The Intergenerational Band

The current book I'm reading is The Generation Myth. In some ways, it's the counterpoint to The Fourth Turning. Generations can appear to fall into patterns, but perhaps it's only because we're primed to find patterns, and then spin myths to live by. 

The author is GenX, and I suspect that the readers are in that generation and before, perhaps Millennials. GenZ is perhaps too young and disinterested in reading a book on history. Who was sitting around reading a somewhat scholarly history books at 16?

Interest in these types of topics usually happens around middle age when you have just enough distance to see things at a wider angle. I read The Fourth Turning in my 40s and loved the book, but have had a change of heart about it. Patterns have too much power over opinions because it's easy to move to "beats" in history rather than the rhythms of it--or even better--its syncopation.

I'm reminded of the idea I had long ago (around the time of the Fourth Turning reading) of the Intergenerational Band: a band whose members would be from all current living generations: the drummer is GenZ, the guitar player is GenX, the bass player is Boomer and the keyboard player is Silent, in their 70s or 80s. I thought it was a viable idea, and perhaps still can be, but the Culture Wars persist. This was something that in the Fourth Turning theory is characteristic of a Third Turning (1980-2008), a period in which GenX was in the cultural zeitgeist of their lives. Millennials are still in a zeitgeist but is fading into the background din of the continuing culture war.