Turbulent Twenties
A Mindful Miscellany, #38
Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, a newsletter dedicated to Sense-making and Story-telling in the Turbulent Twenties. My name is Adam Karaoguz (car-owz). I am a 27 year prior enlisted US Naval Special Warfare officer. I’m also a fiction novelist on submission with D4EO literary. Extended bio located here.
I used to love reading stories about the apocalypse.
I was all in. From ages eleven to fourteen, I devoured dozens of pulpy post-apocalyptic novels, inhaling entire series like “Deathlands.” I remember turning to my mother once, nearly in tears. “I don’t think we’re going to make it,” I said with perfect tween solemnity. She looked at me with a bewildered expression, uncertain why her child was pondering the fate of humanity on a Friday night.
Books like these and Stephen King’s The Stand sank deep into my subconscious. This intro sequence to the miniseries adaptation captures some of the vibe.
As Layman Pascal and Zak Stein discuss, “Apocalypse” means unveiling— to uncover, disclose, reveal. It doesn’t mean the end of the world as in a massive depopulation and destruction of civilization, per se.
It does mean the end of the world in the sense of a one worldview ending, and another beginning.
It’s the next thing, the next paradigm, the next way we will accord ourselves to reality.1
Turbulent can be defined as: Moving rapidly or violently; Characterized by disorder, commotion, or unrest; Disturbed; Agitated; Tumultuous; Roused to violent commotion.
It is likely that during this decade, several interlocking sets of challenges will become or already are becoming too pressing to ignore/postpone— they will exert their gravity onto the context in a manner which causes a phase transition, like water to steam.
These challenges have been documented more concisely elsewhere, but some of them are economic, monetary, environmental, political, social, spiritual, energy, educational, and technological, among others.
Most societies in history have had some sort of millennialism— this notion that a golden age is coming, just around the corner.
If we can just sweep away all the bad stuff from the other people and start over, things will be so much better.
It’s a seductive idea.
It’s natural for humans to think that the time they are living is somehow more special than other times, when in reality, it’s usually just another span just like the others.
Y2K, 2012— these are recent examples of this phenomenon.
I’m wary of running afoul of that bias as I lay this out, but there is an interesting confluence of thinkers in different fields illuminating a tough road ahead in the near term.
This isn’t meant to be a Chicken Little type pronouncement— Most of the needed changes to weather this storm are internal— worldview shifts in how we think about ourselves, others, and reality itself.
Changes in how we educate, how we interact with one another, and what we incentivize as a species.
Below I’ve collated several thinkers who have taken a big history approach understanding the present.2 These are primarily economic, political (including geo-politics), and social models of change. Notably they don’t include the impacts of climate and technology such as Social Media and AI, except more generally as drivers of instability.
The provisional theories below have varying levels of academic rigor.
While I don’t think any one on their own is perfect, taken together they point towards a near term future in line with the catchphrase Taylor Swift uses to sign off some of her concerts— “May you live in interesting times.”3
Ray Dalio
An investor and hedge fund manager, Dalio makes the case we are in a transition to China becoming the major actor on the world stage. The key takeaways from Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail are:
A country gains power when it encounters favorable economic and social conditions that enable it to develop its economy and military.
A country directs the world order once it becomes more powerful than all the other countries (often demonstrated by winning a war).
Once a country peaks, the population gets lazy. It borrows money instead of working hard. The country loses its economic and military edge. It becomes decadent.
The shift from one world order to another happens when a new rising power becomes stronger than the decaying one.
The decaying power often engages and loses a war against the rising power.
The whole cycle starts again.
George Friedman
In The Storm Before the Calm, Geopolitical strategist Friedman makes the case that two major cycles drive changes in America.
The first is an institutional cycle occurring every 80 years (marked in the past by the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II) that guides the relationship between the federal government and other parts of the nation.
The second is a socio-economic cycle, which changes the dynamic of the U.S. economy and society at 50-year intervals. This is responsible for the industrial class, baby boomers, and the middle class.
Friedman predicts these forces will converge in the 2020s to “destabilize” American life and begin a “period of failures” marked by indifference to politics, low growth in productivity, and increasing unemployment.
But fear not, gentle reader— The 2030s will mark a return to a period of calm and prosperity.
Neil Howe
(Sidenote: Here’s a review of both Howe’s and Peter Turchin’s new books by Mr. End of History himself, Francis Fukuyama in the New York Times.)
Along with William Strauss (now deceased), Howe put forth the book Generations in 1992, predicting a "Crisis” in roughly the 2020s. His new book, The Fourth Turning is Here, explores these ideas in greater detail. Here’s a good review of the work on its own.
Strauss and Howe developed a theory of generational cycles, outlining four archetypes and proposing that history repeats in cycles of about 80 to 100 years, each consisting of four approximately twenty-year long turnings or phases.4 These turnings are High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. They identify four generational types emblematic of the humans born during that turning:
Prophet (Idealist): Born during a High and coming of age during an Awakening, Prophets are principled and idealistic, aiming to bring about change and reform societal institutions (Baby Boomers today).
Nomad (Reactive): Born during an Awakening and coming of age during an Unraveling, Nomads are pragmatic, adaptive, and often skeptical of prevailing social norms. They focus on survival and rebuilding institutions (Gen X).
Hero (Civic): Born during an Unraveling and coming of age during a Crisis, Heroes are civic minded, valuing community, teamwork, and collective action. They work to rebuild and strengthen society (Millennials).
Artist (Adaptive): Born during a Crisis and coming of age during a High, Artists are typically raised in a time of societal stability. They contribute to society through creativity and tend to be individualistic (Gen Z).
The theory suggests that each generation's characteristics are influenced by the historical events and the surrounding societal mood during their formative years. These generations pass through the four turnings, and the cyclical nature of history repeats as these patterns recur every 80-100 years. Howe emphasizes the role of generations in shaping history and how each generation's distinct characteristics and attitudes play a significant role in societal changes and the outcome of historical events.
Peter Turchin
Turchin is the creator of Cliodynamics— a transdisciplinary area of research that integrates cultural evolution, economics, history, sociology, and mathematics, among other subjects.5
He recently published End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.
The crux of Turchin’s argument is that one of the largest drivers of discord in a society is what he terms “Popular Immiseration”— declining standards of living, wage stagnation, and inflation of essential expenses for the majority of a society.
This is created by what he calls “The Wealth Pump”— the transfer of capital and resources from the main body to the elites in a society. In Turchin’s framing, this inevitably happens when societies are free enough to pursue innovation. Capital begins to centralize with the winners in an economy.
Another driver is “Elite Overproduction.” Instead of musical chairs with decreasing chairs each round, imagine the game with the same number of chairs, but additional players over time. These elites graduate from prestigious universities and seek jobs as journalists, lawyers, business execs, and politicians. And these elites, groomed from a young age with high education, networks, and ambition, want to lead in society. When the desires of some of them are inevitably frustrated, they turn to rule-twisting and breaking to achieve their objectives. What pulls a society out of this cycle of disintegration boils down to a few possibilities:
Revolution
War (Civil and/or External)
Pandemic (Bigger than COVID, more in line with a Black Plague type event)
Economic Reforms
Each of these will slow or reverse the Wealth Pump. Turchin highlights the year 1970 as the date that our current period of disintegration began in the United States (This tracks with many other forms of analysis, such as Robert Putnam in The Upswing, and this one, referenced by Ed Brenegar). Cycles can last for decades or centuries— they are contextually different based on niche factors.
So What
As I mentioned earlier, I am leery of falling for the “I am alive, thus this time period is super important” bias. History is full of huge crises, noteworthy events, and new technology.
But taken together, these four independently derived models seem to forecast a near term of instability, lack of trust, and violence, either domestically or internationally.6
Rig for heavy seas.
In the face of such titanic forces at work, what is the individual to do?
I used to run cross country in high school— that’s a 5km/3.1-mile foot race through woods and hills. My dad used to give me advice before the starting gun, solicited or not. It’s a dad thing, as I’ve discovered.
In the Turkish accent he never lost, even after decades in America, he would turn to me and say, “Run your race, Adam.”
That’s it. What else can we do?
Right now, that means taking care what we attend to, for our attention will frame the contours of our perception. As Dr. McGilchrist says, attention is a moral act.
It means appreciating the context holistically, cultivating the focus and discernment to think critically about these challenges.
And most importantly, it means acting. Acting to add to the harmony. To heal relationships with family, friends, and strangers. To connect and reconnect the sinew of community, nation, and international connections, through (mostly) in person acts of service.
In this way, we can attune our worldview to guide us through the next years.
Let’s get post-tragic, baby.
Have a great week, everyone!
My sense is much of the rest of the non-western world is closer to this new worldview than we in the west are. Us enlightened westerners have to figure our shit out, match our knowledge with requisite wisdom.
This part of the essay is laying out long cycle historical analysis, that’s why I selected these four. Besides them, Tyson Yunkaporta is a visionary indigenous thinker pointing a way forward through the moment. In addition, there are many women working in this space— some of them include Sonja Blignaut, Nora Bateson, Bonitta Roy, Liv Boeree, Najia Shaukat Lupson, and Kate Raworth. They are all interesting, insightful thinkers who have contributed deeply to my understanding of where we are and the direction we should orient towards.
In fact, Taylor Swift unfortunately does not sign off her concerts in this manner. Even worse, this expression may have just been invented by someone in the west and attributed to a Chinese speaker.
I would be remiss if I did not note this is one of Steve Bannon’s favorite theories. I’m not sure if he just likes the Joker in Batman “watch the world burn” Crisis stage, or if he’s also onboard for the supposed High to follow.
Those with appropriate sci-fi nerd street cred wil recognize whiffs of Hari Seldon’s “Psychohistory” from the Foundation book series (and sad Apple TV show attempt).
A lot of this is happening already, with the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere.
So much meaning in this concise essay, Adam. And so many great resources, some of whom I follow and some new. Thank you for this overview - coalescing many points of view.
So every era has its myths and drivers, and each generation gets to recapitulate meaning. Run Your Race reminds me of what my brother told me once, "Ride Your Ride", maybe something Harley-Davidson owners like to say, or philosophers..