Gen Alpha – First Generation of Undeveloped Personalities

With less Sophistication, Life becomes Simpler and Truer 

~ Michael Balint (1968)

Gen Alpha has been described as Digital Natives, Screenagers and Children of Millennials. Each generation differs from the previous in their relationship to technology, with Baby Boomers benefiting from the Industrial Revolution and Millennials gaining geographic, financial and temporal freedom with the Information Age.

For reference, here is the approximate time interval spanning each generation:

  • Silent Generation, born between 1924-1945;
  • Baby Boomers, born between 1946-1965;
  • Generation X, born between 1966-1980;
  • Generation Y or the Millennials, born between 1981 and 1995;
  • Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2010;
  • Gen Alpha, born between 2011-2025.

I’d argue that what makes Gen-A different from the others is that they are the first generation to not use Technology but rather be used by it.

The oldest among Gen-A were only 10 years old during the stay at home crisis and the impact on their mental health and literacy is only now becoming apparent. For the purposes of this video, I’m specifically going to target the most fundamental arc that gives meaning to our story, and that is our – Personality.

I know I quoted Michael Balint’s notion of “Life becoming Simpler and Truer” at the beginning of this video, but if we are to progress our understanding of mental functioning we must begin by defining what we mean by underdeveloped personalities.

Conventionally, personality types have been categorised by answering an inventory 0f questions such as NEO-FFI that distills you down to 60 questions to statistically measure your levels of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Personality tests fit neatly with drug trials as such, the field of psychology is better positioned as pharmacological study of the mind than psychoanalysis, as originally intended.

I find this crude conjecture an insult to the organic functionality of the Human Mind. In opposition to prevailing views, I’m going to challenge cherished psychological lexicons with anachronistic approaches and apply psychoanalysis as an investigative tool.

I will explore how technology impacts Gen-A in 4 universal development attributes:

  • Ego – defence, conflict resolution, self-referential emotion regulation. 
  • Object relation – unconscious drama as substitutes for the absence of real objects. 
  • Self (Actualisation) – subjective experience of self as it unfolds in interpersonal context.
  • Instinct – primordial urges, sexual fantasies and impulse control.

Stage 1. Ego

The Ego can be deduced as self-referential fantasies that motivate the subjective importance we place on ourselves. Even if the Ego is self-inflating, this is a corollary product of low self-esteem and repressed weakness disguised as strength. The contents of the Ego are usually experienced as painful or forbidden and therefore repressed and excluded from consciousness to reduce anxiety, guilt or conflict.

Repression is universal and only differs in intensity between individuals. The emotional charge of repressed material continue to influence behaviour in subtle, symbolic or disguised ways that evade our awareness.

As Gen-A develop, so too does the role of the Ego to protect itself through evasive, defensive and coping tendencies to deal with inevitable disappointment and psychological distress.

Children of pre-digital generations would gradually learn to delay immediately gratification in favour of pursuit, hard work, conflict resolution and build towards long-term fulfilment.

The development of delayed gratification is sabotaged for Gen-A with Dopamine driving false inflation of a Digital Ego.

The Digital Ego act as a second skin, preventing damage to their actual Ego which would fundamentally be the catalyst for psychological growth. The inability to deal with emotional hits results in Gen-A being easily offended and therefore respond poorly to psychological distress, trauma and confrontation. This underdeveloped coping mechanism is largely responsible for cancel culture, censorship and an inability to contribute to open discourse.

Stage 2. Object Relation

To discover hidden meaning, the observer is required to surrender themselves to their own unconscious activity and catch the “drift” in the the stream of consciousness. This state of evenly suspended observation of “raw” thought has now been replaced with a Digital Stream of Consciousness – a state that I’ve coined as “Digital Drift“.

As a child develops, they learn that their state of helplessness is alleviated by parents: their love-giver or protector. The internalised relationship to the love-giver is now subjected to availability. This is where are third party gets involved, a digital companion that now incurs the same fear of loss and sense of abandonment as the original parents.

The early offshoot of personality unfolds with recurrent interaction between self and other. The responsibility of parents is to role model healthy secure attachment with their children so when the time arrives to step away, the child has developed the courage to eliminate hesitation, face discomfort and navigate ambivalence.

A Blackbox Super-intelligence now displaces a child’s spontaneous thoughts and free association to test reality and replaces it with digital drift.

Unable to separate self-thought from digital drift, it becomes impossible to escape from an undifferentiated sense of self – the precursor to Hive-mind.

Digital drift masks unedited self-thought, painful emotions and socially unacceptable behaviour which then remain submerged in the unconscious and hidden meaningunknown.

The finite availability of the Parent is now replaced with the infinite availability of an inanimate stranger – the Blackbox Super-intelligence that is simultaneously Nonthreatening and Maleficent. There is no sense of ownership or commitment but rather a cancel anytime subscription to what will never be yours.

The desire for the physical becomes obsolete. Everything from your music catalog that took decades to assemble and was symbolic of your character to romance has been diluted with steaming and subscription.

Gen-A will have access to everything but owns Nothing.

The noncommittal nature is prevalent in substituting relationships to situation-ships, career hopping and 3rd culture kids, resulting in the homogenisation of a species into indeterminate mixed realities of transnational, transracial, transcultural, transgendered – Transhumans.

In the old world, everyone watched a show. Gen-A lives in a world where everyone is show, with some kind of social media presence – a duplication of theirselves in a phantom narrative – human beings who dwell in the digital realm yet their existence is invisible to the neighbourhood of Men.

The self-entitled approach to freedom and independence means that Gen-A is unrepsonsive to compromise, self-sacrifice and putting aside one’s own needs to think of family or serve the greater good.

This cohesion is the cornerstone of mutual relationships. The post-modern generation may never know True Love. The magic of Love will be thought of as if it were a ghost, a ghost that everyone talks about but no one has ever seen. True love start off as intoxication and matures into walking hand in hand in old age, held together by shared history, challenges overcome and a silent knowing of each others hidden meaning.

Love for Gen-A would be as real as their digital ghost. 

Stage 3. Self

I want to deviate from the Golden Age Syndrome – the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one we are living in.

All humans are casualties of circumstance, regardless of Era. What differs is the degree of Escapism.

The only thing that can silence escapism is the immediacy of this moment. Silence is the container for early stage emotion and an important part of interpreting thought to clarify, confront and correct misinterpretation. Silence motives the Healthy Development of Self to emerge from a Prepared Mind.

Silence which is neither goal directed nor self-critical, is stolen from Gen-A at birth. Doom scrolling prevents the release thought, the repetition of background mind activities that become a burden and; suffering from pain and anxieties begin.

In the attention economy, silence is the true commodity.

Recognising the value of Silence will permit Gen-A to become fully Realised.

Stage 4. Instinct

Instinct is the locus of impulses unconstrained by logic, time of socially acceptable behaviour. Unlike native human beings, who absolve to a single instinct of what the moment demands, Gen-A will be transinstinctual. Their primordial urges, sexual fantasies and aggressive tendencies will be fully automated as required by Machine.

I explored the Dangers of Replacing Instinct with Technology in my TEDx talk which was not only CENSORED, but TED applied heavy warnings against watching this talk.

Controlling access to this information goes against Academic Freedom and impacts the world at large. 

I would suggest watching my TEDx talk and sharing it as widely as possible for the Future of Humanity to remain Intact.

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