My favorite thing about New Year’s is that it is a largely individualistic holiday following the family-heavy holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It’s as if we’re all heroes of our own stories who’ve made it through the year’s trials, then returned home to get our groove back, and came back out stronger than before.
We return refreshed, emboldened to take on the challenges in front of us. Having taken stock of ourselves with the wind of change at our backs, we dust off our exercise equipment and resolve to be better.
If a typical New Year’s is the turning of a page, a decade-changing New Year’s is the starting of a new notebook. (Note: Don’t be that math guy writing that decades actually start in the 01 year. Nobody actually thinks that way and I’m talking about culture not math.)
But with the leap to 2020 rapidly approaching, the moment somehow feels less significant than normal. Lots of things feel less significant (culturally) than they should right now.
It’s like celebrating in the middle of a fight with your family instead of with your college buddies at a bar that overserves.
You stick the night out for the customary countdown, but by 12:05, everyone’s in their car venting to their significant other about how unfairly they’re being treated.
We’re definitely limping to the finish line of the 2010s, but that’s okay. The past twenty years will likely be considered historical fly-over years if for no other reason than the fact that they’re hard to reference. We never got a good term for them: the aughts then tens.
These decades saw amazing advances in technology and media, but they also saw the commoditization of nostalgia. Not nostalgia for a golden age of enlightenment, like during the Italian Renaissance, but rather for our own childhoods.
Having reached peak cultural frustration, we cast our gaze backwards instead of forwards choosing the past’s safety over the future’s uncertainty.
And when others didn’t come along, we balked. How could the Olsen Twins turn down Fuller House? Don’t they want us to love them anymore!?
No, they’ve grown up.
That love now goes to Kimmy Gibbler. And nobody could ever really love Kimmy Gibbler, so let’s move on.
Going forward with the twenties, thirties, and so on will make the rest our lives much easier to reference. These past decades are just the muddled mess historians can gloss over between the Cold War’s end and whatever follows (probably China).
That’s why I’m not trying to make sense out of what this decade means for our culture. Instead, I’m looking inward taking stock of what this decade meant for me.
I refuse to let the moment go unnoticed. We’re talking about the end of a decade. Even the luckiest of us won’t be able to say that more than ten or eleven times.
Decades have a nice feel to me. I think it’s because I was born in 1980 so they feel like natural time periods. I imagine my thinking would be quite different if I were born in 1983. What an unremarkable sounding year. 1980, however, sounds transformational.
I basically divide my decades as such:
1980s: Childhood.
1990s: Puberty.
2000s: Trying to figure it out.
2010s: Losing a parent, marrying, and becoming a parent.
Not else much seems to matter in retrospect. There were jobs, relationships, accomplishments and mistakes. But their only lasting legacy is this moment, and in this moment (distorted by the lens of time) they all seem small.
There’s no real power in a decade but we cling to the mystique trying to make sense of things.
Keep that in mind when you look at the world this week with “New Year’s eyes.” Don’t just look for tomorrow, look for the decade that lies in front of you and wonder what (within the context of your life) will matter at its end. I’ll bet the list is shorter than you think.
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