“Raise your ya ya ya”, “Ningning is the maknae”, “that’s Mrs. Tohler” “she hurt me with my Ariana Grande shirt on”, “is that hyperpigmentation”, “hello dubai”, the list goes on.
If you’re a high schooler and these sentences make no sense to you, you’re not alone. The birth of new phrases like these stemming from social media platforms is rapid, and unless you’re chronically online, keeping up probably makes you feel old. Well that’s because you are.
The newest generation, “Gen Beta,” following the generation below the current Gen Z MHS students (gen alpha) has officially begun. According to ABC News article Gen Beta Kicks off in 2025: Your guide to all the generation names and years written by Shafiq Nabib, Gen Beta consists of those born between 2025 and 2039 and is anticipated to be characterized by “significant technological integration.”
This means that we’re now shifting to the age range that most millennials were in when we started making fun of them. They mocked us for not truly experiencing life with the Vine app, now we’ll be doing the same to our successors when they grow up without TikTok.
Gen Z is the first generation to have experienced a majority of our childhoods with generally widespread access to social media, even deemed “digital natives” according to McKinsey Company. We’re the first to have never known a world without the internet.
This being said, our expansive use of social media and the internet has paved the way for countless trends and increasingly untraditional outlooks on life, especially regarding our sense of humor. Even being off of social media for as little as a week can leave you falling behind on references, like being left out of an inside joke spanning millions of people.
A majority of these quotes spawn from TikTok, and for those without TikTok, they eventually make it to Instagram Reels.
Although some Gen Zers are beginning to feel out of touch with the constantly evolving trends of our own generation and those below us, more and more are choosing to. Multiple sources report Gen Z as having the highest screen time out of all generations, and while many are perfectly content, others are feeling the effects.
Dr. Benjamin Druss, professor and Rosalynn Carter Chair in Mental Health stated in Gen Z, Social Media, and Mental Health that social media usage is correlated with depressive symptoms and rising rates of diagnosed anxiety and depression.
We know it’s a problem, and some of us are actually changing our ways. Making the shift to spending less time online can be a gamble, but is oftentimes rewarding. According to Dr. Dean M. Daniele Fallin in Gen Z, Social Media, and Mental Health, a lot of youth realize that social media is overbearing, but only once they’ve had a negative experience, which is oftentimes quite harmful.
It’s far too soon to know whether or not the upcoming Generation Beta will follow in the media driven footsteps of Gen Z, and the even more technology fluent Gen Alpha, but as we get older we’re slowly drifting further and further away from what’s “relevant” than we realize.
