On The Millennial Mandate

Rebuilding the World in the Fourth Turning

“The ruins of the past are the foundation stones of the future.” - Saint Augustine

Francis Fukuyama made a Nietzschean proclamation when he said that history is dead, but history has a habit of resurrecting itself. History does not move in straight lines. It turns. Civilizations breathe in rhythms, alternating between creation and decay, order and chaos, confidence and doubt.

William Strauss and Neil Howe called this rhythm The Fourth Turning, a theory of historical time as a cycle of four recurring “seasons,” each roughly twenty years long, each defined by a distinct social mood and generational temperament. Across centuries, they argued, the Anglo-American world has revolved through these turnings with uncanny regularity, rising to moments of renewal and falling again into disarray. Same stuff, different day on an infinite horizon.

The first season, the High, follows a great crisis. It is an era of strong institutions and collective confidence, when society rebuilds its foundations and trusts in them. The second season, the Awakening, comes as that confidence matures into complacency; people begin to value self-expression over duty, and spiritual rebellion replaces civic unity. The third, the Unraveling, sees institutions weakening as individualism peaks, cynicism grows, and the shared moral order frays. Then comes the Fourth Turning, the Crisis. This is the winter of history: a time of reckoning when the old order collapses and a new one must be forged.

Within each cycle rise four generational archetypes, repeating in sequence: the Prophet, born during a High, grows up to preach values and vision; the Nomad, born during an Awakening, grows up skeptical and self-reliant; the Hero, born during an Unraveling, grows up idealistic and community-minded; and the Artist, born during a Crisis, grows up sensitive and adaptive. Strauss and Howe believed these archetypes form the psychological machinery of civilization, each generation reacting to the mistakes of the last, perpetually rebalancing the moral ledger of history.

America’s last Fourth Turning was the Great Depression and World War II, when the Hero archetype was embodied by the so-called “G.I. Generation.” They rebuilt the nation and the world, creating an order so stable their children assumed it would last forever. It didn’t. What followed was the High of the 1950s, the Awakening of the 1960s, the Unraveling of the 1980s and ’90s and now, again, a Crisis that began around 2008 and will likely continue into the 2030s. Each Fourth Turning lasts roughly a generation, and ours is well underway.

The Hero archetype of this cycle is my own generation: the Millennials. Born between roughly 1982 and 2004, we entered the world as faith in institutions disintegrated. The order that raised our parents was already collapsing when we arrived. Strauss and Howe predicted that the Millennials would be the generation tasked with rebuilding. Tempered by hardship, defined by civic purpose, and compelled by necessity to reconstruct what was lost. We are, in their schema, the generation of renewal.

But when I think of my childhood, I see nothing idyllic or protected about it. I am a Millennial by birth, but my upbringing belonged to another time. The son of divorced, working-class Boomer parents, I was more shaped by the hard edges of Generation X than the padded world of my peers. My older brother, Gen X by age and temperament, was my model. Self-reliant, skeptical, allergic to pretense. While many of my generation were supervised, scheduled, and shielded, I came home to an empty house, learned to make my own meals, and watched the adult world stumble through its own confusion. There was no promise of safety, only the lesson that endurance mattered more than innocence.

The Millennials were told that the world was a meritocracy: study, comply, achieve, and stability will follow. But stability had already vanished. We entered adolescence/ young adulthood just as the scaffolding of late twentieth-century confidence gave way. 9/11 was the first shock, collapsing not only towers but the illusion of peace. Then came the Great Recession, which wiped out wealth and trust alike. Then the pandemic, which shattered any lingering faith in competence and authority. Three crises, each more systemic than the last, defined the moral landscape of our generation.

I have come to see these shocks not as interruptions but as revelations, moments when illusion gave way to truth. The institutions that once anchored American life - churches, schools, political parties, corporations had already rotted internally. The crises merely exposed their condition. We were told to play by rules written for a vanished world, but the game had changed. The old promises of stability, of loyalty rewarded, of upward mobility through obedience no longer held. What remained was the test of character.

The latchkey childhood that once felt like deprivation was, in hindsight, preparation. It taught me that strength is forged in absence, not abundance. I learned early that order isn’t given; it’s built. That no system can save a man who will not save himself. The personal became prophetic: the lesson of one boy’s independence reflected the necessity of an entire generation’s self-reliance.

The Millennials, like all Hero generations, are being trained by hardship. Every Crisis generation is. The Revolution forged the Founders; the Civil War tested the Republic; the Depression and World War II remade the world. Ours is the digital, decentralized, distracted version of the same cycle. The crucible of meaning itself. The old material scarcity has been replaced by informational overload. The challenge now is not to survive hunger or cold but to endure confusion, to retain clarity amid constant noise. Ours is a moral and psychological crisis: the erosion of coherence, the bankruptcy of purpose. The Heroes of the last century fought tyranny abroad. The Heroes of this one must fight entropy within.

“Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.” - Seneca

There are signs that this generational transition is already underway. JD Vance rises from the wreckage of Appalachia to bring working-class realism back into American politics. Palmer Luckey reinvents defense technology, building the hard tools of sovereignty in an age of fragility. Brian Armstrong constructs parallel financial systems, anchoring freedom in mathematics when institutions lose their integrity.

Across industries, a new cohort of builders is emerging, not ideological revolutionaries but disciplined pragmatists. They may not use the vocabulary of the Fourth Turning, but they are its incarnations. This is what it looks like when a Hero generation matures into power.

For the Millennials, the moral task is reconstruction. But reconstruction requires more than innovation, it requires virtue. Technology can rebuild infrastructure; only character can rebuild civilization. The new order will demand the same virtues that every enduring civilization has rediscovered in crisis: discipline, subsidiarity, faith, and honor.

Discipline first, because no age as distracted as ours can produce greatness without it. The defining illness of the digital era is dispersion. Attention fractured by devices, identity diluted by infinite choice. A man who cannot command his focus cannot command his destiny. The Hero generation must recover the older virtues of concentration and restraint, the ability to work, to endure, to delay gratification in service of something higher.

Then subsidiarity: the conviction that life flourishes from the bottom up, not the top down. The Boomer world believed salvation would come from systems. Federal programs, corporate ladders, international orders. Millennials, living through their collapse, know better.

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Renewal begins where responsibility is personal: in the home, the neighborhood, the small enterprise, the parish, the local trust that binds face to face. The future will be local by necessity.

Faith follows naturally from both. A generation that has seen the failure of every secular idol will either lapse into cynicism or rediscover transcendence. The pendulum of history rarely stays in nihilism; it swings back toward belief. Our ancestors rebuilt after war and famine because they believed in something larger than themselves. We will have to do the same. Faith need not mean dogmatism, it means orientation toward meaning, toward the possibility that human life serves a moral order greater than consumption.

Finally, honor: the virtue least understood by modernity. Honor is the discipline of reputation within a moral framework, it is accountability to the unseen. In an age where everything is public and nothing is sacred, honor must be redefined not as spectacle but as integrity. The true Hero generation will rebuild private virtue before it rebuilds public trust.

These virtues together form the moral architecture of reconstruction. The crisis itself is the furnace in which they are forged. Strauss and Howe predicted that a Fourth Turning burns away the illusions of comfort and forces a society to remember its first principles. It is not a catastrophe to be avoided but a crucible to be endured. The question is not whether the old order will fall. It already has, but whether the new one will be worthy of what it replaces.

I am old enough now to see my generation assuming power. We are no longer the interns or the experimenters. We are the executives, founders, legislators, and parents. The faces of my youth now run companies, shape policy, and command capital. Some have kept their integrity; many have not. But a pattern is forming. The generation forged in uncertainty is beginning to lead. The latch-key children of the Unraveling are becoming the builders of the Reconstruction.

When I look around, I see the outlines of the next order taking shape, not in Washington, but in the margins: in entrepreneurs who refuse dependency, in communities reasserting moral norms, in families re-centering their lives around faith and discipline.

The great error of modern history was believing progress was automatic. The great correction of this century will be learning that progress must be earned. If the historical rhythm holds, this Fourth Turning will reach its climax before the decade ends. What follows will depend on whether the Millennials can mature from critics to custodians. We cannot remain the generation of complaint. We must become the generation of construction.

The world we inherit is not the world our parents built. It is a world of abandoned institutions and exhausted ideologies, of wealth without meaning and liberty without virtue. But this is not cause for despair. It is the material of destiny. Hardship is the midwife of renewal. Every generation must build its city on the ruins of another. The Millennials stand amid those ruins now. Ours is not the luxury of lamentation; it is the burden of repair. We will restore not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. The pendulum has swung through self-expression and back toward duty. The arc bends again toward order.

I sometimes think of the future in biblical cadence. After the flood, Noah plants a vineyard. After exile, Israel rebuilds the temple. After the war, men raise homes and churches. The pattern endures because it must: creation follows chaos. The Fourth Turning will end the same way, when exhaustion gives way to resolve, when the Hero generation finally accepts its role as steward rather than victim.

To be born a Millennial is to inherit contradiction: we are both the most connected and the most isolated generation in history, the most educated and the least grounded, the most idealistic and the most cynical. But within that contradiction lies possibility. We have seen the emptiness of decadence and can therefore pursue depth. We have endured the collapse of trust and can therefore rebuild it with sobriety. We have inherited a broken order and can therefore craft one that works.

When this Crisis finally resolves, the world that emerges will bear our signature. It will not be perfect. No rebuilt order ever is, but it will be grounded. Less euphoric, more disciplined. Less ideological, more pragmatic. Less utopian, more human. The cycle will turn again, as it always does, and the children born after the storm will live in the calm their parents fought to restore. The Fourth Turning is not the end of history. It is its renewal. We are not the lost generation. We are the generation that rebuilds. When the morning comes, may it find us ready.