This story appears in i-D issue 375, on newsstands September 22. Get yours now.
Dear Reader,
Can I tell you about some words I’m sick of? Slop. Aesthetic. Labubu. Era. Aura. Doomscroll. Rizz. The West Village. But my main offender… Generation. I’d like to propose we retire the concept of generations altogether.
Generational finger-pointing lies at the heart of our Boomers vs. Zoomers political morass. Gen X and Millennials continue to duke it out for a foothold in the Dubai-Chocolate-Matcha Hellscape (aka Trader Joe’s). Meanwhile, waiting for a mythical “Next Generation” to come save everything keeps us collectively paralysed. Who are these kids anyway?
Babies born in 2025 are the first members of Generation Beta. Ouch. It’s one thing to arrive on Earth in an age of climate catastrophes, forever-wars, and uncertainty about the need for human beings altogether. But to also be a Beta from the day you are born? Brutal.
But maybe being Alpha isn’t working out so well for us. Those who hold power today are flopping left and right. The impulse to be first, to be best, to assert dominance has us climbing over each other, going nowhere. A Beta test is also a second try, a version that’s not quite ready yet, a half-baked dream that we need to make real together. Sounds pretty cool, actually.
The reason I’m not a fan of “generations” is that usually the people who define them weren’t really part of their generation at all. We equate Paris Hilton (p. 168) with Y2K, but if you look back at that actual time, she was the only person in the world like her. When I first met Telfar Clemens (p. 192) in the late 2000s at one of Eric Johnson’s house parties (p. 178), he seemed like someone from another planet. Jonathan Anderson (p. 222) is arguably the first great Millennial designer, but he likes 18th century still life paintings more than bingewatching Bravo. In a year of music superstars’ record-breaking global tours, Bad Bunny (p. 158) has decided to do a tour that only goes to one city: his hometown.
If we want to follow suit, we should start thinking less about our generation and more about how we can be more Beta: willing to operate outside the realm of what’s dominant, even at risk of falling on our faces. In this issue, we asked i-D co-founder Terry Jones (and 26 others) to give advice to someone born in 2025 (p. 150). He offered some sound counsel for how to start making the world a better place: “TH!NK.”
