Every morning. I have a routine. I wake up on the floor of my office, take a shower,
and Google myself.
I'm oddly nervous.
It actually looks pretty damn good.
Going to go on chat roulette.
50. 50.
55 55, 55.
Hmm, 48.
I'm 37. A
boy ish 37, I've been told. Okay. So maybe everybody's just Googling my age because they're
wondering why a 55 year old is making YouTube videos. Uh, maybe they think the reason I
make so many World War II videos is because I'm old enough to have fought in the war.
And thus Philip Edwards became the only soldier to be dishonorably discharged from World War
II because of his anachronistic facial hair.
I think there was also some generational thing going on, like is this guy a boomer? Is he
a gen X-er? Is he a millennial? Is he a Zoomer with just terrible health regimen? But the
more you look into this stuff, the more it turns out that generations are actually kind
of a made up concept. All this stuff comes from somewhere.
Now, you would hope that it came from actual academic study of generations. It does not.
It comes from one of the crazier theories that I've ever seen. All that stuff comes
from the Strauss-Howe generational theory. It sounds more legit than it is. It was created
by Neil Howe and William Strauss to try to explain how generations work and their big
theory was that generations had these archetypes that would repeat over and over and over again.
I want to show you a chart. Do you see how there are all these cycles charted on this?
These are supposed to be the four seasons of history that occur over and over again.
And they've laid out little specific events for each season.
So Merry England led to the Puritan awakening led to reaction and restoration, which led
to the glorious revolution, which led to the Augustan age of empire, which led to the first
great Protestant awakening, which, and so on and so on. I'll let Neil how explain it
a little more clearly. History that seemed to be recurring and the appearance of generations,
we found that every generation belongs to one of four lifecycles. That seems to repeat
in the same order over time.
The problem is, is totally made up. The New York Times has backed me up on this. If you
look at the New York Times Book Review of generations, my favorite quote is "they have
reduced American history to a mathematical formula according to which events occur on
schedule and people behave in a predictable manner."
I mean, look at that chart again. They've tried to fit everything on a chart. This is
the same sort of magical thinking that makes people respond to astrology. They see the
character traits for a Leo, pick the ones that they find fit them, and ignore the ones
that don't. That's what Strauss-Howe did with their generational theory, which is really
just kind of made up. Honestly, this is just a hot take and a take as hot as this is not
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So since this generational theory is totally discredited, Does it mean that generations
don't matter at all? Not exactly. So there is some actual academic research on generations
and it provides a much more interesting way to think about why generations matter. It's
by Norman Ryder, it's been cited a lot and it kind of helps to explain why it matters
that I'm so old.
It's time to put on my galoshes.
So this is the big mega-cited paper by Norman Ryder. He has a ton of big ideas in it. I'm
not going to touch on all of those, but I am going to touch on his ideas about generations
and why they matter, and why it does actually matter if somebody is 37 or 22, unfortunately.
So on the one hand, you've got Strauss-Howe, they've got these big theories about generations,
that they are these cycles that happen over and over again.
And on the other hand, you've got Norman Ryder, sociologists, people who actually study and
think about this stuff in a serious way. And their big term is this term called birth cohorts.
What is a birth cohort? The idea that people with similar demographic origins might have
similar traits. Okay.
So go ahead and imagine that this river is a year that this rock is the year that you
were born in like, 2011, since everyone else in the world is incredibly young. And this
rock is the year that I was born: 1983. The year, the river, it runs over all of these
rocks, but each rock has a totally different perspective on what actually happened. This
is how the camera looks from one rock, and this is how the camera looks from the other
rock.
It's a way to express the idea that people born in different times, see the world in
different ways. They have different experiences that shape who they are and how they act.
That's more powerful than the idea of generational cycles, because it shows that history changes
how we look at the world and it changes how people are.
So here's what Ryder says about it. Conceptually, the cohort resembles most closely the ethnic
group. Membership is determined at birth and often has considerable capacity to explain
variance, but need not imply that the category is an organized group. I want to extend this
idea of cohorts. I think they get smaller than just a year, like this right here.
This is me. This is the born in Virginia in 1983 rock. And it's pretty darn different
from a rock that was born in Indonesia in 2008. They have different ways of seeing the
world. These birth cohorts are smaller and smaller and it does matter, because it shapes
who we are, shapes how the year runs over us and what we see when it happens.
Goodbye me.
Take the television I was watching after school as one specific example. I watched Barney.
It was for babies, but still a little comforting. I watched Power Rangers, even though I was
a year too old for Power Rangers and I vegged out on Star Trek, TNG.
You know, that Heraclitus quote...that I Googled recently? It says that you cannot stand in
the same river twice. It's about how the river is always changing because it's moving. I
want to extend that. If you're in a different place in the river than somebody else, you're
not standing in the same river, you're not watching the same TV after school. The river
10 feet up from here— that's not the same river where I am right now. And that river
isn't the same thing either. I'm old enough to remember when Tommy was the green ranger.
Hadn't yet discovered the power of good. I'm old enough to know that it is very possible
to be out of touch.
And I'm old enough to be 37. Or maybe a couple of years younger.
35? You are the winner! 37. Everyone else has
said I'm 50. It's like, come on. I'm not 50.