Why every age mistakes the present for the future
By John Engel
When I was ten years old, disco was everywhere.
It was 1977, and I remember wondering whether this was simply what music was going to sound like from now on. When you are ten, a year is a long time. Something that dominates the culture can feel permanent.
It wasn’t. Disco passed. Wide neckties passed. Both have returned in pieces ever since, borrowed and revised, without ever coming back exactly the same way.
Even musicians who had already established very different identities felt the pull of that moment. The Grateful Dead were playing “Dancin’ in the Streets” in 1977. The following year, the Rolling Stones released “Miss You,” and Rod Stewart went all the way with “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Nobody mistook the Stones for the Bee Gees, or the Dead for a disco band. They absorbed the moment and made it their own.
I’ve been thinking about that because we Americans tend to think of progress as forward motion.
Technology reinforces that idea. Time moves in a straight line, onward and upward. The next computer is faster. We expect the next phone to do more. Artificial intelligence promises greater productivity at lower cost: more for less. If AI allows one person to do the work that once required five, we will quite reasonably call that progress.
And by that measure, it is.
But time also moves in circles. Biology evolves over very long periods, while most of life unfolds in cycles: day and night, birth and death, spring, summer, fall and winter.
William Strauss and Neil Howe built their 1997 book The Fourth Turning around this seasonal view of history. Their distinction between linear and cyclical time has always interested me. “Usually,” they wrote, “the circle is a spiral of progress, sometimes a spiral of decline.”
A spiral may be the better image. We return to the same seasons without returning to the same place.
Artificial intelligence makes the distinction newly important because it excels at measurable progress.
Waze gets me home by the fastest route. I use it all the time. But the fastest route is not always the best route. Sometimes I want to dawdle. Sometimes I don’t know what I want to see until I pass it.
Auto-Tune can put a singer perfectly on pitch. Progress? Pitch is measurable. Individual voice is harder to measure. Once we perfect what can be measured, have we improved the song?
I gave up golf when I realized my handicap wasn’t getting better. Golf measures decline with wonderful cruelty. Lower is better, until the number starts going the other way.
Sailing, at least the way I do it, resists that kind of scoring. I sail the same water year after year and find myself saying, “I’ve seen this before. In fact, I’ve seen much worse.” But I am better this time. Experience accumulates as I keep going around the same islands and returning to the same harbor.
The more we measure, the more tempted we are to let measurement define improvement. Social media gives every idea a score: views, likes, engagement. AI can tell us which headline should perform better, which photograph is most likely to be clicked, which route is fastest, which answer is most efficient.
There was always a formula. Songs stayed under three minutes for radio. Television comedies fit half-hour time slots. Builders found floor plans that sold and built them again: 17,447 homes in Levittown, Long Island, for example.
The efficiencies that produced Levittown and the iPhone created enormous wealth. They also made it easier to confuse what can be counted with what counts.
And maybe we make the same mistake when we think about history.
We tend to imagine society moving the way technology does — each generation replacing the one before it, accumulating knowledge, correcting mistakes, moving onward and upward. But anyone who has lived long enough has watched ideas disappear and return. Music changes. Clothes change. Political moods change. Things that once seemed permanent suddenly look dated, while things we thought we had left behind come around again.
That is the appeal of the seasonal view. Spring follows winter because the seasons turn. The sequence carries no ranking. Each season has its work to do.
Which brings me back to 1977.
At ten, I could imagine disco lasting forever because I had no experience of watching a cultural moment end. Politics can create the same illusion of permanence. As the midterms approach, we are already looking toward the final two years of the Trump administration.
Donald Trump, born in 1946, belongs squarely to the Boomer generation, which Strauss and Howe call the Prophet archetype. Whether you admire him or despise him is beside my point. Trump fills our political culture much as disco filled the airwaves in 1977: so completely that it can be hard to imagine what comes next. He is an unusually clear example of the values-driven, polarizing temperament Strauss and Howe associate with a crisis era.
And crisis eras end.
In Strauss and Howe’s framework, the generation coming of age during crisis eventually turns to the work of building what comes next. They call Millennials the Hero generation, shaped by crisis and later associated with institution-building.
There is something hopeful in that. A season can feel permanent while we are living through it. Then the work changes. The people doing the work change. What looked fixed begins to move again.
That sounds like progress to me.
It just doesn’t look like a straight line. Winter doesn’t defeat Fall. Spring doesn’t correct Winter. Something ends, something survives, and something begins.
Maybe our mistake has been expecting progress to have only one shape.
John Engel is a broker on The Engel Team at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Looking back through twenty years of August 26 photos, he finds the same date returning in different forms: first day of kindergarten, first day of college, one last day on the water, a paintbrush at the beach house, a boat waiting for the tide. August 26 keeps arriving at the hinge between summer and whatever comes next. Same date, different year, different version of us.
