We're living in strange times.

There's an excellent book by William Strauss and Neil Howe called "The Fourth Turning" which explains a lot about the cycles of history. The book was written in the '90s so it's very dated in terms of it's predictions, but the general ideas are still true. We are currently in a once-per-century crisis era that will completely remake society. We don't know yet whether or not the "normal" that emerges on the other end of this, likely sometime in the 2030s, will be better or worse than the normal we knew in the 2010s. Right now I'm not optimistic. I would love to be able to talk to somebody who was alive during the Great Depression and ask them about how the lived experience was back then, how people perceived the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, and what people thought about Hitler before he was HITLER. 

I think the USA in the 1930s was in a better position than today since I don't think it was quite as polarized and therefore, problems could be addressed, but all I have to go on is research into the era, not lived experience.  In other parts of the world, all hell broke loose that decade culminating in World War II.

www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rendezvous/dp/0767900464

One thing that makes this fourth turning different is that the "revolution" appears to be driven by aging baby boomers and Gen Xers who can't handle a changing society opposed to it being a youth movement. That said, right-wing populism could be gaining popularity among the youth, I'm not sure. I sometimes wonder what happened to Obama-era Millennial liberalism. It seems to be either missing from the conversation today or is highly derided as being "woke."

Nonetheless, the past two years have been the worst years of my entire life and these are downright terrifying times to be living through. It was like in an instant back in March 2020, the good times of the 2010s ended and everything became a hellscape overnight. I HATE the 2020s.