Transitions

A few of these posts have been alluding to how much of a generation needs to be in a particular period of life before that generation is actually there.  It’s an attempt to reconcile that a “generation” is a group of people, and one with a wide range of ages (ranging across 20 years, give or take) and yet somehow the group is described as being in a single period.  Let’s walk through it for a second.

This theory all presupposes that a given period of life - childhood, young adult, midlife, elderhood - is roughly the same length of time, and that length of time is roughly the range of a given generation’s ages. Which means that, when the last member of a generation is born (entering childhood) the first member is moving onward (to young adulthood). Which means that, actually, the entire generation  is only in the same given life period for a moment, a second, an instant.  So how can this all work? 

(The obvious answer is, “It doesn’t, this is all pseudo-scientific lite-sociology.” And I promise, I’ll come back to that option again at some point. But let’s roll with it for a second.)

One option is to say that when MOST of the cohort is in the period, we can work as if it all is.  They are going to be the most influential groups in the life period, the following cohort is not influential at all until it has some critical mass, and that a few are in a different life period doesn’t change what they have in common.

Another is to say that it’s not just how much of the cohort is in the period, but what proportion of people in the period are in a given cohort. Generations have different sizes, they grow until their last member is born and then never gain more, and preceding and following cohorts may be larger or smaller. Let’s say a constellation had 10K Prophets, 8K Nomads, 12K Civics, and 9K Artists, and that they were evenly distributed within each cohort. Let’s look at halfway through a Turning: When half of the Nomads are Midlife, there are 4K Midlife and 4K Young Adult. That means 5K Prophets are still Midlife, and 6K Civics are Young Adult. Nomads are outnumbered in both life periods - nobody is going to pay attention to them! A little bit further along, though, and there are 4K Prophets and 5K Nomads in Midlife, leaving 3K Nomads and 7K Civics in Young Adult. 

And it might be important that in the previous step Nomads didn’t have a majority, while in this step they do - perhaps we can’t say that the constellation has moved until every generation has a solid majority in a single life period.

There could be additional implications and effects - if (as with the Baby Boom) there was an early bump, does that mean they can gain influence earlier? Newer generations, one would think, would always be larger - what if a Crisis means fewer babies, enough to make a generation smaller at the end than its next-elder? Say, if in the example, few enough Civics passed in childhood that the Artists were still a smaller cohort for the next 40 years? (They might have significant influence for a very short time in each life period.) I’d say, though, that we’d have to be able to decide at least 1) what affects a generation’s influence 2) to what extent cohort size makes a difference and 3) how these change in the different life periods. 

Which, as the man said, is at least something testable. Or potentially so.