Every year in August we celebrate International Youth Day (Aug. 12), as established by the UN General Assembly on Dec. 17, 1999 “to bring youth issues to the attention of the international community and celebrate the potential of youth in today’s global society.” This year’s theme is anchored on youth innovation for human and planetary health, with focus on transforming food systems for the sustenance and sustainability of the future. This month, however, also provides the perfect opportunity to meet the next generation, now only 11 years old at their oldest, who by the time the last of them is born in 2025, will number almost two billion, the largest generation in history—Generation Alpha or Gen Alpha. The children of Millennials and the younger siblings of Gen Z, and the only generation born entirely within the 21st century, theirs is a world potentially so unlike that of their predecessors. The oldest of Gen Alpha were born in 2010, the year Apple launched its iPad, Instagram was born, and app was the word of the year. Social analyst and futurist Mark McCrindle describes them as the generation most materially endowed, with all the tech possibilities as playthings at their fingertips, and with the Millennials, the first digital natives, actively raising them on the principles of YOLO (You Only Live Once), as a result of which their approach to learning and life is gamified, that is, patterned after the attributes of a video game. Meanwhile, their Gen Z brothers and sisters, many of whom are immersed in the struggle to right the wrongs of society on myriad issues, ranging from poverty, gender equality, and animal rights to consumerism and climate change, shape their conscience, enjoining them in the call-out culture. What particularly shapes Gen Alpha, however, is the ongoing pandemic, already a defining moment, which has so far spanned over two years, for this generation. Locked down, schooled online, and conditioned to adapt to an isolationist world, not only by COVID-19, but also by former US President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda and the still-unfolding Brexit, the kids are spending their growing up years in the milieu of virtual experiences, with their gadgets serving as their schoolmasters, tour guides, babysitters, even playmates. Logged on and linked up with lots of screen time, the children of Gen Alpha are discovering more and more of life in a 24/7 diet of TikTok, YouTube videos, Zoom meetups, Netflix or Amazon Prime, and social networking sites. While they are mastering technology, which is promising or threatening to be the last frontier of human evolution, the kids are also in danger of even shorter attention spans, impaired eyesight, arrested social development, and the tendency to be more selfish, given to instant gratification, especially as a large percentage of 2.5 million Gen Alpha members who are born every week around the world are likely being raised in one-child families and single-parent households. But it’s never too late to raise just the kind of generation this damaged world needs. Before the pandemic, behavioral experts predicted that Gen Alpha would follow the lead of their immediate predecessors, the Gen Z activists. Either this pandemic has canceled social activism or made it even more necessary in the eyes of the children growing up in world like this. With all this time spent cooped at home, Gen Alpha may be dreaming up a world reset that is much greener, healthier, friendlier, freer, and kinder to emerge into when this pandemic is over at last.