Fun fact, putting people in boxes is a horrible way to treat people, is dehumanizing, and doesn't get an accurate look at individuals and their motives.
Fun fact, putting people in boxes is what companies and governments do in order to organize their marketing efforts to try and sell to specific demographics or to get elected.
Putting people in rough boxes can help you discover things about them. You merely have to remember that it is an approximation and does not describe real humans.
Their bedtime story to play on repeat while they sleep:
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
(Brave New World for those who don't immediately get the reference.)
Children born between next Wednesday and Friday will be designated "generation cd-dvd" closely followed by those born the following week who will be called "generation noombers".
The media will focus tightly on how these two groups, born mere hours apart can be entirely characterised in general terms that don't consider geographic, social, economic, or race discrepancies and will set them against each other in a bitter feud that includes housing availability and which slang is the best slang.
One of the many avenues upon which they have divided and conquered us. I don't say this as if I'm above it. Your comment gave me a moment of reflection.
They can switch to Cyrillic: az, buki, vedi, glagol', dobro... Then Futhark, and so on, there's no lack of alphabet systems out there. The preference for Greek is kind of lazy.
What happens when we get to the end of the Greek alphabet?
That's something for Gen Φ or Χ to worry about, sometime in the year 2420. If humanity makes it that far, it feels like a very minor concern.
More likely we just won't be using this archaic technology for generational cohorts by then, because we'll be using Esperanto or Universal Standard Hindi or Mandarin.
Reminder that esperanto is a bad IAL due to being based almost entirely on European languages, having a phoneme Inventory based off one of the languages Zamenhof happened to speak and having an agglutinative grammar that would be unfamiliar and difficult to many people
The boomers were defined by a demographic shift and the millennials (gen y, because Y comes after X and also because "y2k" ) were defined by being young-ish around New year's day 2000. Meanwhile X, z, α, and allegedly now "β" are just arbitrary postmarks who's locations are malleable and variable by the person you're talking to.
This is one of those cultural things that I tend to get grump and annoyed about because it's stupid and people pretend that it's real.
It's a bit like the notions of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. The change was continuous over a long period of time, but I think there are commonalities of thought and experience that tie generations together. Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11; all of those influenced people of different ages at the time in different ways, compounding on each other.
The perspective of someone who was 18 on 9/11/2001 was different from someone who was 35, versus someone who was 50, versus someone who was 80. My kids, for example, have never known the WTC as anything other than an attack site, and recoiled when the NYC skyline was shown during New Year's Rockin' Eve 1999.