population increase. They would have been shaped by a number of different cultural influences, including the Vietnam War in the US, the civil rights movement. And that was, until millennials, by far the largest demographic group that we saw. We have Generation X. That is the group that was born between 1965 and 1980. There have been various ideas for names that came up for this group over the years. Latchkey Kids, MTV Generation, the Forgotten Generation, they're sometimes called because

they're sort of sandwiched between the huge, you know, baby boomers and the millennials just after them. After Gen X, of course, is Millennials. That's the group born between 1981 and 1996. The much maligned Millennials who are just right around middle-aged right now. And kind of came of age, I guess, around the Millennials. Yes. So the term Millennials first came about by two American authors, Neil Strauss and William Howe. And they used millennial because this was the group that was going to be graduating from high school right around the turn of the millennium.

And there was this idea that they were going to be this great generation, that they were coming out into the world in a time where all of the world's biggest problems had been solved. They were going to be this bright shining beacon of hope. They were going to solve all of the problems, remaining problems of the world. Like the optimism of the 90s it sounds like. It was peak optimism. And then we all know how that turned out.

And then Gen Z, Gen Z or Gen Z that was born between 1997 and about 2010. That's the group that's just starting to enter the workforce right now. And then subsequently we have who we're currently calling Gen Alpha, the group that was born between 2011 and 2024. And then this new group that's just starting to enter into the world, born as of January 1st, 2025. All right. So that's actually a really good breakdown then of how these are segmented here. I want to ask about some of these names here, Anne, because you gave us some explanations. But I'm thinking about like Gen X and Gen Z. And I know Millennials for a while were called

Gen Y, but that didn't really seem to stick. Like, how were those decided? Yeah. So that was really the impetus of this whole story was becoming fascinated with the question of where these names have come about. And what I learned is that the process of naming these groups in the past has really been pretty haphazard, much like the categories themselves and how they can be kind of messy and not quite scientific. That's very much how the names have come about in the past. So the very famous example of baby boomers, that name came from a very specific demographic event and so that was logical. It was a name that you know some demographers and a bunch of journalists all kind of latched on and eventually enough people were using it

that it just became common parlance. Whereas in other cases like say Gen X, it wasn't until this group, the Gen Xers, were well into their almost 20s that people really settled around the name X. And that came from a pretty unlikely source. The name Generation X came from, of course, the Douglas Copeland novel of the same name.

And I think Douglas Copeland has talked about this as well in interviews, he never set out to name a generation. He was just writing a novel, you know, but it just so happened that this book that he had written very much kind of captured this spirit and this kind of the zeitgeist of the time, I guess, of these kind of like laid back kind of counterculture, 20 something year old, underemployed, kind of aimless group of young people.

And that for whatever reason resonated with enough people seemed to really kind of capture the cultural feeling of the time. And again, for whatever reason, enough people just started to use the name that it became the name. More recently though, it seems like, especially after millennials became so popular and others really saw the success that Strauss and Howe had from being the ones to coin that term. They came up with Millennials and everyone kind of seized around it and these guys really built their career around the term. They published a bunch of bestselling books.

The name Millennial was on a bunch of magazine covers. There was so much success in that name and creating that millennial brand that others really tried to kind of jump into that game and create this whole industry around, you know, marketing and demography and generational labeling, such that people actually started to kind of race against each other and compete to try to be the next person to coin that next name, that next term. We'll be back in a moment. So Anne, it sounds like so far, the generational names up until millennials have been based

on something that helps describe them. But now there's Generation Alpha and Generation Beta. What do we know about how these two names came about? So everything really shifted around 2008. So this is around the time where we're starting to see the term millennial takeoff. And this is when an Australian researcher, Mark McCrindle, in the same idea of really wanting to kind of get ahead of what the next generational cohort was going to be and create that next label, he put out a survey to try to name the next generation of babies who at that point

hadn't yet been born. So this is 2008 and he was looking for names for what would eventually become Gen Alpha. So the babies born in 2010. He put out a survey casting about for that next name. So that was really a turning point where we went from, you know, having a bunch of babies born, seeing how they turned out, seeing what influences, what kinds of life events shaped them, and then naming who those people were after the fact, to doing it in a really predictive way and trying to predict who these babies would be and predict what their lives would be like and naming them in that way. Yeah, because it seems like with previous generations we've had a little bit of evidence at least or something to know what their experiences would be like, whereas this is, as you say, pretty predictive. Mm-hmm. And so McCrindle's idea back in 2008 was that this next group, the group that would come

after generation Z, Gen Z, should be called generation alpha. So why did he choose alpha? So his thinking was very much that it represented a turning of the page. Instead of simply going to the next letter, which would be back to A, he wanted it to be alpha instead of A because he wanted to make it clear that this was something new and different. And he also liked the idea of adding some scientific rigor to naming of generations.

So he cited mathematical terms that use the Greek alphabet and so that's where alpha came from. And then he posited that every generation after that should just follow the next letter in the Greek alphabet. So it would be alpha, beta, and then gamma, so on. It's interesting though because when we were talking about those previous generational names, we saw sometimes that they do change, right? You mentioned latchkey kids for Gen X, Gen Y, turning into millennial. So is there the chance that alpha and beta, that these labels don't stick? It depends on who you ask. If you ask Mr. McCrindle, which I did, I said to him, you

know, look, generation alpha, for instance, which is a name that he came up with, and that is a very big part of his career. I said, look, that name came long before, say, the COVID pandemic. We had no idea at the time what this group of young people would face and the impacts that this kind of monumental event would have on their young lives. So doesn't that say warrant potentially revisiting the name? He was adamant that the names themselves should not change, that we should stick to this kind of scientific system that he's come up with, but that gradually over time the events and the characteristics that maybe we associate with those generations,

those meanings could become baked in to what we understand alpha to mean, but that the names themselves shouldn't change. Others, however, less than convinced, as you already pointed out, the names of previous generations have changed over time, and we've seen countless examples of that. And they say that as far as they can see alpha, perhaps beta now, these are just placeholder

names and that we may well see as time passes on, new names, maybe more meaningful or apt names come about. I think when a lot of people think about different generations, we often think about how these play out day to day, often in things like social media, right? This is where a lot of us kind of engage with these labels. How does that affect us, the way that these are understood in popular culture? I think that's very true. And I think that social media has done a lot to increase the profile of these different

generational labels. I know that on my own, say Instagram or TikTok feeds, when I'm scrolling through, I see a ton of content geared towards me that's like Gen Z versus millennial. Understanding the difference between the generations, things like that. Like the jeans that you wear, right? Definitely. That kind of thing. What generation are you based on? What jeans you wear?

The way that you part your hair? The way that you pose for photographs? I'm making the heart sign, by the way. As you do it. I did it the Gen Z way, which means that I'm a traitor to my own generation. But it's really become on social media, I think, a label or an identity that we wear in the same way that we might wear other identities like class or race or gender. It's become a shorthand, I think, for a lot of people on social media to try to explain

something about themselves. I think that this makes sense, right? As human beings, we have that instinct to want to understand where we belong. We have this very basic instinct to want to understand who we are and how we might differ from others. And I've had other experts talk about, you know, the time that we're living in where things feel like they're changing very constantly. Obviously, we've been through, we're still living through some times of major disruption and there's just a lot going on in the world. And so it makes sense that we would want to cling on to these identities and these labels. And because we live in 2025, it makes sense for that to all play out on social media.

But I think it has gotten to the point, especially on social media, where we are using these terms that are seemingly increasingly meaningless, where maybe our generational labels are perhaps not entirely relevant. You know, when we're talking about shades of pink, for instance, as in millennial pink, or if we're talking about, you know, for instance, as in millennial pink, or if we're talking about pitting generations against each other, competing against generations, deriding other generations, or even just only talking about generational labels as a way to kind of divide ourselves. I don't know if that is as helpful as how they were originally intended.

Yeah, let's link her around that point for a minute, because it sounds like you started off talking about some of the positives there, but then there are also some negative effects, it seems like. And sometimes we hear even generations blaming each other for things, right? So is that a part of this, too, that maybe we need to pay attention to?

I think that because generations have become used to the point where many people consider their generational label a part of their identity, I think it can also make it easier for people to become an instinctively defensive. When we start talking about generations and generational differences. I know that as somebody who writes stories a lot about generational differences. Anytime I write a story about anything to do with say baby boomers or millennials, like those terms are a lightning rod right away for controversy because I think that they inspire such a knee-jerk reaction for a lot of people. So there's that. I think there's also, and this is something that Professor Sean Lyons from the University of Guelph

talked about quite extensively in my conversation with him, there's always been, and this is tale as old as time, there's always been this cycle that we get into as people where we blame the youngest generation, right? Whoever is the youth of the time, they're the ones who become kind of the punching bag for the rest of us. I know that as I was coming up in the world, as I was a younger person, as a younger millennial in the workforce, you know, we were very much the punching bag for everybody. Everything was blamed on millennials and our avocado toast and suspect work habits.

And very much we're starting to see that now about Gen Z as well. So that is a constant. And that happened long before we had these generational labels or names to attach to that instinct. I think what having the names and the labels does though is it makes it maybe even easier to do that, to blame the young, to blame the youth. And this was so interesting. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. That was Anne Huey, the Globe's Generations Reporter.

That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. This episode was produced by Tiff Lamb. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.