I Am 13. Gen Alpha is Looking For Something to Believe In.
- augustinewasef
- Sep 21
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 17
By Augustine Wasef
For those you have been trying to make sense of Gen Alpha, I feel you. We are expected to believe Gen Alpha will be a progressive renaissance or a conservative tsunami, the end of organized religion or the phoenix of it. The self-contradictory headlines bear more resemblance to a dissonant piece by Schoenberger than the stable chord progression we desire; in the mad stampede to hear what we want we lose sight of reality.
The narrative about this generation has thundered onward in ever increasing spirals of delusion leaving in the dust any actual understanding. Whether I count as a member depends on who you ask–the exact start date is poorly defined. But from my experience with hundreds of my peers I can make out one key and overlooked fact: no one knowns what to believe.
Parents loom like a distant religious authority issuing their binding interpretations of morality, while culture forcefully thrusts them in the opposite direction. Worse, an unmistakable apathy clouds any embryonic forming of opinion. I would call it ideological dysphoria.
Despite the staunch criticism, they deserve far more credit than than what we give them. Without the assistance of adults they have single handedly navigated a hopeless and unpredictable world. In a never ending artillery barrage they have reckoned with everything from social media echo chambers to artificial intelligence to the president. And yet they are relegated to mere screen time addicts lacking any other distinguishable characteristics.
Several decades ago we learned that drug addicts are deeply human, sometimes more so than ourselves. At some point we must learn that “ipad kids” are still human. The mist that envelopes childhood won’t last forever. Eventually they will be forced to develop the same kind of public persona of previous generations. It is up to you whether you recognize that we are navigating through the same world you are.
Thank you for choosing Inflection Magazine and human authorship.
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Love it, Ago!
The piece in question tries to capture the spirit of Generation Alpha, but it leans more on dramatic rhetroic than on careful reasoning. Its main claim—that no one really knows what to believe about this generation—sounds compelling at first, but it doesn’t quite hold up under closer look.
For one thing, the uncertianty about when exactly Generation Alpha begins is overstated. Scholars and demographers might quibble about a year or two, but most agree it means kids born from around 2010 onward. That kind of minor ambiguity is normal whenever we talk about generations. It doesn’t mean the category is useless. Generational definitions are supposed to be guides for understanding culture and society, not rigid scientific laws.
The essay also…
I read Augustine Wasef’s “I Am 13. Gen Alpha is Looking For Something to Believe In” and I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what he says. In his essay, Wasef captures a sense of disorientation that many young people feel today — caught between inherited narratives (from parents, from culture) and a landscape of conflicting ideologies pushing in every direction. My Site 2
I agree especially with his idea of ideological dysphoria: the feeling that you should believe something, but you don’t know what. The pressure to adopt an identity or worldview feels more external than internal, and so many of us are left in a limbo of apathy or uncertainty. Wasef is right that we often…
Wow amazing!