How to Read the Chaos: The Fourth Turning and the Age We’re Living Through
Understanding the Rhythms of Crisis and Renewal — and the Role We’re Meant to Play
There is a lot going on right now. Absurdist political theatre. Money games that only work for the few. And yes — slave patrols, badges polished. To follow the mainstream media timeline is to be angry and afraid. To follow the Black timeline is to miss the point entirely. We scroll, we sigh and we tap out to protect our peace. But here we are — ten thousand serious minds working to make sense of it all. Historical context is the only way to keep the tail from wagging the dog.
Why We Need a Framework for This Moment
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” — James Baldwin
History doesn’t march forward; it breathes — expanding and contracting, building and breaking, collapsing and renewing. Among the frameworks that try to decode these rhythms, few have aged as eerily well as The Fourth Turning. Written in 1997 by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe — the same duo who coined the term Millennial — the book proposes that American life unfolds in repeating 80- to 100-year cycles, each made up of four “turnings.” The High. The Awakening. The Unraveling. The Crisis. When the cycle ends, it begins again. Their work isn’t prophecy; it’s pattern recognition. History as rhythm: birth, decay, rebirth.
And right now, we’re deep in winter: the Fourth Turning, when old systems die so new ones can take root. This is what collapse feels like before clarity. Frameworks like this aren’t perfect or singular, but they’re powerful — they help us locate ourselves in time. Because when you know the season, you can sense what kind of work the moment demands. Knowing the time of day makes it easier to know what action is called for.
The Four Seasons of History
Each saeculum — a long human lifetime — follows a sequence of moods and social orders:
The High: Society emerges from crisis into renewed confidence and unity. Institutions are strong. People believe in the system. (Think post–World War II America.)
The Awakening: The next generation rebels against that order, demanding authenticity, freedom and meaning. (The civil rights movement, counterculture and consciousness revolution of the 1960s–70s.)
The Unraveling: Institutions weaken; individualism reigns. Cynicism becomes culture. (The polarized 1980s–2000s — the “me-first” era of markets and media.)
The Crisis — the Fourth Turning: A reckoning. Systems collapse. Wars, pandemics, economic meltdowns. Out of the wreckage, society redefines itself.
We’re living through that Fourth Turning now: the winter of the cycle, where the old order gives way to the new.
The Evidence Is All Around Us
You don’t need a historian to tell you something has shifted. The pattern is visible in our lifetimes: 9/11 shattered the illusion of safety. The 2008 crash broke our faith in the economy. The pandemic exposed the fragility of our institutions and the limits of our individualism. Political polarization, rising authoritarianism, climate collapse — these aren’t isolated storms. They’re converging fronts in the same season.
Every generation plays a role in this drama. The Boomers (Prophets) champion moral visions that divide the nation. Gen X (Nomads) lead with cynicism and survival instinct. Millennials (Heroes) are called to rebuild amid chaos. And Gen Z (Artists) are coming of age in the shadow of it all — sensitive, adaptive, already preparing to heal.
The Black American Clock: Out of Phase, Still in Motion
“The function of freedom is to free someone else.” — Toni Morrison
For Black Americans, history has always moved slightly out of sync with the national cycle. Emancipation, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement — each a Fourth Turning in miniature, nested within America’s broader rhythm. While the nation now struggles to restore institutional legitimacy, Black America’s work has long been to build autonomous ones — to imagine freedom on our own terms, not the system’s.
If America’s Fourth Turning is about restoring legitimacy to collapsing institutions, ours is about building sovereignty: creating institutions that can survive without theirs. It’s the difference between reforming broken systems and replacing them entirely. The stakes are existential — but so is the opportunity.
Millennials as the Hero Generation
“We are responsible for the world, because we are the world.” — Nikki Giovanni
In Strauss and Howe’s model, Millennials are the Hero archetype — the generation born to rebuild after the storm. Our grandparents’ version of this was the G.I. Generation, who fought the Depression and World War II, then built the institutions that defined the 20th century. Ours will be the generation that rebuilds digital, cultural and civic infrastructure for the 21st.
Heroism today doesn’t look like marching armies; it looks like building durable communities, ethical companies, regenerative systems and media that deepen rather than divide. It’s the slow, collective work of renewal. We don’t have to save the world alone — but we do need to start laying its foundation.
Mothering the Children of the Fourth Turning
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” — bell hooks
Our children — Gen Z and Gen Alpha — are the Artists of the next cycle. Born amid chaos, they’ll grow up craving safety, fairness and stability. Our job is to give them what we didn’t have: calm. To teach them empathy as survival, creativity as resistance and collaboration as power — and to help them master the human soft skills that will matter most in an age ruled by algorithms and AI. The future they inherit will depend less on our rhetoric than on the institutions we rebuild now — in our neighborhoods, our schools, our homes.
Reading the Map
The Fourth Turning reminds us that chaos has a pattern — and in the pattern we find peace through understanding. For every winter gives way to spring. The question is not whether the cycle will end — it will — but what kind of world will bloom after the thaw.
History will record how we responded to the breaking. Whether we panicked or prepared. Whether we clung to the ruins or built something worth surviving.
Every winter ends. Ours will too — but what comes next depends on what we build now.
CRWNMAG Note:
This isn’t just about predicting cycles — it’s about preparing our people. The work of this decade is to turn cultural capital into durable infrastructure: schools, cooperatives, media, businesses and families that can outlast this storm. That’s how we honor our ancestors and protect our descendants. That’s how we win the next turning.
 | A guest post by
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