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Survival skills are what a society needs most in a Fourth Turning, Winter Season or Kali Yuga, and those are precisely what the most criticized archetype - the Nomad aka Gen X - possesses in abundance. Through the natural corrective force of the saeculum (a lifetime period).
The Nomad was raised to excel in exactly those skills that history will require from him in midlife at a time of real public danger. His challenge will be to stop dispersing these skills for scattered purposes and start gathering them for one larger purpose.
Through the Unraveling, the Nomad has been able to withdraw from civic life, but come the Crisis he cannot. It will be his duty to ensure that whatever choices society makes will work as intended. He must cut through the paralytic residue built by his shadow, the old Artist.
In private life, he must rebuild the family and community rituals once discarded by the old Artist. As he does this, the Nomad will nurture the new child Artist.
The 4th Turning will find other generations with lives either mostly in the past or mostly in the future, but not us.
The 4th Turning will find other generations with lives either mostly in the past or mostly in the future, but not us.
Every tool X’ers acquired during a hardened childhood and individualist youth will be put to test. If X’ers apply these tools, they will become antidotes to pathologies remembered from their own Awakening-era, from divorce and latchkeys to public debt and cultural decay.
The X’ers gravest Fourth Tuning duty will be their society’s most important pre-seasonal task: to ensure that there can indeed be a new High, a new golden age of hope and prosperity.
For the Crisis to end well, X’ers must keep Boomers from wreaking needless destruction and Millennials from marching too mindlessly under their elders’ banner.
They will not find it easy to restrain an older generation that will consider itself far wiser than they, and a younger one that will consider itself more deserving. For this, X’ers will require a keen eye and a rejection of the wild risk taking associated with their youth.
We will have to vote more and participate more, if we want to contain the Boomers’ zealotry. As the Crisis catalyzes, we must eclipse Boomers around its climax, and totally dominate them by the time it resolves.
As we go one-on-one with history, X’ers should remember that history is counting to do whatever hard jobs may be necessary. If X’ers play our part weakly, old Boomers could wreak a horrible apocalypse, and X’ers demagogues could impose a mind-numbing authoritarianism—or both.
If X’ers play our script cleverly but safely, however, a new Golden Age will be the hard-won reward. As we age, X’ers should remember Hemingway’s words: “Old men do not grow wise. They grow careful.” FIN
