Popular music changes every 5 or so years, because freshmen entering high school want their own identity that's distinct from the seniors who just graduated. T

Popular music changes every 5 or so years, because freshmen entering high school want their own identity that's distinct from the seniors who just graduated. This is why they can reject the music wave that came just before, yet also embrace nostalgia for the prior wave that came before that. That's fine, because the previous wave of kids (from which we want a separate identity) weren't into that wave. This teenage dynamic carries over into adulthood. Academia is a bunch of young adults chasing tenure, by publishing papers arguing that the existing batch of tenured professors are washed up and got it all wrong. And also "rediscovering" the older research that was discarded by the previous generation. Software development is a bunch of a junior devs working on bug tickets. Frustrated by the tech debt they inherited, and convinced that tech debt comes from the tech rather from the organization. It's just that in comparison to academia, technology has the generational lifespan of fruit flies. So we spin through the cycle a lot faster than other walks of life.