Recently watched an interview with Neil Howe, the author of The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. The interviewer begins by quoting Howe’s prediction that “In the coming year, the country will undergo a crises that will fundamentally reset society.”

I asked Perplexity for a synopsis of the book:

Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning Is Here argues that the United States has already entered a long, cyclical “Crisis” phase that will upend existing institutions and values and culminate in a new civic order sometime in the early 2030s. It extends his earlier generational theory to explain how today’s Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z each play distinct roles in driving and resolving this upheaval.

The book updates the Strauss–Howe generational theory, which sees history moving in 80–100 year cycles composed of four “turnings” (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis), analogous to seasons. Howe contends that the current Fourth Turning (Crisis) began around the 2008 financial crash and will likely end in the early 2030s with a decisive reshaping of American political, economic, and social life.

And a counter view:

Many historians and social scientists see Howe’s framework as pattern‑spotting on noisy data rather than a testable theory, arguing that the “turnings” are cherry‑picked after the fact and stretched to fit events. Critics also note that the generational archetypes are so broad and fuzzy that they can explain almost anything, which makes the predictions more like narrative prophecy than falsifiable social science.

The interviewer asked Howe for if he was at all optimistic and he said the current crises is a good thing because the alternative is more of what we have now. I’m down with that.