Early March of 2024 on a break from supporting my wife through her cancer journey which ended five weeks later in her passing, I walked this creek very near our home. It’s well over a year since I could bare to review, edit and post this today.

The work of Strauss & Howe on Generations has deeply motivated me since reading the books posted in the opening of this video, Generations, The Fourth Turning, 13th Gen, Millenials Rising and The Fourth Turning is Here. These two researched this topic before the nineties before publishing their first book, Generations in 1992, based on much original source material research into demographic profiles and history going back at least 500 years. I’d also watched many video interviews and podcasts with Neil Howe. William Strauss passed away over a decade ago. 

The book 13th Gen is out of print. It was written about Generation X, before the name really stuck. It shocked me how much it made sense of my own experience as well as the cultural experience growing up in the cultural summer (60’s and 70’s), and into the cultural fall in college and as a young professional in the ’80’s and ’90’s. Generation X was the generation of “latch key” kids, largely left to fend for themselves, and often considered degenerate. Watch the Breakfast Club, and this makes sense. Remember also the movies with Generation X kids back in the ’70’s and early ’80’s. Like The Exorcist and Firestarter.

There’s not much generation theory in the meditation. It’s more about the times, Winter is Here. It’s why I reference the Game of Thrones, the TV series which premiered with an episode titled “Winter is Coming” back in 2011. According to Neil Howe, the cultural winter began with the Global Financial Crisis in 2007 to 2008, but I’m not sure the season was really evident until 2020. But this “episode” of Mobile Meditations visits the intersection of the theory of the “fourth turning”, this cultural winter, with a very personal “winter”, dark night of the soul, facing loss and grieving, that was really only starting the beginning of 2024. And I faced it with some confidence that spring always follows winter.