generational crisis – One Thousand And One Parsecs

I had a very interesting discussion with Thomas Umstattd Jr. recently, about George Friedman’s recent book The Storm Before the Calm and the general state of the zeitgeist. My theory has been that the current fourth turning will not end with a first turning high in the 2030s and 2040s, as Strauss-Howe generational theory predicts, but will skip that stage and go straight to the awakening instead, as it did with the anomaly in the Civil War cycle. This awakening will ultimately give us a major Christian revival, such as we haven’t seen in more than 100 years.

Thomas has a very different take on it, though. He thinks that we may just be entering into the very beginning of the fourth turning right now—that all of the chaos of the last ten years was really just the closing half of the third turning “unraveling” era, which ran unusually long (about 35 years instead of the normal 22ish years). He thinks that the fourth turning began with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and will likely involve a major civil conflict here in the United States.

The more I think about it, the more his take makes sense. Strauss-Howe generational theory is based on the four phases of a human life (childhood/adolescence, young adulthood/parenthood, middle age, and elderhood), and the Great Recession was a major disruption that forced a lot of my fellow millennials to put off getting married and starting a family. Same thing with the boomers, who postponed their retirement for an extra decade. So it makes sense that the result would be an extra-long third turning, with most of us putting off that next phase of our lives.

It would also explain why none of the recent wars have exploded into hot global conflicts until now. The Russo-Ukraine war, the Gaza war, the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, and even to some extent the current Iran war have all mostly been confined to small regions. Yes, the major powers all have a hand in them, and are jockeying for position against each other, but it hasn’t yet escalated beyond a proxy conflict, and/or economic and financial sanctions.

In other words, up until now, most of the geopolitical conflicts have been limited to the sort of thing you’d be likely to see during a third turning. President Trump has been less of a Roosevelt or a Lincoln or a Washington, leading our newly-unified nation through a major existential crisis, and more of a Zachary Taylor or a James Buchanan (or his own personal favorite, Andrew Jackson) imposing his vision on a fragmented country with only limited success, as everyone kicks and screams to get off the train. That’s much more typical of an unraveling era president than a crisis era president.

So what does this mean? If Thomas is right and we are only just now entering into the opening phase of a fourth turning, things are likely to get very, very bad in the next few years. Our country (and indeed, most of the rest of the world) is likely to face a major existential threat in the form of an armed conflict. A hot civil war here in the US could be a major component of this, though it could also be a global nuclear or biological war. But the big thing is that the war itself is going to eclipse basically everything we’ve seen in the last couple of decades, including 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I think there’s a very high likelihood that the Russo-Ukraine war and the US war in Iran merge and become one conflict, especially since the US is a major supplier to Ukraine and Iran is a major supplier to Russia. I don’t know if China will attempt a military invasion of Taiwan, but I do think they will continue to push psyops here in the US, both to disrupt our data center buildout and to push more radical left-wing politicians into the mainstream (though to be clear, that’s not just limited to China). We could also see some major acts of sabotage, both from China and the Iran/Russia axis.

The big wild card, of course, is how AI will play into the coming conflict. All of the major players are convinced that whoever controls the emergent AI technology will ultimately control the world, so the AI arms race is likely to turn into even more of a sprint, with very little regard to AI safety. I’m still quite skeptical that this will result in a Skynet-style robot apocalypse, or the worst fears of guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, but it could.

Point is, as bad as things seem right now, if we really are just now entering into the current cycle’s fourth turning, things are going to get much, much worse than anything we’ve seen until now. And the coming conflict will probably extend well into the 2040s, since that’s about as long as it takes for a generational turning to resolve. Which means that right around the time when we are due to resolve the conflict and enter into a generational high, we will instead be facing the unavoidable consequences of the fertility crisis and demographic collapse. So it may turn out that Thomas and I are both right, and we never see a first turning high.

Grim stuff. But fascinating. What do you think?

What Hard Times Hath Wrought is a post-apocalyptic survival story about grief, family, faith, and the hard transfer of responsibility from one generation to the next. It delivers a tense, intimate road story through a collapsing America, where the greatest danger is not only hunger, fuel, disease, or bandits, but the fear that the people you love may not be strong enough for the world they are inheriting.

What Kind of Reader Will Love This Book?

For readers who enjoy character-driven post-apocalyptic fiction, survival stories about ordinary families, and near-future collapse scenarios grounded in social and generational anxieties, What Hard Times Hath Wrought is probably your kind of story.

You may especially love it if you like:

Post-apocalyptic road stories where survival depends on family, grit, and practical competence
Near-future collapse fiction with a realistic, grounded, rural American setting
Stories about grief, responsibility, adoption, forgiveness, and found family under pressure
Hopeful survival fiction where faith and moral courage matter as much as weapons or supplies
Generational stories about young people rising to meet hard times when the old world falls apart

What You’ll Find Inside

What Hard Times Hath Wrought follows Mia, a widowed stepmother and guardian, as she leads her teenage stepdaughter Lily and nephew Caleb away from a failed farm and toward the Rockies in search of safety after America’s slow collapse. Along the way, the story explores grief, family secrets, young love, pregnancy in a broken world, the burden of leadership, and the painful necessity of trusting the next generation. The result is a tense but hopeful post-apocalyptic novelette: rugged, intimate, emotionally grounded, and quietly heroic.

What Makes It Different

Fans of The Road, Station Eleven, or classic survivalist post-apocalyptic fiction will recognize the lonely roads, scarce supplies, broken infrastructure, and constant moral pressure of a world coming apart. But What Hard Times Hath Wrought takes those familiar collapse-fiction elements in a more family-centered and generational direction. Where many post-apocalyptic stories focus on lone wanderers, grim violence, or nihilistic despair, this one leans into kinship, moral formation, faith, and the question of whether hard times can forge people strong enough to rebuild. It is less about the spectacle of civilization falling and more about the intimate moment when a mother figure realizes she can no longer carry the whole world herself.

What You Won’t Find

If you’re looking for grimdark cynicism, explicit romance, or a sprawling action-heavy apocalypse epic, this probably isn’t that kind of story. The danger is real, and the world is harsh, but the emotional center is hopeful, familial, and morally serious. If you would rather read about courage, sacrifice, faith, and young people stepping into responsibility, you’ll feel much more at home here.

Why I Think You Might Love It

I think this story matters because it asks a question that feels increasingly urgent: what kind of people will inherit the world after the old systems fail? The author’s note makes clear that the story grew out of concerns about collapse, generational stagnation, and the population crisis, but the heart of the story is smaller and more human than any theory of history. It is about a woman who has carried too much for too long, a young man who needs to become worthy of the future, and a young woman whose unborn child turns survival into something more than mere endurance. In the end, What Hard Times Hath Wrought is a story about broken things repaired with courage—and about finding hope precisely when the world seems least able to offer it.