Category Archive

We’re almost four years into the 20s and the sooner we bring back the concept of decades the better. Decades give people, especially young people, a temporal identity and a grounding in history. Decades emphasize the importance of now, but also connect us to the past in a way that doesn’t alienate us from our elders or youths in the way the concept of “generations” does automatically. Decades are a key element of narrative storytelling, encourage critical thinking through comparing/contrasting eras, and make it easier to discuss the future. In sum, decades benefit mental health, social inclusion and connection, movement building, and resistance to the aimless void of late capitalism. Our ability to exercise historical agency and preserve historical memory may depend on us reviving this concept.

If you’re 35 or older, you remember the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s as regular talking points. Both in the historical sense of “what was the spirit of the 60s?” and in the future-focused sense of “this will be THE trend of the 90s.” The concept of decades permeated regular conversation, tying people together and rooting them in a temporal home, whether you were talking about music, sports, film, fashion, politics, games, or literally anything. It made it natural and popular to compare eras of things, which is a basic building block of both historical study as well as critical thinking itself. It also helped people form an identity, in the sense of “I’m a child of the 70s” – one shorthand reference point that contains a vast easily-recalled cultural context filled with people, events, products, art, styles, and social struggles. It was a source of pride to be associated with a decade.

When Y2K hit, the computers were just fine. Better than ever, in fact. But we weren’t, because we suddenly lost a very powerful tool for understanding our social environment. Without the concept of decades, we wandered into an amorphous fog without beginning or end, where we became easy-pickings for a consumer capitalism that thrives by developing isolated, disoriented worker-spectators. When ignorant of our past and uninterested in our future, we rarely make trouble for the ruling class.

At first, some people resisted the change. They coined names for the decade-to-be, but none caught on. They sounded forced, so they were relegated to the realm of jokes (Try to have a serious conversation about “the noughties”). Nothing stepped in to bridge the chasm.

It wasn’t a huge problem at first, because the 90s were such a recent frame of reference, so we could keep the concept of decades alive by just filing the present under “post-90s” or “this decade.” All the conversations we were accustomed to, where we compared trends in pants, or hair, or anarchist politics, kept rolling for a while, they just had this weird stand-in where you’d have to compare previous decades to the vague concept of “now.” As in, “you guys had VCRs in the 80s, but now we have the far-superior technology of DVD players, which will remain popular forever.”

Ten years passed. A new decade was scheduled to be starting, but no one took notice. The concept of decades wasn’t revived. Instead, it faded into oblivion. Maybe we were too buried under the infinite scroll of social media, our heads down, absorbed by our smartphones, or too obsessed by the latest streaming content, that we lost the ability to form long-range narratives. Our shared experience of the era itself began to fracture, as our attention scattered into increasingly fragmented niches of the spectacle, which concealed the fact that we were largely all doing the same thing at the same time. Or maybe we were so emotionally beaten down by the seemingly endless “War on Terror” and apocalyptic ecological catastrophe that we simply didn’t have the energy to think of ourselves as historical agents, and therefore couldn’t be bothered with putting a name on the era we were living through, even though “the teens” was an obvious and pleasant choice.

It’s not as if there weren’t massive and historically-important movements for social change happening in that decade. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to MeToo to Transgender visibility, millions of people were organizing, shifting social norms, and becoming empowered to radically improve society in ways perhaps more profound than we know. But compared to movements of the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, these new movements are unusually obscured, and perhaps in danger of being overlooked.

Organizers of these world-changing efforts – people like Alicia Garza and Marisa Holmes – should be recognized and remembered for their actions. Even more importantly, our understanding of how that decade’s movements arose, why they were so effective, and also what their shortcomings were, should be the topic of regular conversation so that we may improve upon them in the future. Yet, it’s nearly impossible to have a productive, civil version of such a discussion on social media, and it may be nearly impossible for a social movement in this day and age to outlast the ephemeral confines of a hashtag.

This is not to suggest that these movements will be forgotten, or to downplay the excellent work of the chroniclers of these efforts, who have produced worthwhile books, documentaries, and other media that actively preserve this historical memory. Instead, I suggest it is unfair to those culture-defining social movements that we can’t immediately recall their powerful messages, images, and actors through a universally-agreed-upon phrase like “the teens” in the same way that “the 60s” immediately conjures such thoughts of the Civil Rights Movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement.

By the way, don’t give me this crap about “generations.” The Civil Rights Movement/Black Freedom Struggle was driven forward by people of all ages, from elders like A. Philip Randolph to middle-aged people like Ella Baker, to children like those who walked out of school to pack the Birmingham jails. As far as I’m aware, the fear-mongering associated with “rebellious youth” has always existed. For sure it existed in the 60s, when the mass media did their best to demonize the anti-authoritarian, hopelessly “feminized” “Baby Boomers”, effectively blaming young people for everything wrong with the world. We’ve come full circle today, blaming those same people, who are now old, for the exact opposite reasons.

“Generations” are a fake conceptual tool used to divide people. Since 2000, as the concept of decades has fallen away, in part it has been superseded by the nefarious concepts of “Millennials” and “Gen. Z.” These are identities which are inherently exclusive, and usually they are invoked for purely negative characterizations. Eventually, “Gen. Z” will get the same scorn that “Boomers” do now, and it will be just as baseless.

In contrast, decades are inherently inclusive. Everyone who was alive in the 90s can reminisce about what that decade was like for them. Even if our experiences were vastly different, we can find common ground through cultural touchstones like The Simpsons or Tupac. That kind of conversation is not just idle nostalgia. It is a collective remembering that allows us to form social bonds with neighbors, co-workers, and fellow activists, to each of whom the 90s is a small building block in their own identity-formation.

If you read comments on Youtube under videos of old music or TV shows (and I’m not recommending you do), you’ll regularly see people lamenting that we no longer live in the [insert decade here]. Some of those commenters are old and feeling nostalgic for the loss of their youth. That’s normal. But some of those commenters are young. They will often mention that they “just turned 16” (or another age of fragile identity-formation). And yet, here they are, wandering the interwebs, watching videos that were produced before they were born and wishing they could time-travel back to the 20^th century. 

Meanwhile, the 21^st century is nearly a quarter complete, and its music and TV shows have been equally valuable, if not more so. But without the decades providing an automatic frame of reference for great artistic works, we struggle to recall exactly when they were released, or how they related to concurrent events in society or technology, or even our own lives. Without decades, people don’t know how to talk to each other about their own time period. And so they don’t. They just slowly forget, as everything is enveloped in a nebulous, meaningless haze.

What stories are children of this century learning about their own time, and where they fit in? What can they be proud of? What can they look forward to?

There’s a bunch of things we could do for a better future for all. Redistributing the wealth of the top 1%. Replacing the private automobile with free public transit. Dismantling the prison-industrial complex in favor of systems of transformative justice and accountability. Planting a billion trees. Those will take a lot of hard work and a long time.

One thing that would take very little effort, would bring us into connection with those around us of all ages, would help us cherish the present and look forward to the future, would empower us to find meaning and feel better, is to reintroduce the concept of decades. We can start now, by acknowledging publicly, and habitually, that we live in the 20s.*

* I mean no disrespect to the decade of the 1920s, a fine decade to study and discuss. But of the decades called “the 20s”, the current decade is far more relevant to everyone living today and for the rest of the 21^st century. I don’t know at what point people stopped referring to the 1820s as “the 20s,” but surely it was before 1923.