Over coffee, a friend vented. He’s thirty-something. Frustrated with the world. Its politics. Its people. Its stagnation.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination...
To him, it was a spark. Exposure of “the other side.” A catalyst. The world noticed, he said. An American comeback felt possible.
I told him no. Not yet.
The spark is real. But fleeting. It took fifty years to reach this point. It will take fifty years to climb out.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s pattern recognition. I told him what I’d been reading. Austrian Economics. The Sovereign Individual. The 4th Turning. Dalio’s Changing World Order. Stoic philosophy. They all say the same thing. Ideological shifts demand a new generation. Population changes. Individual action.
He was looking for an event to change everything. History doesn’t work that way. You need a generation raised differently.
The Cycle We’re In
William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote The Fourth Turning in 1997. They said history moves in eighty to one hundred year cycles. Four turnings. Twenty to twenty-five years each. Like seasons.
High.
Spring. Post-crisis unity. Prosperity. Strong institutions. The post-WWII boom. 1946 to 1964.
Awakening.
Summer. Cultural rebellion. Spiritual focus. Rising individualism. The sixties. The seventies. Counterculture.
Unraveling.
Fall. Institutions weaken. Cynicism grows. Individualism peaks. The eighties through the two-thousands. Materialism. Declining trust.
Crisis.
Winter. Major upheaval. Wars. Economic collapse. Social breakdown. Survival demands collective action.
We’re in Crisis now.
Started around 2008. The markers are everywhere. Declining birth rates. Industrial collapse. Political polarization. Global tensions. Erosion of trust.
This winter tests us. Can society renew itself? Or does it slide into something darker? Centralized control. Authoritarianism. Techno-feudalism.
The outcome isn’t predetermined.
Societies at this crossroads can emerge into a new High. Decentralized freedom. Innovation. Renewed institutions. Or they descend. The difference lies in choices made during crisis. Particularly in how the next generation is raised.
The Bigger Cycle
The eighty-year cycle sits inside a longer one. Five hundred years. Maybe longer.
Around 500, Rome fell. The Dark Ages began.
Around 1000, the Dark Ages ended. Medieval warming. Cities rose. Feudalism solidified.
Around 1500, the printing press arrived. The Renaissance. The Reformation. The end of the medieval order. Power decentralized from the Church. Centralized into nation-states.
Every five hundred years, the entire structure reorganizes. Not just ideology. Everything. Tech. Economy. Power.
We’re five hundred years past the printing press. The internet is our new press. AI is our new Reformation. The nation-state model—born around 1500—is coming apart.
This isn’t just another Crisis phase. It’s a civilizational hinge.
The eighty-year cycle determines whether we slide into authoritarianism or decentralization. The five-hundred-year cycle determines whether we get nation-states 2.0 or something entirely new. Sovereign individuals. Decentralized networks. Or digital feudalism. Platform monopolies.
Both cycles are in motion. Both winters at once.
The stakes are higher than my friend understands.
Generations Shape and Are Shaped
Millennials.
Born 1981 to 1996. The Nomad generation. They came of age during Unraveling. Hit hardest by 2008. Student debt. Stagnant wages. Delayed homeownership. Endless wars. They developed resilience. Also deep skepticism.
Gen Z.
Born 1997 to 2012. The Hero generation. Digital natives. Social media anxiety. Climate fears. Institutional overreach. Positioned to take civic action during Crisis. But vulnerable to the same forces crushing Millennials.
Gen Alpha.
Born 2013 to 2024. The Artist generation. Born into pervasive technology. AI. Surveillance. They risk deeper isolation if not guided toward self-reliance.
Gen Beta.
Born 2025 to 2039. The Prophet generation. They’ll mature in the 2040s and 2050s. After Crisis resolves. If raised with decentralized values—self-reliance, critical thinking, distrust of centralized control—they could drive renewal into a new High. If not, they’ll inherit dysfunction. Perpetuate it.
This is where my friend’s optimism meets reality. One event can’t reprogram a generation already formed. The comeback he hopes for won’t arrive until Gen Beta matures.
And only if we plant the right seeds now.
How We Got Here
To understand why the old model collapsed for Millennials and Gen Z, trace the economic decay. See what created conditions for this Crisis.
The 1971 Nixon Shock
Nixon severed the dollar from gold in 1971. A pivotal moment. From an Austrian Economics perspective, this unleashed market distortions. Without commodity-backing, government could spend recklessly. Print money. Finance wars. Welfare states. Grandiose projects. No constraint.
Fiat currency became a tool for inflation. More dollars chasing the same goods. Debasing savings. Warping price signals.
The consequences compounded.
The seventies and eighties.
Reckless monetary expansion. Boom-bust cycles. Recessions in ‘73-’74. ‘80-’81. ‘90-’91. Each crisis a symptom. Government couldn’t manage an untethered money supply.
The nineties and two-thousands.
Globalization accelerated. Clinton’s policies. NAFTA. The WTO. China entered global trade in 2001. Marketed as progress. Really? Outsourced American manufacturing. Hollowed the industrial base. Chinese exports flooded U.S. markets. Displaced workers. Accumulated trade deficits. Set the stage for 2008.
The 2008 Financial Crisis.
The debt trap sprung. Decades of fiat-driven credit expansion. Government-backed housing bubbles. Financialization. Collapsed. The response? More fiat expansion. Quantitative easing. Zero interest rates. Bailouts. Rewarded the institutions that caused the crisis.
Today.
We live with the wreckage.
Property taxes and inflated home prices mean ownership is an illusion. You’re renting from the state. Fiat-driven inflation priced Millennials and Gen Z out of the housing market. The median home price-to-income ratio was three-to-one in 1980. By 2020? Seven-to-one in major metros. Add student debt. Averaging thirty thousand per Millennial. Stagnant wages. The result is predictable. Delayed marriage. Delayed homeownership. Historic lows in birth rates.
Why Ownership Matters
Ownership isn’t just economic. It’s the foundation of sovereignty. Generational continuity.
When you own your home, you accumulate wealth. Pass it to your children. Invest in the future. When you’re perpetually renting—from a landlord or the state via property taxes—you have no stake. You’re in survival mode. Not building mode.
Without ownership, there’s no reason to have children. Why bring kids into a world where they’ll inherit debt and dependency? Not equity and opportunity. Declining birth rates aren’t a cultural failure. They’re a rational response to economic decay.
This is the trap. Fiat inflation. Eroded ownership. Dependence on the state. Declining births. No generational renewal. Without a growing, re-educated generation, no ideological comeback is possible.
Historical Precedent
This pattern repeats. Economic or demographic shock. Generational renewal. Ideological shift. Three examples.
The Black Death
The Black Death hit Europe in 1347. Killed thirty to fifty percent of the population by 1353. The demographic shock didn’t topple feudalism overnight. It shifted the balance of power. The next generation normalized it.
Labor scarcity.
Half the workforce dead. Surviving peasants could demand higher wages. Better conditions. Lords who refused lost workers to competitors. England passed the Statute of Laborers in 1351. Tried to cap wages. Enforcement failed. Markets overpowered law.
Land abundance.
Depopulation meant empty land. Peasants could abandon manors. Settle elsewhere. Weakened lords’ control. Serfdom bound workers to land. Became unenforceable when land was cheap and labor expensive.
Revolts and tech.
Economic leverage fueled political consciousness. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England demanded the end of serfdom outright. Crushed. But it signaled the old order was brittle. Labor scarcity accelerated innovation. Water mills. Crop rotation. Tools that let fewer workers produce more.
Feudalism didn’t die in 1353. It eroded over a century. The generation born after the plague never knew the old labor glut. They normalized higher wages. Mobility. By the 1450s, serfdom had largely vanished in Western Europe.
The mechanism: population loss created conditions. The new generation, raised in scarcity, locked in the change. Ideology followed demographics.
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution ran from the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Driven by tech innovation. Population growth. People moved from rural areas to cities. Factory work. A new urban working class. This demographic shift birthed new ideologies. Classical economics. Socialism. Eventually fascism.
Classical economics.
Adam Smith. David Ricardo. Emerged to explain free markets. Specialization.
Socialism.
Marx. Engels. A critique of industrial exploitation.
Fascism.
Early twentieth century. State-corporate mergers. Response to perceived failures of capitalism and socialism.
Each ideology was shaped by the generation that experienced industrialization firsthand. The children of farmers-turned-factory-workers didn’t think like their parents. They formed unions. Demanded rights. Eventually reshaped political systems. The ideological change took decades. The time it took for a new generation to mature and gain political power.
The Post-WWII Baby Boom
The Baby Boom ran from 1946 to 1964. Massive population surge in the U.S. and Europe. This generation came of age during the sixties and seventies. The Awakening phase. Questioning authority. Challenging traditional norms. Embracing individualism.
The result was counterculture. Civil rights advances. Feminism. Environmentalism. Social liberalism. Not just cultural fads. A generational shift in values. Driven by a cohort large enough to reshape institutions.
But the Boomers also set the stage for Unraveling. Their focus on personal freedom and autonomy morphed into narcissism. Materialism. By the eighties and two-thousands, institutions weakened. Cynicism grew. The seeds of the current Crisis were planted.
The pattern holds. A population surge or shift creates new ideological conditions. The generation raised in those conditions normalizes the change. The cycle takes fifty to eighty years to complete.
The Information Age
We’re in the early stages of an Information Age transition. Shift away from centralized authority. Toward decentralized decision-making. Technologies like Bitcoin. Remote work. Homeschooling. Alternative community structures.
The Sovereign Individual came out in 1997. James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg wrote it. They argued information tech would empower individuals. Escape the control of nation-states. Create a new class of sovereign individuals. Control their own wealth. Data. Destinies.
The vision is compelling. Decentralized currencies. Bitcoin. Peer-to-peer networks. Self-education. Entrepreneurship replacing the old model. School. Job. Marriage. Home. Kids. But the transition is fragile.
The Risk of Regression
As centralized systems break down—governments over-leveraged, institutions discredited, currencies debased—there’s risk of regression. Authoritarianism. Neo-feudalism. History shows this is possible.
The rise of strongmen.
In the absence of effective governance, charismatic authoritarians emerge. Fill the power vacuum. Promise order and security. In exchange for freedom.
The re-emergence of feudalism.
A system where a small elite controls the means of production. Distributes resources to the masses. As homeownership becomes unattainable and people rent everything—homes, cars, subscriptions—we’re already sliding toward this model.
Techno-feudalism.
Instead of lords and serfs, we have platform monopolies. Google. Amazon. Facebook. X. And users. Data and attention are the new crops. Extracted and monetized by centralized entities. We’re here now.
The loss of critical infrastructure.
If centralized systems collapse without decentralized alternatives in place—power grids, water, supply chains—living standards plummet. Survival mode overrides ideology.
To avoid these outcomes, we need resilience. Adaptability. Intentional community-building. Most importantly, we need to raise the next generation differently.
The Failure of the Old Model
The old model assumed stability. School. Job. Marriage. Home. Kids. Reliable employment. Affordable housing. Predictable life stages. For Boomers and Gen X, this largely held. For Millennials and Gen Z, it collapsed.
The numbers:
Homeownership. Median price-to-income ratio rose from three-to-one in 1980 to seven-to-one in 2020. Major metros.
Student debt. Millennials carry an average of thirty thousand. Delays home purchases. Family formation.
Marriage and births. Median age of first marriage rose from twenty-three in 1980 to thirty in 2020. Birth rates hit historic lows. Not by choice. The economic foundation vanished.
The angst Millennials and Gen Z feel isn’t existential. It’s structural. The old model promised a ladder. Education. Job. Equity. Legacy. Fiat inflation and centralization sawed off the rungs. Automation replaced stable jobs. Gig work replaced pensions. Rent replaced ownership.
Decentralized alternatives are emerging. Remote work. Bitcoin. Homeschooling. Intentional communities. But they’re fragile. Unproven. The question is whether they can scale and solidify before the Crisis phase ends.
Change Occurs at the Margins or Under Pressure
Ideological change doesn’t happen through top-down mandates. Or single catalytic events. It happens gradually. At the margins. Or rapidly under extreme pressure.
Marginal change.
Incremental shifts at the edges of society. The rise of the internet. Social media. Bitcoin. Homeschooling. All marginal at first. They grew slowly. Adopted by early adopters. Until they reached critical mass.
Pressure-driven change.
External forces create urgency. Economic collapse. War. Environmental disaster. The Great Depression led to the New Deal. WWII reshaped global order. 2008 accelerated distrust of institutions. Interest in alternatives.
The intersection of marginal change and pressure is where transformation happens. When people face gradual alternatives—Bitcoin, homeschooling—and acute crisis—inflation, job loss—they’re forced to choose. If the alternatives are robust, they adopt them. If not, they default to centralized solutions. Authoritarianism. Universal basic income. Surveillance.
Critical mass is the tipping point.
A movement becomes impossible to ignore. The Civil Rights Movement started small. Bus boycotts. Sit-ins. But it reached critical mass when external pressure—media coverage, government response—forced society to confront its contradictions. Women’s suffrage followed the same arc.
Today, we’re in the pressure phase. Inflation. Political polarization. Tech disruption. These create urgency. The question is whether decentralized alternatives reach critical mass before people turn to authoritarian fixes.
Individual Action
Stoicism offers a framework. Epictetus wrote, “Some things are in our control and others not.”
We can’t control monetary policy. Geopolitics. Institutional decay. But we can control our thoughts. Actions. Responses.
What individuals can control:
Adopt decentralized tools.
Bitcoin offers financial sovereignty. A hedge against fiat debasement. It aligns with Stoic self-reliance. Austrian Economics emphasis on individual choice over state control.
Raise children with fresh values.
The old model is broken. Homeschooling. Alternative education. Teaching critical thinking. Prepare the next generation for an AI-driven, decentralized future. Seneca wrote, “The wise man is content with himself.”
Self-reliance is the foundation of freedom.
Build resilient communities.
Decentralization doesn’t mean isolation. It means forming voluntary, cooperative networks. Homeschool co-ops. Local trade. Mutual aid. These networks provide the social fabric centralized institutions once offered.
Prepare for tech change.
AI. Automation. Remote work. Reshaping the economy. Teach children to adapt. Learn continuously. Create value in this environment.
Reject dependence.
Cato the Younger said, “I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny.”
Resist overreach. State surveillance. Platform monopolies. Fiat control. Starts with individual choices.
These actions seem small. But they aggregate. A thousand families homeschooling creates a movement. A million people adopting Bitcoin shifts financial power. Individual efforts, compounded over time, reach critical mass.
The Role of Gen Beta
This brings us back to my friend’s hope. He’s not wrong to sense possibility. We’re in a Crisis phase. The next turning—a new High—is within reach. But it won’t arrive through a single event. Or leader. It will arrive when Gen Beta matures. The children born between 2025 and 2039. Into a generation raised on decentralized values.
Ray Dalio echoes this in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Navigating winter crises determines the next era’s prosperity. Whether it’s peaceful reform or destructive conflict depends on choices made today.
If Gen Beta is raised in the old model—centralized schooling, dependence on institutions, passive consumption—they’ll perpetuate the dysfunction. If they’re raised on self-reliance, critical thinking, decentralized tools, community resilience, they’ll drive renewal.
Gen Beta won’t end the cycle.
They’ll build. Their children will inherit. Their grandchildren will squander. Eighty years later, another Crisis. Another winter. This is the pattern. We see it. We know it. It will happen again.
So why act?
Because the alternative is worse. Because your children deserve a spring, even if their grandchildren face another winter. Because Stoicism teaches us to accept what we cannot change—the cycle—while controlling what we can. Our choices. Our families. Our lifetimes.
This is the fifty-year timeline I gave my friend. We’re fifty-plus years into decline. Since 1971. It will take fifty-plus years to climb out. As the Crisis yields to spring.
The turning point isn’t now.
It’s twenty to thirty years from now. When Gen Beta holds cultural and political power.
Conclusion
I told my friend the comeback he hopes for won’t happen in our lifetime. Not fully. The spark he saw is real. But it’s not enough. Ideological change takes decades. Driven by population growth. Renewal.
We’re fifty-plus years into decline.
Currency debasement. Globalization. Declining births. Industrial collapse. It will take fifty-plus years to emerge. As The 4th Turning’s Crisis phase gives way to a new High. Hope lies not in events. But in action. Stoic acceptance of what we can’t control. Paired with fierce commitment to what we can.
Have kids.
Teach them via homeschooling and AI. Value self-reliance over dependence. Adopt Bitcoin. Build community. These aren’t grand gestures. They’re the marginal changes that, compounded, reach critical mass.
The comeback starts individually.
One family at a time. Shaping Generation Beta to redefine sovereignty for the next cycle.
That’s the only way out.