My generation, the “end of history” kids, came of age at the dawn of the era of the things which might have been. And all their trials and terrors and ghastly wonders. All the things which our ancestors might have wrought but would never have lived to see. And we live among it now, and it is us, and we are that which they made in their own eras of wonton foolery.

That the oldest are now turning forty is important not just because it must auger the end of an era when Millennial was a byword for the young, but also because it must auger the beginning of an era when this generation’s leadership in the world is a thing of the present. That era is here and now, not some distant time in the future.