It’s hard to escape thinking at least a little bit about the end of an entire decade. What stood out? What was good? What was bad? What’s better or worse today than I thought it would be 10 years ago?
Music
I did my #SpotifyWrapped just like everybody else (results here) and - while the data is missing 2010, I was actually astonished looking back to 2011 at how narrow my music taste was then. I’ve always thought of myself as being pretty open minded even if my tastes reflect biases toward stuff I merely like, and today at closer to age 30 than 20 I would have thought the inverse would have been true. (E.g., I predicted the data would show that I discovered a lot of interesting new music in the past, and today I listen to the same song on repeat.) But when I dug into the data, the INVERSE held true. My music tastes from college were either things I already liked in high school or things that my peers exposed me to in the dorms or at college parties, because that’s all that was easy to find in 2010, 2011. Today I take it for granted that algorithms, weekly playlists of new tracks in different niches, and the online hive mind will surface the best new music for me (and then I’ll listen to it until it’s annoying and I can’t stand it). It only feels repetitive because I’m spoiled for choice, not because it actually is. I listened to a lot of top 40 pop in 2011 because it’s what was there - today I don’t bother with that, because I have so much more choice, and from such a wider pool in terms of geography, language, even simple stuff like licensing/record labels. Getting anything international that hadn’t hit it big used to be really difficult, today we take it for granted. Music in general and the choices people have to listen to music have improved a lot!!
Travel
It’s kind of the stereotype at this point - millennials value experiences over things, and would rather travel the world than buy a house in the suburbs. Was it always like that?
No, not really. I grew up on a farm in rural North Dakota - I never really went anywhere besides Canada and Mexico before college, most of my classmates hadn’t either, neither had their parents. (My own mother did, she had been to every continent but Antarctica when she married my father.) Most of the people I grew up around seemed to have little interest in the rest of the world unless they had distant relatives, invariably in Europe, that they wanted to visit. I’m not trying to be insulting with this description - it’s just how it was, that was the culture we all swam in, it was hard to picture what the rest of the world might even be like or why anyone would want to go there anyway. No one was being deliberately small or close-minded, it’s just that the rest of the world seemed irrelevant and you couldn’t really get there anyway.
Today that’s all different. You can get somewhere else for a few hundred bucks and a stamp on your passport. There’s no need to deal with aggravating hostel stays or expensive hotels where everything is an extra $5 in whatever currency when Airbnb and other sites provide tons of competition. So people do get out and they go see the world. My sister Kate did it by winning a Fulbright fellowship to spend a year teaching English abroad, but I’ve also known tons of people that didn’t go to college at all that just went somewhere else to work. I also know many people that have left the U.S. and made their lives somewhere else. And while everyone has had romantic fantasies of chucking it all in a bag and starting over someplace new, leaving the country and moving someplace where you don’t speak the language, have no family, and may struggle to get proper work authorization is pretty drastic. So why then?
Politics
Nothing drives the most mobile people toward the exits like political instability, and on that front, the U.S. has delivered in spades. We opened the decade with a dramatic change in political representation in Congress as the Tea Party took over the U.S. House of Representatives. This was a mere two years after President Obama had won an election with a wide majority on a platform almost diametrically opposed to theirs. From that point on it was pretty much just non-stop gridlock, shutdowns, and chaos. Obama may have been a good person at heart, but he was inept at managing amid the dysfunction.
In 2015, the promise of a return to normalcy (whatever that is) seemed right around the corner when Donald Trump came barreling onto the scene. I watched my colleagues in Washington dismiss him as a fluke while my peers abroad were cheering on Brexit and I knew in my heart that they were about to be so, so, wrong. People have come up with a variety of just-so stories to explain why Trump was able to win the 2016 election. It was Russia, it was racism, it was Wikileaks, it was inequality, it was declining Rust Belt towns with no jobs, it was this or that…
Nah, it was the chaos. Terror attacks in the news seemingly once a week, government shutdowns, at the time there had been literal riots in the streets - it was just intolerable to many people. Some of them moved abroad, some of them voted for a political leader that campaigned on providing a dramatic shock to the system.
I won’t attempt to read the tea leaves for the 2020 election here, but in my opinion ongoing political instability is the biggest risk to the United States today. We still don’t have a handle on this because we refuse to confront the problem for what it is. As I am writing this we are running down the clock on yet another government shutdown - the government is running on 30 days of temporary funding that expires right before Christmas. At the same time Congress is debating an impeachment resolution to try and rid themselves of President Donald Trump, who they view as reckless and uncouth. The most prosperous and productive society that has ever existed in world history could end up without an elected leader and without a funded government - at the same time.
We’re going into the 2020’s teetering on a chair with one weak leg. I often wonder if, like residents of the former USSR, one day I will wake up for my commute in the DC suburbs and it will all simply be over. It sort of felt that way the week of the 2016 election - I went in to work the morning after and people were sobbing at their desks. Others took time off. I continued numbly going through the motions of doing my job like nothing happened because at least on paper, nothing had changed.
But there’s no going back, and no one knows what forward looks like either. I’m nervous, but maybe by 2030 we will have figured it out.
