The Fourth Turning

Now, I didn’t go looking for the Strauss–Howe generational theory. It found me.

I stumbled on the idea of “Turnings,” these repeating cycles that supposedly shape the rise and fall of institutions, the mood of generations, even the character of national life. At first, it sounded a little too tidy for the messy world I wake up in every day, but the more I read, the more I recognized pieces of our lives scattered across those descriptions.

It was the Fourth Turning, the Crisis, that got me. According to the theory, we’ve been in it since 2008.

I remember that year vividly: the panic, the layoffs, the sense that something had cracked. But looking back, it feels like it opened a door into a whole new era, where nothing—government, technology, the economy, even our sense of community—felt stable anymore.

As I dug into the earlier phases, I started connecting them to stories I’d grown up hearing. My grandparents talked about the post–World War II years like they were the golden age of certainty, when people believed things were getting better, inch by inch.

That was the High.

My parents lived through the Awakening—with its protests, its music, its searching for identity. They used to talk about the 70s as if it were a fever dream of questioning everything.

And then there was my own coming of age in what Strauss and Howe call the Unraveling. You didn’t need a historian to tell you that trust in institutions was dropping; you could feel it in every dinner table debate and every news cycle.

But it’s the Fourth Turning that I keep circling back to, probably because we’re living inside it. The theory suggests this phase is when institutions weaken, conflicts are sharp, and society needs reconstruction.

Now, I don’t know if that’s prophecy or just good pattern recognition, but it certainly matches the feeling of the last decade and a half. Rising tensions, growing inequality, technologies leaping ahead faster than we can make rules for them, with some days feeling like we’re all walking across a burning bridge.

And yet, oddly enough, the idea hasn’t left me discouraged. If anything, it gave me a strange sense of orientation, like finding out the storm we’re stuck in is actually part of a larger weather system.

The theory doesn’t promise an easy ending. It doesn’t predict outcomes at all.

But it does suggest that crises aren’t permanent. They give way, eventually, to renewal, to a new version of the High where society pulls itself back together and redraws its social contract.

Maybe that’s why the idea stays with me. Not because I think history moves on an exact schedule, or because I believe everything is predetermined, but because it reminds me that upheaval isn’t the end of the story. Periods like this have come before, and each time, people find ways to build something better on the other side.

When I step back and look at the chaos of the 2020s, it still feels overwhelming. But through the lens of this theory, it also feels like a chapter rather than a collapse, intense, turbulent, and transformative, yes, but also filled with possibility.

And somehow, knowing that gives me just enough hope to keep moving through it.