I'm a sceptic that the 4th Turning started in 2008

[David Horn]

(08-01-2020, 07:30 AM)RadianMay Wrote: The problem I have now with the cycle is whether each stage of development is really 21 years long anymore. More and more young people are going to college, and thus becoming reliant on older generations for longer in their lives. In the past, you were clearly a “young adult” in your early twenties, most people married young and got a permanent job. Now it’s clearly the opposite, and with the newer generations being reliant on older ones for longer, with a clear extension of childhood. At least from my observations, most college age kids do seem to think, act, and identify as children rather than adults. Many college graduates are similar.

S&H also stated that 1T and 2Ts tend to have children growing up faster than in 3Ts and 4Ts, as evidenced by the average age of marriage. Does this mean 1Ts and 2Ts tend to be shorter than 3Ts if that is the case? However this doesn’t take into account the other generations that cause the turnings.

Let's step back a bit and reexamine first premises.  In Generations, the authors argued that history creates generations and generations create history.  If we lived in a totally sanitary world, where only one world-wide historical cycle existed and non-human events had no impact, then the cycle would be arguably a fixed phenomenon.  But we don't.  So back to the impact of history on generations and its obverse: it makes perfect sense that variance must exist inside a less than perfect model.  Though the issue of an unusually long Turning or a truncated generation needs to be explained, it doesn't invalidate anything in and of itself.  We may not know how it all fits together for another Turning or two.

I've always been in a minority who felt that the mechanistic approach to the theory robbed it of its power by demanding an impossible degree of precision.  That said, we are in an era that may be unprecedented.  We're a little too capable of observation, analysis and counteraction due entirely to the presence of technology we've only recently acquired.  It's hard to know whether our knowledge of what is occurring and our efforts to manipulate it are enough to break the cycle or merely bend it in a new way, but we should assume there is an impact.