The Reality of Generation Beta

I heard from a friend that this year is the year of Gen Beta. Here’s what that means for parents and the children of this generation.

The children are growing up in mature, hyperstimulating technology. Mature, since all the technology companies and platforms have deep, deep profiles of billions of humans. There is no learning over the years as immature technologies require, only immediate extraction. TikTok, with its almost instantaneous pull into consumption (we call this being “frictionless”) is an example of mature technology that is hyperstimulating.

This matters for Gen Beta and their parents because they will be consuming this technology and its nth-order effects from the moment they’re born — even far before. It’s said that children can develop cravings based on their mother’s eating habits. I believe this extends to digital consumption as well. (Could children be “trained” to prefer a certain influencer or brand or lifestyle simply because their mom was binging this content while they were still in the womb?)

It should be noted that the ramifications of this are very well studied, but up to a point. With Gen Z, these were immature brains interacting with immature technologies. With Gen Alpha, these were immature brains interacting with far more mature technologies. With Gen Beta, these are immature brains interacting with hyperstimulating technologies. The difference is paramount, and unstudied, and unable to be stopped because the studies don’t exist so the regulations are based on no evidence and thus unlikely to be passed in any regulatory or concrete way. So Gen Beta will be growing up with social media, GenAI, XR glasses and headsets, and new wearables that create this bubble around their psychologies and socialites, predicating them on hyperstimulating technology. Phew. This is only the first point.

The second is cultural and political instability combined with (really, based off) economic uncertainty. As the supply of fiat money grows and grows, contributing to ever-rising prices and funding endless wars, Gen Beta will grow up in an age of very, very turbulent finances. They will watch their parents do some pretty whacky things with money: gamble it all on meme coins, get upset that they’re spending anything and tell them to HODL, teach them about trading stocks and flipping houses, buy personal finance courses for them, etc.

With their parents unable to afford stable housing and such, they may actually be far closer to their grandparents and uncles and aunts, since everyone is living at home. They may learn that money is something that is quite difficult to come by, a fictitious thing that is almost impossible to grow (they would come to this conclusion by most obviously not being middle class, because fiat money is destroying the middle class and vanishing [maybe banishing] the entire socioeconomic class).

The money issue will delve into the culture wars, as they always do. This could prompt parents to give their child the red pill from a very young age, give and enforce on them radical literature, and even go so far as to explain to them the roles of men and women, whichever aisle they fall into for the culture wars. Children will grow up watching their parents consider Andrew Tate the alpha, Donald Trump God, MAGA a religion, wokeness an ideology to subscribe to, Red Pill as healthy or toxic, and on and on. Likewise with the hyperstimulating technology, they will be indoctrinated with hyperaddicting memes. With the stickiness of MAGA or wokeness or Red Pill in mature brains, imagine children growing up with no external understanding of these pseudocultures and internalizing the facets of these movements from day one. This is both fascinating and horrifying.

A third reality for Gen Beta is essentially having no understanding of anything outside of their technology — unless a cultural shift happens now. Gen Beta risk relying on GenAI and Instagram/Tiktok for the information, to saturate their world models. With modern educational institutions being nothing more than intellectual factory farms requiring conformity beyond the scope and need of contemporary humans, Gen Beta will be forced to rely on social platforms for their news, to understand math, science, politics, romance, sexuality, extracurricular skills, etc. Have we any confidence that this is going to result in anything healthy in the minds and brains of our new generation? I don’t.

A fourth is that Gen Beta might be the last generation not completely and heavily genetically modified. Please take this point seriously. It may be the case that halfway through the generation, powerful genetic modification technologies come onto the scene, similar to how Facebook and Twitter and YouTube caught their stride towards the middle of Generation Z. But if this isn’t the case and the genetic modification technologies need some time to mature and develop, then we might safely say that Gen Beta is the last generation to not be radically genetically modified, and that means something.

It means that they actually might be the generation of humans that is competing with those that are widely and ubiquitously genetically modified (Generation Charlie). They might be upset with their parents, and with the cosmos, of being born in the wrong era, as essentially every generation is. They might be competing with those that are modified, and getting superseded with the scarcely-available jobs, even after the supposed GenAI apocalypse.

Their parents also might be caught between a rock and a hard place: do I risk putting my potential embryo through experimental tests of genetic modification or do I wait until enough other people have done this? And if I wait, what if I’m still giving my child a disadvantage in some way? There’s always a “first strike anxiety” when it comes to genetic modification, a cultural arms race of sorts that makes the deployment of these technologies that change the social reality of these humans very difficult. So Gen Beta might be the first half-generation to be genetically modified or the last generation to not be. I don’t know, honestly, which is preferable for them.

As a last point, Gen Beta could be growing up without a grounded understanding of humanity. This is a difficult point to tease out but I will try my best. Right now, humanity as a whole is asking: Is going multi planetary the best bet? Is electing this (American) political side over the other best for the country and the world at large? Is investing in Bitcoin better than traditional fiat finance? And more and more. This takes them completely away from an internal understanding of themselves which is already at a collective low for our species. With hyperstimulating mature technologies along with cultural and political and economic instability combined with genetic modification competition, the future is already looking dim for Gen Beta.

Though hate and doom-porn is rather uninteresting and not something I am preferring to contribute to, even though I truly prefer talking about the important points of humanity before they come so we can proactively try to stop them from taking place. There is a dire reality for Gen Beta to understand, and hopefully their parents can teach them this very simple but powerful point: powerful technology is dangerous if the wisdom to wield it is not proportional. Having some growth in human wisdom in the 21st century is essential, if not the most consequential.

All these crisis could happen, but the truth is that they don’t have to impact humans in the ways described. If parents teach Gen Beta these new understandings of understanding their internal states more — listening to their gut intelligence, talking to their subconscious (and in a meta way, treating these as actual avenues of thought and exploration and not hippie-dippie nonsense) — then the hyperstimulating technologies and instabilities and genetic engineering realities won’t be as harsh or impactive. If we, as a species, could turn to preferring, and most importantly, respecting our internal state over the external world replete with ads, scams, perverse incentives, etc, then we can frankly begin to solve all the problems in the world.

This is what I hope Gen Beta can learn, with or without their parents. I’m not going to make some grandiose declaration or predictions about Gen Beta since I have no clue what’s going to happen next week let alone in the next 15 years. What I do know is that no matter how much the external world changes, we have but one way to change the world: by changing our internal reality.