Neil Howe, who co-authored “The Fourth Turning” in the 1990s which predicted a lot of the issues we are going through now in the Western world from the late 2000s to the late 2020s, just came out with a sequel called “The Fourth Turning is Here”.
I haven’t read that new one yet, but plan to eventually. But it has me thinking about something.
Neil Howe and his co-author, back in their prior 1992 book “Generations”, coined the now-famous term “Millennial generation”. Whenever we think about how “Boomers”, “Gen X” and “Millennials” differ from each other statistically, a lot of that social concept and nomenclature goes back to the research of Howe and his co-author three decades ago.
In their view, statistically speaking, each generation tends to be raised from prior circumstances, and develops certain attributes from how they were raised. And then how they were raised and how they become, contributes to how they raise their kids. The TL;DR in one sentence is the meme, “strong people create good times, good times create weak people, weak people create bad times, bad times create strong people”, although the full conception is of course more complex and nuanced than that.
To describe it in a slightly more detailed manner, there are periods of social unification and optimism (but general repression of outsiders/minorities), periods of pushback and awakening social change, periods of isolation and pessimism as the social order begins to disintegrate, and periods of populism and catastrophe, resulting in a crisis that leads to… periods of social unification and optimism (but general repression of outsiders/minorities) which begins the cycle anew.
In this post, the most relevant two of the four generations are:
-Generation X (those born from the mid-late 1960s to the very early 1980s) were kind of “on their own” as kids. Statistically speaking, their parents gave them a key to the house and basically said, “go bike and play with your friends”. They developed a rather individualist and self-reliant but somewhat cynical view of society. As they became adults, they were capable, but generally inactive in terms of politics.
-Millennials on the other hand, (those born from the early 1980s to the late 1990s or early 2000s), were statistically rather coddled by their Boomer parents, but by extension were made sure to have a bunch of talents (grades, languages, social connections, etc). And the 1990s in the US and Europe were basically “peak years” in terms of optimism. As they are starting to become adults (30s and older), they lack independence but have a strong sense of community.
As someone who is on the older half of Millennials (born in the mid/late 1980s), and with an older father (not a Boomer, but rather the prior generation to Boomers that mostly raised Gen Xers), I have found this blend to be true, but interesting. And it has been useful to witness the social shift in society in ways I can observe. I’m kind of a Gen X and Millennial hybrid, in other words. I was raised in a Gen X way by a parent of the typical age of Gen X-er parent, but in terms of age and media influence, I’m a Millennial.
This generational stuff is only about statistics/trends, so there are a ton of exceptions, like me and others. So for example, I was homeless with my mother from age 5-7, and then grew up in a trailer park with my elderly single father from age 7-18 who had to work most days, so I wasn’t exactly the main demographic of reference here. And yet I still experienced much of it through media, in my hybrid way.
My father, by the nature of his age and circumstances, treated me as a blend of Gen X and Millennial as Howe would define it, but mostly Gen X. He gave me a house key, taught me to cook, and was basically like, “go play with your friends and get your homework done, I love you, but I need to work now.” when I was 7. I was out with my trailer park friends for hours unwatched playing with literal samurai swords and stuff, which would horrify parents today. My father had harsh standards for my school grades but didn’t directly participate because he didn’t know anything about math and so forth. He also put me in martial arts classes, which like a classical Millennial parent (and unlike my schooling or the Gen X stereotype), he tightly participated in by driving me there and watching me there every session in the evenings. Plus, from a Millennial perspective, as a single father and one daughter, we had more communication than a typical Gen X household would have by Howe’s conception of a typical Gen X household (closer to a Millennial household where there is more of a highly communicative and friendly relationship between parents and kids). We were a hybrid Gen X and Millennial environment, based on age, situation, media, and era.
I grew up with 1990s media. The Soviet Union recently fell, and China was opening up to the world, which along with the US and Europe together helped integrate the world together. I played and watched Pokemon from Japan, and as I grew older I watched things like Cowboy Bebop and other anime. I was aware that more and more of my physical stuff was made in China. The movie Independence Day with Will Smith from the USA was popular, and other pro-America, pro-world movies and shows were popular. Europe was integrating together and had a very optimistic economic outlook (lol in hindsight), which came together with the euro currency. All sorts of optimism in media, with a pro-America and pro-World theme, everything seemed to be improving. I was playing Japanese Nintendo and Gamecube, filled with happiness and optimism, and Japanese Playstation (Final Fantasy 7 and 8), with some emo drama but generally positive. Later when I went to my friends homes, I played Playstation 2 and so forth, which had grittier content but still with a conception of ever-improving technology.
That was the social era I grew up in. Few or no phones, or basic flip phones at best. We were still out and experiencing the world as kids, in our rough and tumble way, or playing computer/console games (often together in someone’s living room while the parent was at work). But there was a social and media conception that things were improving, including global geopolitics and economics, which influenced me and the rest of the Millennial generation, even as I was also kind of raised as an independent Gen X that cooked for herself, was alone or with friends for long stretches of time while her father was at work, and would be respected enough to just be out with friends for hours at a time without the parent knowing where I was.
I’m grateful for this blend. I love the combination of the early Millennial era optimism (coming of age in the 1990s and early 2000s), but I also appreciate the grit of being raised in a trailer park by a single elderly father born in fucking 1935 who, by practical necessity, made me independent as soon as I was consciously able to be and threw me out into the working-class suburban wild. A lot of people born in the 1980s, not just me, kind of have a sweet spot there. Grit and optimism. I was a 7-year-old that from that point had to navigate cooking, house maintenance, neighbors, snow-shoveling, getting to the bus stop a mile away, but that also had a friendly relationship with her father as the only two people in the household, and who was raised in an environment of highly positive 1990s and early 2000s media and friends.
It has been interesting to watch media change over time. It has of course become grittier, darker, and more pessimistic. We had the 2007-2009 Great Recession, and then slow economic growth, and then all the 2020-2022 COVID stuff. Dark stuff is popular now. I also personally find that I like darker stuff. Optimistic stuff seems out-of-touch. This is our era.
And it has been interesting to watch social norms change as well, somewhat in the opposite direction. We became less optimistic in our media, even as we tried to become more inclusive in our social norms.
My father was a Republican and my mother was a Democrat. I was young and politically neutral until the US invaded Iraq in 2003 when I was 15-16. Most Republicans voted for it, and a sizable minority of Democrats voted for it, but far more Democrats opposed it than Republicans. Republicans opposed LGBT rights whereas Democrats supported them. Republicans were generally the war-on-drugs group and Democrats were more mixed in that regard. I was a blended Democrat or Libertarian in the sense that I didn’t like foreign war, and I also wanted adult LGBT people to have rights (many of which they didn’t have back then), and although I wanted rule of law on property I didn’t want the drug war, and was fiscally free-market oriented on taxes and regulations and so forth. Basically, my default setting in that context was socially liberal and fiscally moderate/nuanced. I defined myself as opposing the Iraq War and Drug War, and wanting my LGBT friends to have equal rights in an individualist but rule-of-law society. My focus was on individual freedom, with an emphasis on empathy and inclusiveness.
When I was in college, I worked as a resident assistant, meaning I helped freshman and sophomores become accustomed to living on campus away from their parents for the first time, and deal with their problems that might pop up. We (resident assistants) were the front line to help them get used to it, become independent, and to spot problems (e.g. suicidal students, which unfortunately happened on occasion). I also had to give diversity presentations.
Back then, and I’m talking late-2000s here, the diversity presentations that resident assistants like me had to do were rational and benign. It was just about awareness of statistics, and to ask why, and to discuss how we might be more cognizant of these differentials. The goal was to make people think and be self-aware, rather than to give them answers.
For example, we would do various exercises to identify privilege, like the male/white percentage of celebrities, superheroes, politicians, famous authors, and so forth to see how high the percentage was and to question why. The focus was on identifying the historical momentum of privilege and how many of our influences are drawn from that momentum, being aware of it, as social cognizant people, and that’s it. We also did totally different social bonding things, like video game tournaments (I always did Super Smash Bros), March Madness tournaments, and so forth that had nothing to do with race/gender/orientation/etc. The goal was to have fun, build a community, and then once in a while think about the concept of social momentum and how we might deliberately make a note to be more consciously inclusive of our friends, or media, and thinking to include everyone rather than ride on unconscious momentum. I think that’s healthy, and that’s all that we did at that time. It was about individualism combined with conscious inclusivism rather than unconscious riding on historical (often racist, sexist) momentum.
But now when I look at college campuses in the 2010s and 2020s, and society at large, it has obviously trended a lot differently since then. The full Millennial and Gen Z environment is very different than the Gen X and early Millennial environment. Many of them now have adopted a more cultural Marxist type of ideology where race/gender/orientation takes more of a center stage, and things have trended in a more extreme direction. In my college days of 2006-2010, I wasn’t even aware this was a modern thing.
In my primary through high schooling, I was raised in an environment of “racial blindness”. And in a multi-ethnic near-city suburban mixed neighborhood, that’s what it was. White kids were the majority (as is normal in the US), but there was an above-nation-average percentage of African Americans and Indians, along with many Hispanics and Asians and others (we were in the Northeast, which is less of a hot-spot for Hispanics and Asians). What me and my peers were brought up with, much like Martin Luther King Jr. said to do, was to base everything on character and content rather than superficial appearances like race, gender, orientation, etc. It makes sense to take some extra effort to reach out to under-represented groups and to proactively include them, but the whole point ultimately is to be focused on character, not on immutable characteristics. My friends where White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, Straight, LGBT, and the whole point was… it was boring. We were all friends. We observed each other’s differences but barely cared. To the extent that we had cultural differences, those were the spices around the edges, and made things better. The main point was our schooling, sports, and all of our other shared hardships that we bonded together to get through together.
Anyway, these are just things I observe or think about sometimes. There’s value in independence and self-reliance (Gen X), but there’s also value in social optimism and an explicitly and proactively welcoming community (Millennial), and in some sense I was born in and experienced the generational trends of both.
My view, in terms of Bitcoin or otherwise, is to be independent and self-reliant, and then *also* to go out and proactively build an optimistic broad community too. So as it relates to diversity, my view is to not force it, but to proactively reach out and gather it, but while emphasizing expertise as the most important thing and not trying to force baseless quotas.
This is, in my opinion, is basic rationality, optimism, and inclusiveness. I don’t see why it’s controversial, but every side seems to want to be extreme and fight each other. We can’t influence the desires of other people, but we can take the initiative to reach out and make spaces accepting, deliberately try to broaden the space, and see what happens from there to reach the broadest possible audience.
