Our Four-Generational Future

Neil Howe’s Vision from Now to the 2050s

What are Boomers, Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers likely to do in the crises and in the good times from now till the 2050s?  In this post, I’ll focus on answers to this question, because this is what I believe most merits our attention in Neil Howe’s vision of the future.

(In my first post responding to Howe’s new book The Fourth Turning Is Here, I outlined his view of America’s five generations in the present – in the mid-2020s.) 

There are two dimensions of the Strauss-Howe paradigm: eras and generations.  I am setting aside eras here and focusing entirely on generations. 

So rather than history’s Crises and the Highs that follow them, my focus here is on small-c crises and small-h highs or “good times”.  The result is not a pure Howe view, but I’m drawing almost entirely from Howe.

Basically, we can guess that the good times will be caused by economic upswings, medical and other scientific and technological breakthroughs and progress (including our venture into space), the upside of A.I., and / or something akin to lifelong affordable access to education and training (via online courses and courseware) for every person on Earth.

And we can guess at the crises: economic recessions and / or a depression, a major fiscal crisis from our tens of trillions of dollars in national debt, the nightmare scenarios of A.I. and / or other science and technology, a war with weapons of mass destruction, and / or a cyberwar that leaves us without digital or even electric grids.

Alongside whatever mix of crises and good times are going to come our way, we face three other huge variables:

First, how bad and how disruptive will climate change get?  Will we leave it as an unsolved crisis – maybe the biggest crisis – or will we halt it (with clean fuels and electricity) or even reverse it (with something like nano-carbon-capture)?

Second (and Howe leaves this out), advances in longevity.  We will soon be able to replace every organ in our body except our brain, regenerate our brain cells, and (in the 2040s?) reverse aging.  Then, instead of housing, communities, and jobs for 10 billion of us, we may need them for 20 billion of us.

And third (and Howe devotes many insightful pages to this), will our democratic societies be strong enough to meet each crisis?  Or will our democratic societies be here at all? 

Will we continue to divide into two warring tribes – our Blue tribe of more open-minded, inclusive, futuristic professionals who provide our higher-tech goods and services (and much of our media and culture) vs. our Red tribe of more tradition-rooted contractors and workers who construct and keep functioning our buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure and provide our lower-tech goods and services? 

Will we continue to weaken ourselves with this feverish divide, which is itself a crisis?  Or will we put this division behind us and strengthen our democratic societies by becoming unified?  

Even more fundamentally and with potentially much worse an outcome, will more democracies – even American democracy – degenerate into authoritarianism and dictatorship?  Will a “populist”-driven collapse of democracies into dictatorships become the main crisis of our lives?

This, essentially, is what’s hovering over us – both the storm clouds and the bright promises rising up over the next third-of-a-century – as we stand here in 2023 and look out at the horizon.

What will each generation be like as we move forward – especially in the years Howe selects for his thoughtful speculations, from 2033 to 2056?  There will be only three million Americans from the Folk Generation (born from 1925 to 1942) – what Howe any many others call the Silent Generation – still alive in 2033.  So let’s join Howe in taking a look at the future of the four other living generations.

The Boom Generation

Born 1943 to 1960

2033: 42 million Americans age 73 to 90

2056: 3 million Americans age 96 and up

For the rest of their lives, our Boom elders at their best will urge us toward good character and a wise and principled life.  Most of these values-based visions will be drawn from the depths of our cultural heritage.

In crises, we may find Boomers to be wise stewards.  They may even help turn the crossing of a painful threshold into a purifying transformation.  But we may also find them to be of such uncompromising, unyielding rectitude and zeal that, unchecked by younger generations, they would make the crisis much worse.

In good times, Boomers are likely to see the Millennials’ optimistic planning and building as bland, shallow, and herd-like.  But Millennials will shake off the criticism and plow ahead.

Generation X

Born 1961 to 1981

2033: 84 million Americans age 52 to 72

2056: 47 million Americans age 75 to 95

In the crises of the next couple decades, America and the world will need tough, gritty, resilient, gutsy leaders and managers.  And whaddya know?  Here we are.

Howe observes that we Xers will bring to crises our quick thinking on the fly and outside the box, our deft timing, and our tactical creativity.  We will be daring and unfazed by risks as we move from problem to problem and come up with solutions that work. 

We may have spent our youth wandering alone in a land without boundaries, rules, or structure.  But in large part because of this experience, Howe sees us excelling as midlife crisis leaders and managers. 

In the darkest of our society’s trials, at the fulcrum between tragedy and triumph, with everything at stake, we Xers may well anchor and ultimately save civilization – or at least the Republic – as we safeguard Millennials and Zoomers and secure a better future for them.

In good times, we’ll stop arguing about values, calm society down, and get the job done.  We’ll focus on getting things working – especially securing the peace and raising wages.  And we’ll set aside our differences with Millennials to build a workable civic order.

From now on, as midlifers and then as elders, we Xers will invest more and more time in mentoring the young in our communities.  Millennials and Zoomers may find us too risk-averse, too cautious, as we age, but we’ll teach them a few hard-scrabble lessons and the value of ice-cold realism.

The Millennial Generation

Born 1982 to c. 2005

2033: 113 million Americans age 28 to 51

2056: 107 million Americans age 51 to 74

Millennials will keep up their wholesome culture, their sociable and cooperative behavior, and their hard work and perfectionism.  More practical than Boomers, more disciplined than Xers, Millennials will confidently build up a functional new system that benefits as many of them as possible.

After struggling financially for two decades, they’ll begin to propel society forward by doing big things.  They’ll be ready to build and rebuild our neighborhoods, to generate real and widespread home ownership for themselves, and (for those for whom it’s not late) to finally settle down, marry, and have children.

Howe envisions Millennials leading America and the world through an era of planning and building.  Enough Millennials played the videogames SimCity, Civilization, and Age of Empires that they’ll be ready to revitalize our cities by building parks, malls, and civic centers. 

Howe goes much further, and imagines America’s 2030s mayors hiring, say, 15 million Millennials to manage multi-billion-dollar projects “from smart highways, transit loops, and universal IoT Wi-Fi to urban reconstruction, modular housing, and solar and geothermal power farms.”  Millennials will hold stable jobs while building it, they’ll live in it, and they’ll love being able to “contribute (at last) to something that benefits everyone”.

All along the way, cohesive Millennial work teams will take on Promethean challenges with energy and optimism.  They’ll be rational but grandly ambitious and their collective achievements will be stunning.

With their team-and-consensus-building skills, their belief in the wonders of technology and social organization, and their commitment to outer-world progress – at scale – Millennials by 2050, Howe writes, will have forged the “networked tubes, towers, and terraces that will define 21st Century civilization”.  And when history calls on them to do so, they will not only mobilize our civic life but build up old and new institutions, re-establish our Republic, and strengthen global civilization.

Out there in the 2050s, as seventyish Millennials begin departing this world, it may feel like they are going out as one large force.  Like those wholesome, cheerful, confident Power Rangers of their youth, they’ll be remembered for transforming themselves, when summoned, to succeed in the face of great odds.  And while each gets his or her own epitaph, we can visualize Millennials making their exit with one large, shared, collective epitaph – the motto of the Power Rangers: “The Power of Teamwork Overcomes All”.

The Zoomer Generation

Born c. 2006 to c. 2029

2033: 99 million Americans age 4 to 27

2056: 107 million Americans age 27 to 50

Zoomers, Howe tells us, will continue to be screened, monitored, tracked, and sheltered from danger 24/7, to be subjected to do-and-don’t rules for almost all their behavior, and to live in homes that are, basically, claustrophobic bunkers.  But they’ll continue to prefer life with rules than without. 

We’ll keep finding Zoomers self-conscious, awkward, anxious, and a bit neurotic – focused on avoiding mistakes and scandalous behavior.  But this is the flipside of their impressive traits of resisting their impulses, exercising self-control and responsibility, satisfying other people’s expectations, and meeting high standards. 

Howe notes that on one matter Zoomers will take a firm stand.  They’ll continue to speak against people who are selfish, rude, aggressive, and contentious – all of whom, for some reason, they’ve dubbed “Karens”.

We will begin to notice, more and more, the upside.  The oldest Zoomers are about to step forward to acquire diplomas and other credentials.  Many will develop well-informed and well-rounded professional expertise.  Many will emerge as model spouses, employees, neighbors, and citizens.

In the 2030s and 2040s, Zoomers will be polite, super-nice, earnest, well-behaved, and sensitive rising adults.  Will they be too conventional, docile, and complacent?  Yes, says Howe, but they will also “excel at communicating with other people (including other age groups) who hold different points of view”.

In the next crisis or two, Zoomers will probably be bystanders.  They’ll be helpmates to their elders, Howe predicts, who take on many of the early crises’ smaller tasks.

In the good times, rising-adult Zoomers will help midlife Millennials carry out their grand plans.  Zoomers will serve as the experts, specialists, and technicians of Millennials’ grand collective efforts.

Robbed of their agency as youth, Zoomers can be expected to emerge in midlife in the 2050s into lives of autonomy, empowerment, personal exploration, and, at last, risk-taking.  They will probably also doubt and question the gigantism of the Millennials-built world.

Along the way, Zoomers will add conscience, feelings, and authenticity to a period that will be somewhat lacking in them.  More than any other generation, from the 2030s to the 2050s and well beyond, Zoomers will give America and the world its heart.

This, in brief and slightly modified, is the vision we gain when we look through Neil Howe’s powerful and clarifying generational lens.  No one sees the future of living generations with a keener eye.  The Fourth Turning Is Here is indispensable — a must-read — because it gives us the most insightful view we have into our lives in 2023 and in the decades that lie ahead of us.

The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil Howe