Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2026 1:32 pm In a true Information Age, there would be enough information and decision making based on it to put people in positions of authority who wouldn't do stupid things like this. After all, those people do exist in substantial numbers. But we're nowhere near that yet. Before that, "The shit floats to the top," and then comes the new dark age.

I conducted many hundreds of focus groups with employees, managers, and senior managers over 2.5 decades as a management consultant. Many of these groups were done post-layoff. I cannot think of a single time when I didn’t run into focus group participants who were positively mystified because “that guy” or “that woman” was let go. Invariably, that guy and that woman were considered absolutely key to getting results and making their sub-organization run efficiently.

Bosses know a threat when they see one, and those threats are often very intelligent.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Jul 11, 2026 4:11 pm

WHEN ANDREW CHAN, MD, became a gastroenterologist two decades ago, he began noticing a gradual shift in the patients calling for appointments. These weren’t the usual people over 65. Instead, they were young adults who, at first glance, check the boxes for “healthy.” Yet each had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

Most weren’t obese. Some were marathoners. Some were vegetarians. Some didn’t even take a sip of alcohol. Since Dr. Chan specializes in high-risk cancer genetics, he also checked to see if there was a family history of disease. Negative.

Dr. Chan’s situation is not an outlier. In fact, it’s becoming more of the norm.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Mar 10, 2024 6:34 pm

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Feb 23, 2024 9:54 pm In what might be called the mainstream American culture, which includes exposures to synthetic chemicals, childhood vaccines, standard American diet

First generation: (born around 1960 plus or minus a few years) Parents were not exposed to synthetic chemicals until they were adults. Anecdotally there seem to be a few more obese kids, geeky kids, gay kids, kids with allergies, kids needing orthodontics, etc., but nothing too alarming and kids seem to grow out of some of these problems. The birth rate for this generation falls a bit when adulthood is reached but nothing too dramatic. There may be a few years decrease in life expectancy becoming evident.

Second generation: (born around 1985 plus or minus a few years) First transgenerational effects may be seen, in other words, parents who were exposed to these things during their own fetal and childhood development start to have kids. In addition to what plagues the first generation born around 1960, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, autism, more severe allergies, diabetes, and other disorders become more common and less curable. Some are now common enough to have names and to be screened for. This generation sees a dramatic fall in their birthrate upon reaching adulthood.

Third generation: (born around 2015 plus or minus a few more years) Now going out on a limb. Transgenerational effects are now quite noticeable and influence the culture and economy to a great extent. There are lots more lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults compared to generations born before World War II, so many in fact that an acronym to describe this phenomenon is thought to be needed, LGBT. It is rare for a child not to have some kind of disorder. Disorders become even more severe; for example whereas many children born in 1960 may have been a bit geeky, now many are severely autistic. The birth rate for this generation takes a dramatic fall to less than half of the birthrate of the generation born before World War II.

Fourth generation: (born around 2045 plus or minus a few more years) Now really going out on a limb. Transgenerational effects in the mainstream American culture are now so severe that fertility and lifespan are affected to the point that it is evident mainstream culture is no longer viable. In most cases, disorders are so severe as to be irreversible and in many cases untreatable.

Reference that discusses transgenerational effects:

Fetal exposures cause disease in future generations. Remarkably, it appears that early life exposures can lead to health problems not only in adulthood, but also down through subsequent generations. For instance, adult diseases linked to newborns' low birth weight, enumerated above, cause adverse effects not only in those babies born small, but also in their children of any birth size, through heritable changes in gene expression that result in a phenomenon known as "epigenetic inheritance." Very different from genetic mutations, which are physical changes in gene structure, epigenetic inheritance is instead characterized by certain genes being turned on or off, but near permanently in ways that can be inherited.

If a genetic mutation is like changing a light fixture, the comparable epigenitic change would involve taping the light switch on or off. Since genes are responsible for making the chemicals that build and repair the body, this unnatural forcing to a permanent on or off position can have far-reaching consequences. In humans, both kinds of genetic changes, mutations as well as epigenetic changes in gene expression, can be passed down to a baby in the womb.

Scientists have recently found heritable epigenetic changes linked to the fungicide vinclozolin and pesticide methoxychlor, which impaired sperm counts and sperm motility not only among animals exposed in utero, but also in three subsequent generations (Anway et al. 2005). In other words, what each of us was exposed to in our mother's womb might affect the health of our great-grandchildren.

Notably, both of these pesticides were recently banned under a federal law that requires pesticides to be safe for newborns and children. The government gives children no explicit protection under the federal law meant to ensure the safety of other commercial chemicals (the Toxic Substances Control Act), even though risks from childhood exposures to industrial chemicals are no lower than those from pesticides.

https://www.ewg.org/research/body-burde ... n-newborns

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Jul 11, 2026 2:08 pm A separate thread titled something like "Maintaining Your Sanity and Health in the (fill in the blank)" might be useful?

Something interesting I ran across a few days ago was there was an article saying that they now know the cause of the increase in cancer rates for Millenials and Gen Z, which was identified as "accelerated aging". Well, OK, but what was the cause of the "accelerated aging"? Seems to me like they really know nothing.

Doctors Discover What’s Behind the Disturbing Rise of Cancer Cases in Millennials and Gen Z
Cancer keeps striking younger and younger. We now know why.

By Sarah Elizabeth Richards
Published: Jul 07, 2026 4:07 PM EDT

WHEN ANDREW CHAN, MD, became a gastroenterologist two decades ago, he began noticing a gradual shift in the patients calling for appointments. These weren’t the usual people over 65. Instead, they were young adults who, at first glance, check the boxes for “healthy.” Yet each had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

Most weren’t obese. Some were marathoners. Some were vegetarians. Some didn’t even take a sip of alcohol. Since Dr. Chan specializes in high-risk cancer genetics, he also checked to see if there was a family history of disease. Negative.

Dr. Chan’s situation is not an outlier. In fact, it’s becoming more of the norm. According to the 2026 report by the American Cancer Society, the overall rate of colorectal cancer has gone down since the mid-1980s. But if you look at it by age, the rate has increased by 2.9 percent each year in people under 50. Plus, these cancers tend to be more aggressive than those diagnosed at an older age.

“Early onset” patients used to make up less than 10 percent of Dr. Chan’s caseload. Today it’s more than double—a trend he calls “truly stunning” because they’re his age or even 20 years younger. (Dr. Chan, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is in his 50s.)

It’s become one of the decade’s most disturbing medical mysteries: Why are more younger adults getting diagnosed with cancers historically linked to old age? There’s a lot of opinions and not enough answers—until now.

THERE ARE A lot of trails to chase: Did we eat too many processed foods as kids and mess up our microbiomes? Ingest too many microplastics or absorb too many “forever chemicals”? Was it too many years of binge drinking or burning the midnight oil? Or something else entirely?

These questions are what prompted Dr. Chan to step up to be a leader of Team Prospect, a $25 million project funded by the National Cancer Institute along with research groups in the UK, France, Italy and India. The initiative enlists epidemiologists, clinicians, chemists, computational scientists and microbiome experts to investigate all these factors.

Already, Chan’s co-leader, cancer epidemiologist Yin Cao, is creating buzz with work she published in Nature Medicine. Her team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found evidence that younger people with cancer were somehow aging faster than their peers. They crunched the so-called biological age of over 150,000 people’s blood samples in the U.K. Biobank database.

By looking at nine blood biomarkers, including creatinine, C-reactive protein, glucose and white blood cell count, they calculated that people who were born after 1965 had a 23 percent higher likelihood of accelerated aging than those born between 1950 and 1954.

The evidence that their bodies were getting old faster was linked with the dramatic increase in lung, gastrointestinal, and uterine cancers.

https://www.menshealth.com/health/a7183 ... diagnosis/

Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Jul 08, 2026 12:18 pm Some people smoke all their lives and are almost completely unaffected.

Jean Calment smoking

AI Overview

Jeanne Calment, the longest-living person in recorded history, started smoking at age 21 and continued until she was 117 years old. She notably only quit the habit because her failing eyesight made it difficult to light the cigarettes herself.

Despite her smoking, she lived to a verified age of 122 years and 164 days.

Here are a few specific details about her smoking habit and lifestyle:

Frequency: She didn't chain-smoke; she typically averaged only about two cigarettes per day.

Lifestyle Add-ons: Alongside her cigarette habit, she indulged in nearly a kilogram (2.2 lbs) of chocolate per week and ended her daily meals with a glass of port wine.

Health View: While her case makes a fascinating Wikipedia anomaly, medical experts highlight that her longevity is an extreme outlier and smoking remains a leading cause of cancer and heart disease.

Here are 10 startling statistics about email use:

[*]Statistics show that the average office worker receives 121 emails per day.
[*]The average number of emails sent and received each day keeps rising. Last year emails averaged around 281 billion per day. By 2023, we can expect an increase to 347 billion per day.
[*]By 2023, the number of email users worldwide will reach 4.4 billion. That’s up almost 16% from 3.8 billion users last year.
[*]Most people check their email at least once a day. 19% check emails as soon as they hit the inbox.
[*]49% of US employees check their work email every few hours while they’re off duty.
[*]9% of US workers constantly check work email outside of working hours.
[*]55.6% of email users read their emails on a mobile device.
[*]A Michigan State University study reveals that the overuse of email hinders leadership ability in managers.
[*]Employees spend more than 90 minutes per day recovering from email interruptions.
[*]About 14.5 billion spam emails are sent per day. Loss in productivity because of spam costs businesses around $20.5 billion a year.

Key Points

Warren Buffett recently warned investors that a "gambling mood" is driving the stock market today.

Buffett, now 95, stepped down as Berkshire's CEO last year, but he recently shared a grim warning with investors during a CNBC interview. "We've never had people in a more gambling mood than now." Buffett also said traders were treating the stock market like a casino.

In a sweeping cultural shift, the fabled American work ethic may be getting sidelined in the quest for easy money.

For generations, Americans built wealth through accumulated skill and earned experience, the kind of success that didn’t rely on shortcuts. Now, 72 percent of Americans either have a side hustle or are considering one, with many chasing returns from crypto, prediction markets, or AI content.

Why?

Consumer prices climbed more than 20 percent from 2020 to 2024, outpacing wage growth for most Americans and widening the distance between effort and reward. Pew Research found that just 39 percent of Americans under 30 believe the so-called American Dream is still achievable through their own ambition. The rise of zero-fee platforms like Robinhood and prediction markets like Polymarket has made the potential for big paydays possible—if the bets pay off.

There’s a mechanism driving this shift that rarely gets named directly: survivorship bias. That’s the psychological mechanism where we draw conclusions about something using only a few successful examples (the survivors) while ignoring the failures (which usually outnumber the survivors).

Today, the get-rich-quick stories that circulate on social media are the survivors. And they’re rewriting how millions of people think about effort, risk, and wealth.

That distortion matters to every leader and entrepreneur, because it shapes who’s entering the workforce, what they expect from careers, and how they evaluate building something versus betting on something.

The Dream That Changed

The American Dream has always carried a clear logic: effort connects to reward. Its roots run through the Declaration of Independence and the work ethic that defined early American culture. And for much of the last two centuries, the contract felt real enough to head west to the gold rush, take loans out to go to college, or drop out of school to launch a startup.

The number of Millennials who say the dream is out of reach has quadrupled, from 9 percent in 2017 to 35 percent in 2024, according to the American Enterprise Institute.

Pew Research found that just 39 percent of Americans under 30 believe the so-called American Dream is still achievable through their own ambition.

There’s a mechanism driving this shift that rarely gets named directly: survivorship bias. That’s the psychological mechanism where we draw conclusions about something using only a few successful examples (the survivors) while ignoring the failures (which usually outnumber the survivors).

Today, the get-rich-quick stories that circulate on social media are the survivors. And they’re rewriting how millions of people think about effort, risk, and wealth.

The American Dream has always carried a clear logic: effort connects to reward.

The number of Millennials who say the dream is out of reach has quadrupled, from 9 percent in 2017 to 35 percent in 2024, according to the American Enterprise Institute.

vincecate wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2026 9:08 pm http://cate.ai/misc/ - total of 10 AIs on ai.smart.html topic. Some other topics.