What If The Greatest Part Of This Generation Is...

The Greatest Generation, aka the GI generation, aka the prior “hero” generation, has been revered and respected for leaving home as kids, traveling abroad, and fighting in the World Wars. We don’t relate them to the modern “hero” generation, the millennials, because—duh, no wars. But, I think there’s a bigger commonality than a world war here, and it’s a beacon of hope for the future.

They came home, with all the experiences, traumas, and senses of self-potentials, determined to rebuild the world as a better place. A world without the need for another experience like the one they’d had. It led them to raise some very ambitious kids, and focus very hard to set an example. Their shadow is only now setting as the last of them slowly depart the earth.

In Neil Howe’s work on generational theory, he maps world history and this generation forward in time.

Here’s a table I made to help me map my own family. Note the generation names on the left, and then the seasons of life with his labels. It all makes a ton of intuitive sense to me:

The GI’s are followed in birth by the Silent Generation, quieted by the impressiveness of the last group’s accomplishments, who are then followed by the Boomers, the ambitious babies of GI and Silent parents, who grow up in a world open to new opportunities that no prior generation has seen, who are then followed by Gen-Xers, peeved by the opposite feelings of opportunity and respect the people 40 years older than them seem to have kept all for themselves.

And then it rolls over. Backward in history, and, if you believe Howe’s theory, forward too.

The modern Heroes are the present-day Millennials. Lots of people have used the 4th Turning framework to predict another war. Another global fiasco to burn down what the Boomers built in their sound and fury. Eek! But, fingers crossed, it doesn’t seem to be materializing.

If you only look for a war as the common bond between the two hero generations, you miss seeing all of the other common threads between them.

Yes, there hasn’t been a WWIII, but what has materialized includes the internet, social media, AI, a loneliness epidemic, and an embedded struggle to culturally have a sense of self now that Google is the closest thing to a modern god we’ve got all while everyone is a potential enemy, of the ill-defined states and our increasingly narrow worldviews.

But, what if the millennials are cooking up a new variant on the same generational experience inside of all this mess, without a world war?

My (working) theory is that a lot of us born in the 1980ish to 2006ish space had a similar experience. For one, we were born prior to the great internet disruption. It’s important we remember a world of that type. But, more importantly, a lot of us left home for college. We went to cities, or other locations. We traveled the world. We went into debt. We handled at least one if not two or three recessions at early parts of careers, and we still bare all of those scars.

Flash forward to 2025, and a lot of us have left the cities and travels to make a home. We didn’t fight in a war, but we returned to a place, a community, a setting where we could build the next phase of our lives. And, we did it with all of that global knowledge.

No, we didn’t travel the world getting shot at.

Yes, we explored the world, literally and via the world wide web, taking some shots along the way and thinking, “This is a big place. We’re not so different though. I wish I knew this growing up.”

I went (very laterally) from northeastern PA to New England for college and tried to be a corporate person for a number of years across the land of Boston and New York rivalries. My (now) wife grew up in the same small PA town as I did, but then lived in a bunch of cities, like Philly, Boston, and Chicago, until we met and decided to move back home. Partially thanks to the pandemic, and partially thanks to us wanting to make some serious life changes together, we found ourselves back to the town where we both started off.

The area’s changed, but not completely. Kind of like us. And those little changes, that we’ve brought back, are everything.

The modern Millennials left home, gained experiences, and are either returning or setting up shop somewhere that’s often not in a major city.

They are adults, with jobs and identities, ready to reshape their local communities with a more global perspective.

We didn’t fight a war, but we learned a new set of lessons from our trials, tribulations, and travels.

Everybody wants an answer to the loneliness epidemic, to the widening gyre of society, to our political woes and… I think it’s right under our noses.

Community is coming back, in the hands of the Millenials who have come back home, the Gen Xers who want something cool to happen again, and the Gen-Z’s who ache to learn what it’s like to not just be online.

I don’t think we need a war to get there.

I hope we don’t get a war to get there.

But I am very, very excited about the opportunity this framing presents.  

A few personal anecdotes:

I spent more time with my grandparents in the past few years than I had in the past few decades. I haven’t felt this cross-generationally connected since I was a child. The reconnection with my grandfather in particular, who we lost less than a year ago, has already altered how I’m seeing the world (read about him here).

My wife and I moved and had some household appliances we couldn’t bring with us mostly due to space. At first we considered selling them since they were relatively new and in great condition, but after talking about how fortunate we’ve been, and how much we were saving by moving out of cities and back to the rust belt, we opted to donate the items to a local women’s shelter that my wife has been advocating for. We saw firsthand the difference they made.

Further, for my wife’s birthday this month, she’s doing a fundraiser for the shelter instead of gifts. You can help her have a wonderful birthday by donating essential items to women in need here.

What’s the takeaway? We started local, we went global, and we came back with a newfound appreciation for the community we want to be a part of. This means we’re more active, we’re more interested, and because of our experiences, we’re probably a little more interesting to people too (even if that means local pizza fans making fun of my wife’s beloved deep dish, which, I will stan Pequod’s any day of the week, so yeah.).

Ps. if you missed it, I previously wrote this essay for Epsilon Theory applying Howe’s Generational Theory to my own life: The Time I Got A High School Paper Extension In A Bar: The Fourth Turning (But Not In The Way You Think)

PSs. This isn’t to say locals who never leave can’t be charitable or even worldly, it’s just to point out there is value in leaving and returning, and I think we might be able to harvest more of it if we talk about this.