The Generational Trends To Watch

As a reminder, in case you missed out on past emails, you can always go to the newsletter website and view the catalogue of content. Everything written over the past year is there as “shareable” links.

Let’s start off with a little level setting.

The word generation is, “often used synonymously with birth/age cohort in demographics, marketing, and social science; under this formulation it means "people within a delineated population who experience the same significant events within a given period of time.” - Wikipedia

I highlighted this definition because when I talk about “generational trends” I’m referring to society wide changes created from (or are influenced by) different age and technologically bound groups of people.

Here’s an example:

The Gen Z haircut is a recent generational trend that’s become common to the Gen Z age cohort. ie: a bunch of younger guys all style their hair like the image below.

It’s “cool” and “trendy”… I guess.

The point being that we tend to adopt styles, mannerisms, and other social preferences based on our peers in a similar age bracket. Like how shoulder pads were popular in the 1980s. These are cultural trends that influence purchasing decisions.

Another way to think about generational trends is to think of them in terms of technology cohorts.

As an example, think of how life was before and after the introduction of the Iphone and the on-demand app economy.

Early Iphone adopters lived meaningfully different lives than those that remained loyal to the flip phone.

Over time however, the technology was adopted at scale throughout society and major social changes occurred as a result.

Ride sharing, social media, on-demand video, etc. These technologies led to massive changes throughout society.

The point here is that the way society looked and acted before and after the Iphone is very different. So different, that we can almost draw a line between life before and life after the technology was introduced.

Obviously the hair and shoulder pad trends wouldn’t cause the same level of society wide changes as the Iphone did. But these examples provide good contrast to show that trends can be bracketed by age, social demographic, and technological cohorts.

With all that said, the generational trends that I'm interested in focusing on are the ones that likely lead to significant society wide downstream changes.

Trends like remote work, the increasing use of digital assets, Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the downstream effects of the tools/and preferences created by these trends.

They represent the beginning of generation defining changes similar in scope to the Iphone. They bring the kinds of changes that transition society from the Information Age to the Digital Age. The kind of changes we’ll look back on and be able to draw clear before and after lines.

If you pay attention to how they begin, evolve, and diffuse through society, you might just be able to position yourself early for their positive outcomes.

Below, I’ll give some introductions to a few of the trends I’ve got my eye on.

These are topics I plan to explore in greater detail moving forward. As I like to do, I’ll map current events as they play out to the trend and show how the trends are influencing society and how they lead to structural changes in how we live, work, and form relationships.

Crypto As A Beneficiary of Generational Wealth Transfers - Age Based - Longer Time Horizon

I expect the crypto asset class will be a major a beneficiary of the massive wealth transfers that will occur from the Boomer generation to Millennials & Gen Z.

In short, Boomers as a generation account for trillions of dollars in wealth that will be passed on to younger generations at an accelerating rate over the next few years.

At first a trickle, then a stream, and finally a flood of money flowing from elders to younger people.

Following this money and investing for this generational transfer is a matter of understanding the investment habits and appetites of the younger generations.

It’s already clear that a statistically significant portion of this money will gradually flow into crypto.

This will be a topic I explore over the coming months with an emphasis on positioning myself to capitalize on the inflows of capital into the crypto ecosystem. (see last weeks newsletter for my short term thoughts.)

PS. this won’t just impact crypto, it’ll also impact other asset classes. That’s why it makes sense to explore investment trends/preferences by age cohort.

Housing & Living Preferences Change In A Remote Work World - Tech & Age Based - Shorter Time Horizon

An important trend to explore is how housing and living preferences are changing as a consequence of remote work.

ie: what types of homes, communities, and rental/ownership structures will society prize vs shun as a result of remote work at society wide scale? How will that change as new housing and community tech hits the market? How will it vary across generational age cohorts?

These housing preferences are influenced by the younger generations bias for remote work, other digital trends, and a disposition for “experiential lifestyles”.

But it’s also influenced by the fact that housing prices are at generational highs which influences younger cohorts to consider new and alternative lifestyles beyond the dream of a house with a yard and a white picket fence.

This trend also intersects very well with the first trend on generational wealth transfers.

Augmented Reality Is The Real “Metaverse” & It Will Fundamentally Change How We Live - Tech Based - Longer Time Horizon

People like to crack jokes about the metaverse - but that’s because they misunderstand what it really is.

Don’t think of the metaverse as a purely digital space. It’s not Ready Player One or The Matrix. It’s not a place you go to.

Instead, think of it as a digital/physical hybrid “experience”.

Augmented reality will start first as a set of “technology bridges” that connect the digital and physical world and then over time, help to more permanently embed and overlay digital content on top of the physical world.

Think about how that will impact how we live, work, and form relationships.

If you’re looking at the metaverse from that perspective then you’ll see that its already here taking root in society and expanding its influence. The what, where, how, and why of this are important to pay attention to.

In particular, I’m focused on the trends that start online first and then become embedded features of the physical world.

Examples:

You can think of remote work as a trend of the metaverse. Digital tools like Zoom/Facetime digitally connect people from around the world in a blending of digital and physical. It’s changed when, where, and how we work.

Crypto is another example of something that started as a purely digital asset that has increasing utility in the physical world. It’s changing how money is managed in a global and increasingly permissionless economy.

Social networks, mobile apps that engage with physical world devices, and Apples Vision Pro are other examples of digital tech that have increasing relevance in the physical world.

The concept of the metaverse as augmented reality is going to accelerate over the next few years. Especially as AR tooling becomes more accessible. It will feed on many of the other trends mentioned in this newsletter as well. Even if you think it’s silly now, this is something worth paying attention to.

Educational Changes In A Digital First World - Tech Based - Longer Time Horizon

How will homeschooling, education, the socialization and the coming of age rituals of young people evolve and adapt to the digital age?

A time where remote work is fragmenting communities along location dependent & location independent social class lines and schooling best practices are struggling to keep up with the evolving needs of a digital age workforce.

How does this trend of homeschooling feed into the emergent social class dividing lines of location-dependent workers vs location-independent workers?

How will it impact where people choose to live? The policies they choose to advocate for? The opportunities young people can compete for based on the types of education they receive?

No parent want’s to take high risks with their children’s future. But I bet we’ll see new batches of startups, tools, resources, and actual adoption of alternative childhood life paths over the next few years. These represent important trends to learn from and adapt to.

What We Define As “Work” In A World Of Accessible AI Is Rapidly Evolving - Tech & Age Based

This is a short section but it’s pretty straightforward.

What we define as work, honest labor, sexy vs unsexy jobs in the era of widely available artificial intelligence will change. The type of new activities that generate a living wage will change (ex: the creator and the tik tok influencer are early signs of this change).

How will these changes impact the above educational trends and emergent social class divides?

Neomedievalism, Nationalism, & The New Model For Community & Governance In A Digital First World - Tech Based

In the backdrop, as these trends grow and collide they reinforce varying degrees of neomedievalism and nationalism, causing communities rapidly to fragment & change from the pressure of digital transformation.

As these “collisions” happen, they lead to a macro generational trend - ie: how community and government policies get created and enforced will evolve rapidly. I’m very interested in new community and local/state level governance mechanisms and frameworks. I believe these will see radical changes over the next few years as new social class divides become entrenched.

Old ways of creating and enforcing policy will fail under these digitally transformative pressures and then begin to evolve given to adapt to the trends above.

My questions - how, why, & what might come next? These are topics we can explore, understand the trends better, and forecast potential outcomes to prepare for.

Final Comments

With generational trends - you want to capture as much directionally correct information as early as possible. Then position yourself in the "path" of that outcome.

The goal is to begin preparing for the outcome and use new data to calibrate an increasing or decreasing probability of that expected outcome. As new data comes in, you use that additional information to reposition yourself to capitalize on an expected future.

As of now, some of these trends are farther along in development than others but nothing is set in stone. So we make predictions, watch, gather new data, adapt, and react.

Rapid Fire

• Charting The Growing Generational Wealth Gap - This chart is already a little out of date but still does a good job of representing the generational tidal wave coming in the form of wealth transfers.

• Ranked: Gen Z’s Favorite Brands, Compared with Older Generations - Favoring mobile payments apps lends itself well to crypto.

• Invesco Global Sovereign Asset Management Study - It makes sense to focus on how nation states invest their assets.

• Could Meta use Threads conversations to train its AI chatbots - When using “free” apps in the digital age always ask yourself, could this app be using niche public data to train niche AI?

• East Coast mayors call for more office-to-apartment conversions - Something to pay attention to re: real estate, housing, and community trends.

• Deadlines for U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETF Approvals Come Into Sight - “the clock on the review process formally starts only when filings are published in the register. Initially, this sets a deadline of 45 days, but that can be extended to as long as 240 days.” ←The clock started last week.