It is one of the great ironies of life that each generation believes its experiences are unique. The reality is that we have seen this movie before—with different actors, plot twists, and technological advancements.
The basic plot seems to push along a hauntingly familiar path.
In 1997, Neil Howe and William Strauss introduced the concept of Fourth Turning. They divided the population into four generational archetypes: Hero, Artist, Prophet, and Nomad. (read more about the archetypes and their characteristics here)
Each generation consists of people who were born and came of age at the same period in history. They had similar experiences and thus gravitated toward similar attitudes.
The change of control from one generation to the next is called a “turning” in the Strauss/Howe scheme. On a Fourth Turning, the cycle repeats, sparking a generational crisis.
When Howe uses that word, he doesn’t mean a short period of difficulty. He means an existential crisis—one in which society’s strongest institutions collapse (or are severely challenged and stressed) and national survival is in serious doubt.
By Neil Howe’s timeline, we are today about halfway through the Fourth Turning’s Crisis phase. If this Fourth Turning is like previous ones, here is what we should see.
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