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.
Replying to
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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