I personally believe that Howe’s boomer era is too short, probably because he is too connected to the time period.
They place the change with JFKs execution, but I don’t think this makes sense as a turning point. Society did not change after. Institutional trust remained high. I would put it around the time of watergate, the loss of the Vietnam war and the closing of the gold window, the early 70s. I would then place the end of the Gen X period around the time of the end of the Warsaw Pact and USSR. The drawing of the age of American hegemony – the early 90s not early 80s.
Therefore, the start of the 4th turning is more like the Trump presidency or COVID onset than the financial crash in 2008. We could have a long way to go, but the 4th turnings can also flair up quickly and end quickly, like the civil war.
I am not a scholar in this area, just a Gen X observer. I would love to know what other’s think.
It’s just labels. You can’t live a label, but you can live a life regardless of labels. It’s the timeline that’s important; where we are and where we’re going.
Dangerous Variant
August 2, 2023 8:03 am
There is no going back. This is what is being driven into my heart over and over in current year.
At the same time, it is also what I wrestle with when considering my choices relative to some vision of the future that those choices might help build. I refuse to abandon the culture and traditions of my people and those values and attributes that carried my ancestors through their own frontiers of some unknown future. We cant go back but we can carry things forward.
Yet instead of the circling of wagons I imagined the Great GenX would marshal, I see mostly echoes of the same boomerisms we love to criticize, e.g., the rampant “get mine” materialism and neurotic pursuit of progressive status whose biggest complaints of the great can-kicking collapse is the decline in their purchasing power and having to watch their elders squander what would be their windfall of inheritance assets that just might true-up the great accounting of entitlement.
Well, the latchkey kids are all growed up with their own designer kids and really have no desire to go back to the sexist racist past so no worries there. But they also avoid contemplating what future they are leaving for their children beyond the broken trajectory that should be painfully obvious by now. So the curse of the magical thinking continues.
Given that “who we are” is a question that has been totally conditioned out of the minds of most Heritage Americans and banished from the public discourse of our former nation outside a handful of obscure bunkers of badthinkers it is understandable that the future is a logjam of cogdis to anyone even half-way noticing.
All this while the turning culminates in a melting pot of inverted truths pressed beyond the limits of its flawed logic and invader peoples swarming the crumbs of the empire as the great looting phase empties the silos of tomorrows seeds.
I recently passed through a super touristy area in rural FUSA. Perhaps that is why I am down on my cohort. The absolutely rekt people that waddled around in various acts of feeding while their young were led around by their screens was only outdone in disgust by the sheer number of ferals and hordes of well-heeled brown invaders touring the fabricated illusion of American heritage plasticized by the bland, homogenized and grotesque facades of extreme consumerism.
Whatever the turning has in store for us better include the destruction of the fake and ghey homo economicus delusion that has us mistaking the “Economy” for that question of who we are and to what we shall serve. Its unfortunate to have to give up so many comforts but I do not see another way to awaken the generations that will be tasked with their part of this whole turning thing.
Interesting. I am no longer consider a boomer. My kid and I are both gen x now.
I personally believe that Howe’s boomer era is too short, probably because he is too connected to the time period.
They place the change with JFKs execution, but I don’t think this makes sense as a turning point. Society did not change after. Institutional trust remained high. I would put it around the time of watergate, the loss of the Vietnam war and the closing of the gold window, the early 70s. I would then place the end of the Gen X period around the time of the end of the Warsaw Pact and USSR. The drawing of the age of American hegemony – the early 90s not early 80s.
Therefore, the start of the 4th turning is more like the Trump presidency or COVID onset than the financial crash in 2008. We could have a long way to go, but the 4th turnings can also flair up quickly and end quickly, like the civil war.
I am not a scholar in this area, just a Gen X observer. I would love to know what other’s think.
It’s just labels. You can’t live a label, but you can live a life regardless of labels. It’s the timeline that’s important; where we are and where we’re going.
There is no going back. This is what is being driven into my heart over and over in current year.
At the same time, it is also what I wrestle with when considering my choices relative to some vision of the future that those choices might help build. I refuse to abandon the culture and traditions of my people and those values and attributes that carried my ancestors through their own frontiers of some unknown future. We cant go back but we can carry things forward.
Yet instead of the circling of wagons I imagined the Great GenX would marshal, I see mostly echoes of the same boomerisms we love to criticize, e.g., the rampant “get mine” materialism and neurotic pursuit of progressive status whose biggest complaints of the great can-kicking collapse is the decline in their purchasing power and having to watch their elders squander what would be their windfall of inheritance assets that just might true-up the great accounting of entitlement.
Well, the latchkey kids are all growed up with their own designer kids and really have no desire to go back to the sexist racist past so no worries there. But they also avoid contemplating what future they are leaving for their children beyond the broken trajectory that should be painfully obvious by now. So the curse of the magical thinking continues.
Given that “who we are” is a question that has been totally conditioned out of the minds of most Heritage Americans and banished from the public discourse of our former nation outside a handful of obscure bunkers of badthinkers it is understandable that the future is a logjam of cogdis to anyone even half-way noticing.
All this while the turning culminates in a melting pot of inverted truths pressed beyond the limits of its flawed logic and invader peoples swarming the crumbs of the empire as the great looting phase empties the silos of tomorrows seeds.
I recently passed through a super touristy area in rural FUSA. Perhaps that is why I am down on my cohort. The absolutely rekt people that waddled around in various acts of feeding while their young were led around by their screens was only outdone in disgust by the sheer number of ferals and hordes of well-heeled brown invaders touring the fabricated illusion of American heritage plasticized by the bland, homogenized and grotesque facades of extreme consumerism.
Whatever the turning has in store for us better include the destruction of the fake and ghey homo economicus delusion that has us mistaking the “Economy” for that question of who we are and to what we shall serve. Its unfortunate to have to give up so many comforts but I do not see another way to awaken the generations that will be tasked with their part of this whole turning thing.