We’re obsessed with dividing people into generational buckets. Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, Alpha, Beta—the whole thing feels scientific, doesn’t it? Like if we just plot someone’s birth year on a graph, we can predict what they’ll buy, how they’ll vote, what makes them tick. But here’s what I actually noticed growing up: generational labels are a lot messier than the neat age-based sorting we’ve convinced ourselves works.
I grew up in Malad, in what I like to call the “uncool” parts of the city—the kind of neighborhood where you didn’t just go to dinner with friends. You had to ask permission first. Actually ask. Say the words. Wait for approval. When I started college and met people from Ville Parle, I realized how weird my childhood sounded to them. They’d just call their moms and say, “I’m staying out for dinner”—no performance, no negotiation, no permission slip required.
Here’s what messed with my head: my mom and my friend’s mom were the same age. Same generational cohort, right? Except culturally? My mother was way closer to my friend’s grandmother. The way she moved through the world, what she valued, how she made decisions—it was a whole generation behind. Not because of anything biological or chronological. Because of where she grew up, how she was raised, what box she was expected to fit into.
That’s what we’ve been getting wrong about generations.
We treat generational identity like it’s synonymous with age. Born in the 80s? Millennial. Born after 2010? Gen Alpha. And sure, there’s something real there—if you grew up with dial-up internet and the shock of going digital, that’s different from never knowing a world without Instagram. Shared formative moments, shared tech, shared cultural moments. It creates patterns. It’s intuitive.
But it ignores everyone who doesn’t fit the template. The kid in a conservative household in Malad who was treated like they belonged to a previous era entirely. The outliers shaped more by their neighborhood, their family’s values, their parents’ anxieties than by whatever was trending globally the year they were born.
Then the internet happened.
Suddenly, your generational identity wasn’t locked down by when you showed up on earth anymore. You could log in and find your actual tribe—people who got you, who spoke your language (literal or metaphorical), who cared about the same hyperspecific things you did. That 14-year-old and 64-year-old in your family WhatsApp group reacting to the same viral video? They’re having a moment together that has nothing to do with their birth certificates.
My mom’s Instagram algorithm feeds her devotional content and recipe videos. Mine feeds me memes and literary debates. But here’s the thing—they bleed into each other. Her algorithm doesn’t just stay in her feed. Sometimes she sees what I’m sharing. Sometimes I end up watching a cooking tutorial because it made her life. We’re living in overlapping information streams, not sealed-off generational silos.
Think about what that actually means. Ten years ago, someone from Malad had an easier time connecting with another person from their neighborhood than with a stranger nine thousand kilometers away. Geography was everything. Now? A teenager in Mumbai obsessing over a K-pop band has more in common with teenagers in Seoul, São Paulo, and Stockholm than with the teenagers sitting three blocks away who aren’t online in those communities.
The real generational dividing lines aren’t age anymore. They’re exposure clusters. Information streams. Digital neighborhoods.
It’s the online communities you move through—the fandoms, the Discord servers, the subreddits, the TikTok tribes. It’s which algorithmic streams feed you religious content versus progressive poetry versus pop culture versus coding tutorials. It’s the micro-languages you pick up from influencers and meme culture and hybridized Twitter slang. It’s regional subcultures—like Adukka, Edik, Etepe—that connect cousins across age divides online while leaving peers in the same city completely oblivious.
Look at who’s actually bonded as a “generation” now. The people on “Gen TikTok” aren’t connected by birth year—they’re connected by algorithmic discovery and shared digital interests. Elder YouTubers with viral cooking channels have digital exposure closer to Gen Z than to their own peers. A 50-year-old and a 22-year-old in a coding bootcamp learning Python together are newer members of the same digital generation. Meme culture? Political satire? It engages a 16-year-old and a 60-year-old in the exact same cultural moment.
But here’s what we need to actually sit with: not everyone has equal access to these streams. Some people are offline or less connected entirely. Some people straddle both traditional and digital worlds—how do they actually develop an identity? And in intergenerational households, where family influence constantly disrupts what you’re exposed to, which “generation” are you actually part of?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re cracks in the whole framework.
If generations are really clusters of online exposure and shared information streams and digital communities, then our whole vocabulary needs updating. Age still matters—obviously it does. But it’s not the main sorting mechanism anymore. What actually binds or divides us now might be memes and digital dialects and algorithmic neighborhoods. Not birth years. Not age cohorts. Culture. Access. Which digital streams you swim in.
We need language that accounts for that.