Rabbithole: Neil Howe w/ Transcript

Generational Roles in a time of crisis.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Neil Howe, author of Generations, The Fourth Turning and The Fourth Turning is Here. You can find his work at Demography Unplugged. Neil has been enormously influential in my own thinking about the Now, so I took the opportunity to ask him all my burning questions about what those of us in midlife and older are actually facing, and what to do about it.

This full transcript is for paying subscribers, and is a companion to a second piece published today on the Elder Crisis. Enjoy.

Edited Transcript:

[00:00:00] Dave Nadig:
We're not going to go deep into what generational theory is, or the Fourth Turning. We're going to talk about the now being the frog in the boiling water of the current crisis.

Where are we in your cycle and how does it feel in terms of how you would expect it to have gone when you started this process 20 years ago?

[00:00:31] Neil Howe:
I have to say, this has played out pretty much as we expected.

I'm speaking honestly from when Bill and I first started writing about this in 1991, that was in our book "Generations" where we first talked about American history and by extension much of Western history being cyclical, modern history, being cyclical.

We talked about a crisis of the 2020s. It's in that book. And we foretold something that would be the way this generational cycle plays out would lead to that. Now, at that time, we often thought about something peaking in the year 2020 or in the early 2020s.

And I would say the one difference is that due to the lengthening of generations, the slowing of the timing of generations, that we're pushing. The cycle is dilating slightly, and this has happened over time. This happened over the centuries.