2020 and Beyond

The year is coming to an end soon, with Christmas as the last big hurdle before we bring 2019 to an end, but as the year draws to a close so too does this decade.  The 2010s are to give way to the 2020s and a new era will begin.  I was listening to the WOW Report Podcast on Youtube and James St James was talking about the delineation of decades and how when we look back at the 70s, 80s, and 90s it's very easy to say this is what it was, and define that in terms of fashions, music, movies and other elements of pop culture, but with the turn of the century and subsequently the turn of the millennium there has been a melding that occurred where the past 20 years has almost blurred into one - at least, at first glance.

James brought up an idea that I have been dwelling on for a few weeks now and it's beginning to click in my mind, that is the idea of taking the past twenty years and instead of dividing it into two decades of ten years as you would expect, instead dividing it into two brackets the first lasting from 2000 through to 2012 and the second lasting from 2013 through to 2019 - the logic here is that the latter form the "teen" years as with the time of adolescence for most people and the former being the infancy and childhood years.  The more I think about this concept the more it starts to sound quite disturbing when you take a step back and look at the state of the world.

The Millennium essentially serves as a point of birth, when new life was created, when everything that came before was cast off and a new hopeful future emerged, something which quickly crumbled in 2001 in the second year of the Millennium the terrible twos came to full force and wreaked havoc with our lives, war broke out and emotions ran high.  An age of ignorance dawned where we were divided into those who knew and those who didn't want to know.  The former felt the tumult and rode every high and low whilst the latter distracted themselves with toys and games, the iPhone came along and gadgets and really even though the internet existed it really came into its own when people needed an escape, a deep dark endless abyss into which they could pour everything they loved and hated about the world and seal it all up in one big box - Pandora's Box became Pandora's Cloud.

2012 was foretold to be the end of time and civilisation as we know it, that the world would end and everything would fall apart and nothing would ever be the same again, and in a way, it did.  2013 brought the formative teenage years and with them the angst and the whirlwind of emotion.  When you think of the years leading up to 2012 there was a childlike innocence, a sneering at the joke that the world would end, the funny side was seen by most with only a few actually believing it, but once 2012 passed there has been a darkening of our mentality as a society, hope has slowly ebbed away and for many it was sweet or perhaps bitter sixteen that brought this to the front more than any other year.  Politics aside, of which two great upheavals occurred that for the moment are irrelevant to this narrative as they are partisan, but what is not partisan is death itself and 2016 brought, or rather took from us some of the greats.  One by one they fell on all sides and by the end of the year a climate of fear prevailed where every time someone's name trended on twitter you were afraid to click for fear that they too were joining the list.

Depression took hold and society began to regress, teenage rebellion rose up to full force and we became a society that was and in many ways still is more divided than ever.  As 2020 approaches however we have to realise that the teenage years are behind us, for most at this point in their lives college or University is the time when great experimentation occurs as the adult self emerges.  We've had the highs, the lows, the austerity, the indulgence, we've let our inner child run amok and we've seen now where we have ended up because of it.  If the 2020s are to mirror life then the next decade going forward I see a world that tries to rebuild, that takes all that it was promised and all it aspired to and tries to build a life that encompasses all of those things.  We will inevitably fail, that's the point of your 20s, you approach with optimism and renewed naivety the task of creating the perfect life, it's not until the 30s that you realise perfection is an illusion and compromise is necessary.

What all this has to do with here and now and the state of the world is simple, we are tired, we have endured what we have been told was necessary to get us to this point, and now we expect the pay off, we expect the world going forward to give us what we were promised and if we don't get it from the adults in the room who are supposed to be older and wiser, then come the 30s we will take it, and that generational divide will deepen.  Your day is done, a new day has come, a new decade is dawning, and with it that renewed sense of optimism must be delivered.