Predicting the Future
Image Credit: Printable World History Timeline Chart
I used to think The Fourth Turning was a revolutionary idea.
The groundwork for The Strauss-Howe Generational Theory was first laid out in the titular William Strauss’ and Neil Howe’s Generations: The History of America’s Future in 1991, but I didn’t pick up on it until much later. Something about 2016 made me curious about where we were all heading….
It cleanly grabbed my attention with how it so intuitively described the feeling of unease and chaos we were all in, and when the pandemic his a few years later I was completely sold on it. Every 80 years or so, about four generations, there is a period of disaster and turmoil that one generation would take the burden of resolving. For our Fourth Turning, which started in 2001, it was the global war on terror, a pandemic, the rise of fascism, global economic upheaval, and the climate disaster on our doorstep. 80 years ago, it was World War 2. 80 years before that it was the US Civil War. 80 years before that was the American Revolution.
Of course, a slightly keen eye will notice an immediate problem of it being dominated by US-centric events, and not global history, and also that it ignores how generational evolution varies wildly across different cultures, religions, and regions, but that’s beside the point. I believed we were in the Fourth Turning of our age, and a lot of other folks did, too.
As I got to be a few years older, though, those points “beside the point” became the point itself. The Fourth Turning doesn’t really add up, because it seems like every generation faces some major challenges. Just like every generation of Christians believes they’re the ones who will see the Second Coming of Jesus. On top of that, as I’ve been working more closely with people all around the world and experiencing these cultural differences a little more directly, it’s clear to me that the Euro-American-centric approach to generations doesn’t really cut it in terms of all of global human history.
The Fourth Turning isn’t as revolutionary of an idea to me anymore.
Especially so because I’ve since read Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. This was a problematic book and series for me, because I’ve always had at the core of my heart a desire to leave a long-lasting impression on the world. When I was working on my first website years ago, a friend asked me, “You’re building a website?” and I replied, “No. I’m building a legacy.” LOL
But Foundation, with all of its psychohistorians and plot-lines spanning thousands of years, challenged my idea of what a “legacy” even means. Here was a story about humans tens-of-thousands of years in the future conquering space who don’t even know which planet Earth is any more. What good is a legacy when the timeline of the Universe is near-infinite?
We don’t even need to go to that scale of time to see the futility of “legacy”, though. Kurzgesagt made a wonderful video in March 2022, which I only just watched last year, trying to find some evidence of ancient civilizations in our planet’s past. The results were… depressing to say the least. Over millions of years, even the most advanced societies with the greatest dominion over the Earth and her resources will be forgotten, reduced to fractions of a centimeter of dust in the geological record.
I have a problem with all of this, though, and maybe a bit of hope for the case of “legacy”: We don’t actually know what the future holds.
Never before have humans had the capability to write books like Asimov, create videos like Kurzgesagt, or come up with wild theories like Strauss and Howe. In the past 100 years we’ve advanced faster than the previous 10,000 (give or take), and our past 10 years we’ve developed more than the previous 100. Asimov’s psychohistorians may have used math to predict the future, but I don’t trust the numbers.
Humans are too chaotic to be predictable.
Sure, there’s The Wisdom of Crowds, famously illustrated with many experiments like Jack Treynor’s bean counters. Many people have argued that this shows how predictable humans in large groups really are, but the slightest adjustment in biases shows how flimsy the theory is (just read the article above for reasons why). Not to mention that, once again, the data comes from experiments run only in the last 100 years.
How many of you were surprised by the 2024 US Election results?
Nostradamus gets things right every so often because he wrote a ton of gibberish that we can reinterpret to fit the goals, and Howe and Strauss have a perfect theory as long as you ignore the rest of global history. Does anyone have a real understanding of where we’re heading, though?
There’s simply too many people going in too many different directions to even define what “crowd” we’re talking about. Taylor Swift can perform for a billion people around the world and she still won’t have the impact that Michael Jackson did on history.
There will never be another William Shakespeare or J.R.R. Tolkien or Wright brother or Alexander the Great or Star Wars: A New Hope. The people breaking down the human genome and pushing the world into the era of AI are nameless behind corporations that could go bankrupt with the next financial disaster. There are a few sports stars that break through to truly global popularity and impact, like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Sometimes I like to look back at the meme videos that defined my generation, and I’m stunned to see how few views they have. It seemed like everyone in the world knew “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”, but the video from 2006 has only 8 million views. Today, if a YouTube video doesn’t break a few million views in a week, it might be considered a flop. Make a billion dollars in revenue at the box office and your movie may barely make back its budget.
Still pissed they cancelled this amazing show….
My point is, I don’t really think there is one single “thing” that is driving humanity forward. We are defined right now by a plethora of choice and diversity. Generalizations are further from the truth than ever before.
We can’t make sense of any of it! Even when some of it makes perfect sense.
I don’t know if we’re in the Fourth Turning, or if I’m going to leave a legacy, or if humans are going to forget which planet Earth is someday. I won’t ever know any of that. So, I guess I’ll just enjoy today, stop trying to control the future, be kind to my fellow human, and take care of my home (both literal and figurative). Maybe through all of this I’ll learn to enjoy experiencing the little slice of history I’m a part of right now, instead of rushing through it to try and predict the future.
I put my website on Svbtle because of their Forever Promise, hoping to find a place where my words would live on for future generations to read. That seems kind of silly now after writing this post.