I really feel like parts of the 80's were just downright fucking weird. We had a preacher in the white house and the whole country was his congregation (do not conflate, that doesn't mean "I like X instead!"). We all had one or more peoples that we more or less agreed were the bad guy, and so a larger portion of people were in a riled-up soccer hooligan kind of mood, in a low grade way, all the time.

We had "this is devil music and will make you satanic", and probably, oh, 50% of people would have said, "Why yes, I think it's kind of satanic."

And on and on. It really does now feel like an eternity ago. Like my parents probably imagined the 40's (although the reading I've gotten is that it's an idylic, sweet orgy of "We're all in the same club! No rufiians round these parts! Agree or be ejected!", which, it probably was.

But folks my non-existant kids' age view the 80's in the way that I viewed the 50's. Which is mind-blowing. If you have never had that kind of mind warping generation shock before, mark your calendar for when you are "old" and remember to do the same math:

The year X for twenty year olds today is as long ago for them as the year Y was when I was 20.

You'll be thusly mindwarped.

Anyway, the 80's created a very different kind of person than "now". The whole dang shopping mall had a totally different cultural milieu. So, it stands to reason that people who came up back den. Had a vastly different childhood.

The bigger point to me is: so what?!

I think it explains a lot of (fucking absurd) social friction we see. It's kids-these-days-get-off-my-lawn all over again for probably the kerjillionth time in history.

If there is a cycle on the "lineage" level that is 20-ish years long (a "generation"), how does that interplay with the sea of people being born? There's a birth-to-fertility length cycle that happens along any path in a family tree (most), and people born around "the same time" tend to cluster together and see each other as peers. Are there patterns that emerge from that? Does something like that need to be there from the ground up for any kind of AI that tries to model anything about the human world.