Can you believe it??
Today’s the day.
I’ve been hinting at this article for weeks, and we’re finally doing it: the cycles we’re in.
We’ll also talk briefly about the thrilling conclusion of that tiny little government shutdown because it illustrates the cycle in a powerful way.
Please remember, despite the political sphere clawing its way into these articles continually: I do not really write about politics.
I write about systems.
Political things just end up in my articles fairly regularly because politics is one of the dominant systems in our lives, and we can’t make sense of what’s happening without understanding how that fits into the larger puzzle.
OK… back to cycles!
To understand the very weird moment we’re living through — the confusion, the exhaustion, the constant energy that feels like a face-palm — we need to zoom out. Way out. Like, centuries out.
Because I believe what we’re experiencing right now actually isn’t that weird. It’s patterned. Maybe even predictable.
And honestly?
Right on schedule.
WHAT IS THE FOURTH TURNING?
Let’s talk about Bill Strauss and Neil Howe.
You maybe haven’t heard of them, but you know an output of their work — these are the guys that coined the term “Millenials” in their book “Generations” back in 1991.
Then, in ‘97, these two historians released a book called The Fourth Turning, which introduced a theory that is either the most interesting generational framework ever created or a beautifully structured hallucination.
Spoiler alert: I lean toward the former, mostly because it’s been wildly accurate.
Here’s the theory in a nutshell…
Societies move through four repeating 20-something-year eras called “turnings,” which together make up a roughly 80- to 100-year cycle (basically the length of a long human lifespan).
There are also four different generational archetypes: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist. Society progresses through all four of those as well, and then the cycle starts over.
What creates those generational types?
That’s the Turnings. Each twenty-year period has a different kind of “flavor,” a different zeitgeist, which shapes the young people in that time period to the point where we can say “you’re in this generation” or “you’re in that generation” with some kind of coherence.
So we’ve got Turnings that create a certain “type” of generation which helps birth the next Turning.
To everything, turn turn turn…
The four turnings also reflect our physical seasons:
Spring is called The High — Institutions are strong, individualism is low. Everyone’s bought in. We rebuilt after the last crisis and things actually work.
Summer is The Awakening — Institutions start to get challenged, a focus on individual identity becomes really important.
Fall is The Unraveling — Institutions weaken and individualism peaks. Trust erodes. Everyone’s in their own corner. Things still kinda work, but barely.
Winter is The Crisis — Trust is gone. Systems collapse. A crisis occurs. This is the moment of institutional breakdown.
Pop quiz: what season do you think we’re in now??
Let’s go through them again and I’ll orient you…
Spring, The High, happened in the period after World War 2, when the middle class was strong and we all seemed to believe in a great big beautiful tomorrow.
Summer, The Awakening, happened in the cultural revolution period of the 60s and 70s when institutions were being seriously questioned.
Fall, The Unraveling, happened in the time period I was born into, the famous “greed is good” 80s and 90s.
Which leaves…
You guessed it.
Winter, The Crisis — happening right freaking now.
According to this model we are deep into what Strauss and Howe call a Fourth Turning.
The winter phase.
This is when political systems break down, economic models wobble, trust evaporates, old methods stop working, because the structures built in the last Spring just aren’t working anymore.
Sound familiar?
Winter is the era when societies must reinvent themselves.
And here’s the kicker: winter is not a mistake.
Winter is the assignment.
THE STAGES OF WINTER
There are also four stages of Winter. In the interest of simplicity, I won’t go into the names of these stages today, but here’s what you need to know.
Neil Howe would say the first stage of Winter started around 2008 with the Great Financial Crisis. The second stage started in 2016 with Trump vs. Clinton, when people started to wake up and realize things were very broken (I know this is exactly when I woke up!).
The third stage of winter is a big organizing conflict. This could be a war, a domestic breakdown, a financial collapse, something major. This conflict does NOT have to happen on our shores — remember the last one was WW2, which was mostly elsewhere — but this conflict will be something massive that forces us all to choose what kind of future we want.
Neil believes, and I agree, that we haven’t had this conflict yet, but it’s coming.
After the conflict we’ll get a clear sign that winter is ending. For World War II, this was D-Day. It’s the moment when a different future becomes much more visible and actually possible. Howe predicts this happening around 2030.
So, if you buy into this theory, right now we’re in the predictably weird space between knowing stuff is seriously broken and biting our nails waiting for the big conflict.
THE MATHEMATICIAN AGREES
Now, before you dismiss this as just an “interesting theory” let me tell you about Peter Turchin.
Turchin is a Russian-American complexity scientist — a mathematician and evolutionary biologist who initially studied insect populations. And what he found studying beetles led him to study human societies along with a wild realization: human history follows mathematical patterns.
In 2003, he founded a field called “cliodynamics” — named after Clio, the Greek muse of history, plus dynamics, how things change over time.
For any Isaac Asimov fans out there, yeah, this is basically psychohistory from the Foundation series, except, you know, not sci-fi.
Here’s what Turchin does: he uses big data models full of historical information like wages, wealth distribution, political polarization, government debt, and so on. He feeds it all into mathematical models, and then he runs tests and simulations.
Guess what his models predict?
Political violence and social instability peaking in the 2020s, with a climax around 2030.
Different method.
Same timeline.
Turchin isn’t looking at demographics or generations or archetypes. He’s tracking a boatload of data points around things like “elite overproduction” — too many credentialed people competing for too few elite positions — and what happens predictably throughout history when something like that occurs.
His 2023 book End Times uses pure data to arrive at pretty much the exact timeline conclusion Howe and Strauss reached using historical patterns.
Two completely different roads. Same destination.
You are obviously welcome to make up your own mind, but this makes me pay attention.
Because when the demographic pattern-matchers AND the mathematical modeler both say winter is here… to my ears, winter is probably here.
And beyond that, to me, right now things just… feel chilly.
My spidey sense is saying… “Yeah, something like this is exactly what’s happening.”
Which brings us to the shutdown.
THE SHUTDOWN IS A SYMPTOM OF WINTER
The government of the most powerful country in the world finally decided to turn its lights back on after 43 days of darkness.
Yes, it was the longest shutdown in U.S. history, and sure, it cost us tens of billions of dollars in negative economic impact, but you know at least we bounced back with a strong renewal of trust and heroic bipartisan breakthrough, right?!
Nope, not so much.
Let’s take a quick look at the shutdown, not from a political perspective but from a system and cycle viewpoint. Because what just happened is basically a live-action case study in the Fourth Turning.
Here’s the nonpartisan truth: Our political institutions as they are now reward chaos. You’ve noticed this, right? This means government shutdowns like the one that just happened aren’t really accidents. They’re system failures.
Under the current operating system, shutdowns like this aren’t only possible — even though they shouldn’t be possible and don’t happen in other countries — they are incentivized. You probably noticed this, too: during a shutdown, media attention skyrockets. Tribal loyalty strengthens. Stability gets ignored.
Basically, our operating system is outdated and is unable to handle the complexity of the future.
The U.S. Constitution, as innovative as it may be, was designed in an environment with 13 small colonies, no real national bureaucracy, no 24/7 media, no global supply chains, and definitely no nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence.
Yet we’re still using mostly that 18th-century OS to run a 21st-century superpower.
So when you think about a government shutting down, don’t just think about party dysfunction, think: “the software just crashed.”
Our governance operating system needs a massive overhaul, my friends.
This isn’t a surprise to you, of course. You might not remember everything from your 7th Grade Civics Class, but you don’t really have to — you can feel that the current operating system is buckling under the weight of tomorrow with a quick doomscroll during your bathroom break at any moment of the day.
This is exactly what Howe and Strauss describe… well, not the bathroom break part, but everything else.
Late in a Fourth Turning Winter, institutions lose legitimacy, factions harden, and systems that once held society together become brittle under the weight of accumulated contradictions.
Brrr! It’s just so dang wintery out here, my friends!
WHY WINTER IS SO NECESSARY
Winter is the season when the scaffolding we built during the last High, the last Spring season, collapses. This is simply the nature of seasons; the systems built at the beginning of the last lifecycle have reached the end of their usefulness.
In a Fourth Turning, three things happen at once:
- The old stories stop working. People no longer believe in the institutions they relied on. Congress, banking, media, academia — pick your fighter.
- The old identities stop holding us. The narratives we used to organize society become too narrow. “Left vs. right” is feeling absurdly inSufficient, isn’t it?
- The old systems stop producing stability. The mechanisms that kept us functioning begin to break. Looks like: shutdowns, polarization, cynicism, zero trust.
These things aren’t random. They’re the symptoms of a cycle reaching its end.
Are you seeing it? This is the stuff we talk about every single week.
It’s a LOT. It’s intense. This is truly a bizarre time to be alive, in this particular season. Which is why I am spending so much time on this — I want you to zoom out with me and remember that winter serves a powerful evolutionary purpose: to clear space for the next societal operating system.
It’s entropy with a mission.
Destruction with direction.
This is why the shutdown was such a perfect symbol for where we are.
The shutdown showed us:
- The current system cannot sustain. It was built for a smaller world. It cannot hold the “next” version of complexity.
- The system can’t course-correct itself. It’s hostile to reform. Every incentive pulls us backwards towards the past High or outwards toward the extremes.
- Tomorrow will be sacrificed for today. Those in power will happily externalize all costs either onto citizens or into the future.
But these aren’t really things to bemoan or wonder why they’re happening.
This is just late-cycle behavior.
Institutions in winter shift from serving society to an obsession with their own survival.
And that isn’t just why they fail.
It is why they MUST fail.
THE FOURTH TURNING’S GIFT: POSSIBILITY
Strauss and Howe are sometimes read as doom prophets.
But I believe they’re offering something much better: a blueprint for renewal.
Winter is harsh.
But winter is also the season before rebirth, always.
As far as we know, no culture — none — has ever made it to spring without going through winter.
This is the moment in the cycle when the next civic imagination begins to germinate. When new systems, new norms, new institutions, and new values begin to form.
But here’s the uncomfortable part: winter demands our participation. If you care about the future, you don’t get to sit this out. You don’t get to wait for the thaw. You don’t want to let “someone else” build the new architecture.
Winter is when we decide what will come after winter.
That’s the whole point.
If winter is the season of breakdown, of endings, of exposed fragilities, of systems shaking themselves apart…
Then our job is not to cling to the past or pretend we’re still in another season.
Our job is to see clearly. To recognize patterns. To understand the moment we’re actually in.
Our job is to dream boldly. Winter is when new civic futures get imagined.
Our job is to design intentionally. All future systems begin as stories told in winter.
Our job is to prepare for Spring.
Which leads me to one last comment about the shutdown.
We ought not keep treating things like shutdowns as “crises” or “failures” or “political drama.” They’re none of those things. Well, they ARE those things, but they’re those things with a PURPOSE. They’re symptoms. Indicators. Signals. They’re proof that the old cycle is ending, and that a new thing is demanding to be born.
The other day, my partner said to me, quite earnestly: “Why are you optimistic?”
I said: “Because there’s a crisis coming.”
They looked at me for a moment like I’d lost my mind.
But this is what I mean: the crisis is the thing that forces the rebuild.
The big organizing conflict, whatever it is and whenever it comes, will be the moment when we can’t keep pretending the old system works. When we have to actually build something new.
That’s not naive optimism. That’s pattern recognition.
Spring plants the seeds — but first, winter clears the ground.
THE OPTIMISTIC REBELLION
So if we’re between a renewed awareness of brokenness and the organizing conflict, how do we prepare?
Here are three things we can do right now:
- Stop trying to fix what’s destined to break — The system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as designed (optimizing for capital, not humans). Stop exhausting yourself trying to repair it.
- Invest in what comes next, not what’s dying — We’re in the destruction phase. Put your energy into building the new system, not propping up the old one.
- Lead with optimism as strategy — Optimism isn’t naive, it’s positioning. The people who thrive in a Fourth Turning are the ones who see opportunity in chaos and build toward what’s emerging.
The government shutdown has ended, for now.
But the cycles have not.
We are living through a Fourth Turning — a winter season in the long arc of life.
And while winter is uncomfortable, disorienting, cold, and often lonely, it is also thoughtful, contemplative, and steely.
It’s the hard season that makes spring possible.
Winter is the moment when the universe hands us the tools and says: “Okay. It’s time. Build something better.”
We might not love winter. But we are absolutely, undeniably, right on time.
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Please know I’m never too busy for your referrals, and I’m currently booking keynotes for 2026 — if I can help bring more systemic clarity and optimism for the next season to your group, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can send me an email at future@hellotomorrowpodcast.com
