Boomers: Birth to 80

October 16, 2026

The more I think about it, the more I keep coming back to how much life has changed since the end of World War II. Our homes, jobs, health, technology, and expectations are completely different from what they were back then. It also makes me wonder what life will look like for the next generation. How do we prepare for that future, not only as investors but as a society? Very Fourth Turning-esque, I know. For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Fourth Turning is a theory from a late-1990s book by Bill Strauss and Neil Howe. It argues that history tends to move in 80-to-100-year cycles, with each cycle divided into four eras, or “turnings.”

Think about a child born in the United States in 1946. That child entered a very different world. One out of every three homes did not have full plumbing. Almost nobody had air conditioning. About a third of adults had not finished high school. Around one baby in thirty did not make it to a first birthday. Real disposable income per person was under $11,000 in today’s dollars, and a boy born then could expect to live to about sixty-four.

Fast-forward eighty years, and that same person is now turning eighty in a country that would be almost unrecognizable compared with the one they were born into. Income per person is nearly five times higher. Infant mortality has fallen dramatically. Life expectancy has increased by more than twelve years. We fly several times a year instead of once a decade, and food takes up a much smaller share of the family budget. None of this happened all at once. Nobody voted for “modern life” in one big national decision. It happened slowly, year after year, as progress built on itself. That may be one of the most underrated forces in history, and it is a big reason the doomsayers have been wrong for the last eighty years.

So the more interesting question is this: What will life look like for the babies being wheeled home from the hospital this week? What will their world look like in 2106?

Obviously, the rest of this is a guess. Still, I think the general direction is clear enough to talk about.

Health care and longevity may be the biggest part of the story. The Boomer story was mostly about people not dying young. The next story may be about people not aging as quickly. If longevity research even partially delivers on what serious people in the field believe is possible, we may begin treating aging itself as the issue instead of only treating the diseases that come with it. A child born in 2026 may view turning one hundred the way we view turning eighty today: common, normal, and often still healthy. If that happens, it changes almost everything.

Work is where things get trickier. AI may do to office and knowledge work what the tractor did to farming. Boomers spent most of their careers trading hours for dollars. Their great-grandchildren may grow up in a world where, outside of certain trades and many service jobs, machines are simply better at doing a lot of those hours. That does not have to be a disaster. When farms needed fewer workers, we did not starve. We built other industries and found other work. But that does not mean the transition was easy, and this one probably will not be easy either.

That is why capital may become one of the biggest stories of the next century. If labor receives a smaller share of the economic pie, owning the machines, land, energy, and ideas becomes much more important. The uncomfortable reality is that returns on capital could compound faster than ever if labor becomes cheaper. Put simply, whoever owns the robots owns a lot of the output. Figuring out how to broaden that ownership, rather than only redistributing the income afterward, may become one of the biggest political questions of the next fifty years. I think we are already seeing early signs of that in recent elections, and I would not be surprised if it speeds up from here. Again, it is very Fourth Turning: unrest eventually forces some kind of civic reset, and then the whole process starts over.

Education will have to change too. It cannot remain something you finish once in your early twenties and then leave behind forever. If people live to one hundred and jobs keep changing, education becomes more like a lifelong operating system. A child born today may “graduate” many times, and the diploma that matters most may be the one earned at seventy. I do, however, feel bad for whoever is still paying tuition in their seventies.

Space is the wildcard I find most interesting and, honestly, the most hopeful. For the first time, the cost curve seems to be moving in the right direction. If we eventually move some manufacturing, mining, and energy production off the planet, the old argument about Earth’s fixed resources could begin to lose some of its force. What used to look like a physics problem may slowly become more of an engineering problem. As difficult as engineering problems can be, they are usually easier to solve than physics problems.

So, is the future bright or bleak for the generation being born now? My answer, at least today, is bright, with an asterisk. The babies of 2026 will probably live longer, healthier, wealthier, and freer lives than any generation in history. Abundance seems more likely than not.

The asterisk is not really about scarcity. It is about distribution and meaning. When machines make more of what we need and time itself becomes less scarce, the hardest questions change. They become less about whether we can produce enough and more about who owns it, who benefits, and what people are supposed to do with all that extra time. Those are better problems to have, but they are still real problems. Unlike material progress, they will not solve themselves simply by compounding.

The Boomers spent eighty years proving the pessimists wrong about the material world. My guess is that the generation in the maternity ward this morning will do the same. Then they’ll spend the rest of their unusually long lives arguing about everything that remains, probably on whatever replaces group texts and almost certainly blaming those of us reading this.