Conversation

Strauss-Howe generations are true-democratic analogues of imperial (“Victorian”) or elected administration (“Thatcher era”, “Clinton administration”) eras. People who complain about statistical flimsiness miss the point. The ceremonial marking *causes* the identity formation.
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Ie you don’t have a certain personality because you were born in a certain year and we’re therefore shaped by specific consciousness shaping events. You *decide* to identify with a collective consciousness narrative based on your birth year. It’s like citizenship, not ethnicity.
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Your natural, unchangeable trairs (birth year, ethnicity, birth gender, birth religion, skin color) give you opt-in access to certain shared narratives, and you pick a few that fit. I self-selected into generational identity narrative because I fit the cliches of GenX well.
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It’s a bit like the sorting hat except at a meta level. Your opinions matter before the sorting hat declares you to be GenX/Myers-Briggs INTP/Scorpio/Year of Tiger, and then you let the stories you pick shape you a bit from then on. Personal cultural product-market fit.
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So yes, it can all be superstitious bullshit AND all be truth-by-self-selection AND truth-by-self-fulfilling-prophecy. 90% of the reason I’m GenX is that I’ve thought of myself that way for a couple of decades 😂.
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