Generational Theory Forum: The Fourth Turning Forum: A message board discussing generations and the Strauss Howe generational theory

Full Version: After the Crisis is over, here’s how I think the Millennium Scaculum will look like.
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
Soomers: 1940-1946

Baby Boomers: 1943-1960

Jones: 1958-1964

Generation X: 1961-1981

Xennials: 1978-1984

Millennials: 1982-2001

Zillennials: 1997-2003

Zoomers: 2002-2019

Zorronials: 2015-2021
Lol there's no way I'm in the same generation as my one year old nephew just because I graduated during coronavirus.

He's not going to remember a pre-coronavirus world. He won't remember what the world used to be like. This pandemic will basically be history to him. Unlike him, I actually fully and completely understood what a pre-COVID world looked like. That should be the main divider between people like me and Generation Alpha.

I can't see Generation Z lasting past 2014.
Generation Y lasts until 2003 (birthyear)
Generation Z will last until 2024

15-year generations do not exist.
(09-04-2020, 10:25 PM)RELFantastic Wrote: [ -> ]Soomers: 1940-1946

Baby Boomers: 1943-1960

Jones: 1958-1964

Generation X: 1961-1981

Xennials: 1978-1984

Millennials: 1982-2001

Zillennials: 1997-2003

Zoomers: 2002-2019

Zorronials: 2015-2021

Great list! Wholeheartedly agree!
(09-05-2020, 12:38 PM)Rainbow Wrote: [ -> ]Lol there's no way I'm in the same generation as my one year old nephew just because I graduated during coronavirus.

He's not going to remember a pre-coronavirus world. He won't remember what the world used to be like. This pandemic will basically be history to him. Unlike him, I actually fully and completely understood what a pre-COVID world looked like. That should be the main divider between people like me and Generation Alpha.

I can't see Generation Z lasting past 2014.

COVID-19 and the attempted shake-up of the American political tradition under Donald Trump may well be the 'meat' of the Crisis of 2020 in America. The children born just before the resolution of the Crisis can be the New Idealists. Consider that the first Boomers were born in the year in which the youngest Missionaries turned 62; a strict analogue has the New Idealists starting to be born in 2022. Howe and Strauss suggested in Generations about another generation, the Millennials, that they would be the first generation of a true Civic generation to be born under some influence of an older Civic Generation since the first wave of Thomas Jefferson's Republican generation. 

(OK, the Gilded generation of Civil War veterans took on many Civic traits late in life if they became "Establishment" by going into politics or government. But that is nearly a quibble). 

2001/2002 looks like a fairly neat divide on youth undergoing most of the usual rites of passage without distortion and those who must see many critical rites of passage from First Communions to senior proms and First Days at "Old Ivy" deferred or distorted perhaps even with their usual meanings compromised.  2020 has not only the Coronavirus as an unwelcome feature of American life, but also some particularly ugly politics and administrative practice. We have a President trying to act as a despot. The death toll of COVID-19 is analogous to that of an apocalyptic war. COVID-19 has not killed in the same proportion as the influenza epidemic of a century ago, but there are differences: respiratory infections are not usual causes of death in the First World and among privileged people in the Second and Third Worlds (see Brazil, India, Iran, and Russia) except among those with underlying conditions that make them vulnerable to opportunistic infections (compromised immune systems, congestive heart failure, cancer, or extreme poverty). There may be some people on the brink of adulthood whose defining moments are athletic performances, as in college sports and for certain Olympic athletes (the 2020 Olympic games will be held in 2021... say the siblings "I. Hope" and "U. Hope").

Life is clearly not going to be the same for someone born in 2007 as for one born in 1998. Where will the divide be?  Millennial adults will have roles in defeating COVID-19. I am taking 2001/2002 not for the 9/11 attack  or the Crash of 2008, but instead because a kid born in 2002 almost certainly had his last year in high school twisted like a personal image in a fun-house mirror. Although completion of college is a norm in certain classes (middle and higher), it is not yet a predictable expectation for young adults across the social spectrum as is high school. 

The life-narratives of Millennial adults and "Homeland" adults will be very different not so much because some technology will be with Homeland kids all their non-infant lives but be a later introduction for Millenials, or that the Homeland generation will know or not know some pop group or cultural fad that the Millennial Generation does not know. "No Child Left Behind" as an educational policy (basically preparing kids for initial placements in dead-end jobs but little else and gives kids no room for expression or culture) might have some bearing.... but that started with Millennial kids already well into the K-12 system. 

The big question is how this Crisis ends. The most promising scenario is one in which the wise people of the time sort out the fundamentals of social organization and political life as in the largely-peaceful end of the Crisis of 1780, when Americans established their Novo Ordo Saeculorum with the  ideal of E Pluribus Unum. The best situation is one in which all people are stakeholders and is not the divide between privilege and deprivation as neoliberal economics mandates with a social order split between those who do the toil and those who profit from it with 2% living like sultans, 3% being somewhat OK, and the rest living in abject poverty. Trends solidify or break in a Crisis, and America still has a neat divide between those who want America to look more like Germany before 1914 and something more like Germany today. 

I prefer not to contemplate the worst. Most of us are better than that.