Babies born on the first day of 2025 aren’t just the first of the year — they’re the first of a generation.
The incoming generation beta — people born between 2025 and 2039 — is the seventh concurrent generation of our time.
They’re expected to make up 16 per cent of the global population and many of them are expected to live long enough to see the dawn of the 22nd century.
Unlike gen Z, who witnessed the transition from analogue to digital technology, gen beta will grow up in a highly technologically integrated world, significantly altered by the emergence of artificial intelligence.
As a result, they will exhibit ultra-high technological fluency.
Gen beta will also inherit the impact of climate change, says Lucas Walsh, director of the Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice, who is not optimistic the world will do enough to arrest global warming.
He said that, while large, existential challenges are not new, a rejection of community thinking will hinder any meaningful action.
Generation beta will grow up in an entirely technologically integrated world. Source: Getty / Riccardo Milani
“We’ve seen the fragmentation of ideologies and political views — there isn’t some sort of grand narrative guiding decision-making going forward,” he said.
“When we observe the major meetings around climate change, they’ve become less and less effective.
“The increasing individualisation of society is being reflected in identity politics and the other ways that we think about our place in the world, which now is about the ‘I’ in identity.”
What’s expected to be the most radical change?
One of the hallmarks of today’s youth — which emerged “like lights on a Christmas tree”, Walsh said — is a distrust in institutions.
“Year after year we have seen a concern, a criticism of our mainstream political institutions among young people.”
This criticism emerges from a realisation that economic and social structures set up by previous generations are disadvantaging many young people, he said.
“The game says if you get more credentials and training, that will lead to better jobs. And that one day you might be able to afford a home and maybe start a family,” he said.
“There is no other game in town which leads you to think: ‘Who’s setting the rules of that game?'”
But Dan Woodman, a professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne, said the effects of an overwhelming distrust or rejection of institutions are yet to be known.
“[Gen beta] is being born into a world where trust in the institutions that shaped not just a generation, but entire centuries, is weakened,” he said.
“What it means to live in a world where, for instance, democracy is under question, will be interesting to see.”
It may seem that previous generations had more in common than those of the 21st century, and that new generations are changing at a pace faster than they’re being defined.
But Walsh said that’s not the case.
“Social individualisation and fragmentation are part of a longer-term trend that’s been coming into the fore since the late 1970s and 1980s,” he said.
“The differences between generations that we are seeing might just be part of a broader trend of individualisation.”
What might we expect from gen beta?
“Projections are problematic … because of the sheer amount of change taking place,” Walsh said.
“When we use terms like generation X or boomers or even generation beta, those categories tend to emerge over time, retrospectively.”
Woodman said we should be cautious about generational labels.
“It’s only relatively recently that we’ve started to predict the future of these generations that have just been born or even not yet born,” he said.
“There’s lots that [can] change across the span of a generation.”
