I've become acutely aware that we're nearly a whole quarter century into the 2000s. Obligatory "but Y2K was just last week!"
The Victorians thought nostalgia was an illness but there was definitely something charming about the '90s.
What are we gonna look back on with fondness about the first half of the 2020s? Things feel more mental than they've ever been without any sign of slowing down.
I think a lot of us will end up looking back on the pandemic with a fair amount of fondness. For those of us lucky enough to have a career that let them do fuck all at home for 2 years on full pay, it really was a great time to be alive. I learned to bake bread, grew a shitload of vegetables, and genuinely woke up every day excited to try something new and just see what the day had in store for me. Can't fucking wait to be retired now.
Other than that, who knows, everything is shit. Maybe TV is good at the minute and we'll look back on this as a particularly good era for that? Or maybe they're just paying a lot of money to put Henry Cavill and Pedro Pascal into everything, and we just think it's good based on that.
I think the 20s have largely been shite. Barely two months into them, we had a global pandemic that absolutely everybody lost their shit about, you were stuck at home doing fuck all, the repercussions of Brexit have now fully set in, and now we have a festering sore of a regional war in Ukraine that isn't quite all that regional and could turn into WWIII on short notice. Gas and electricity are through the roof, real wages are stagnating, and a packet of sliced cheese is up to three quid.
Unless something drastic happens for the better in the next few years, the 2020s will probably go down as the most shit decade since the 1970s. All I know is that I'd gladly take the 90s back over the last three to four years.
I normally judge decades based on their music, and I must say that the average 2020s song is considerably better than the real nadir of humanity in 2005-2010. In terms of things we will look back on fondly, I suspect a few of the big technology companies are going to go bankrupt and everyone will be nostalgic for Netflix and Twitter and possibly Tinder. Plus snow, of course. At some point in the 2020s it will snow in this country for the last time ever, and we won't know it at the time and we really won't make the most of it.
>>456159 >Tinder
Are Tinder and similar still even good in the 2020s? As is being discussed in /101/, sexuality has significantly changed. In the 2010s, it was no bother at all to find people online who were up for casual sex, but navigating the same nowadays seems like a nightmare.
Depends on your age group I think. If you're late 20s to early 30s and up, I think it's still basically as good as it ever was- That is to say, it works, but there's a steep learning curve, and some lads out there will, by necessity, be no hopers either way. But then, the same was always true of IRL dating. I also want to say that the "casual sex" aspect of Tinder/online dating in general has always been near non-existent, unless you're exceptionally attractive. Most women on there get tired of the chances far too quickly, so you at least have to pretend like you're in it for more than that. Again- Just like IRL dating.
For the younger generation, yeah, fuck knows, but I wouldn't fancy my chances. Whenever I dip my search filter under 25 (out of curiosity, you understand) I'm just constantly bemused by these standoffish little madames trying desperately to look strong and aloof, putting all sorts of gobbledegook about being an ethical polyfem rad vegan or whatever in their bio. Life has taught me that people who try that hard are nearly always all front, and underneath they're just a colossal mess; but it seems like all the younger lasses are like that now. That's their default.
>>456160 Weirdly enough Hinge -- a dating app that markets itself as trying to promote itself as being the app where folks actually talk to one another before shagging -- has become more the place for casual sex over Tinder, at least in the experience of me and my pals.
>>456158 I think 70s are underrated because they were tacky and unstable, even though much of that tackiness is largely a sign of the rising living standards and increased social liberalism which we associate with the 1960s actually arriving on the doorsteps of ordinary people. The economic situation was far more mixed than it might seem - it was unstable and unsightly to have the bin men go on strike or for the power to cut out because the miners had the audacity to expect wages in line with the government's own pay policy, but living standards went up through the decade. That's a stark contrast to life since 2008, where things have stagnated but done so in a stable fashion.
But then, history is written and tastes are set by the people who did alright out of the 2010s and the 2020s, and a good chunk of them were there to remember the 70s, where they personally - or their parents - ran into such intolerable inconveniences as the government saying you can't take what would today be thousands of pounds out of the country for your holiday abroad. They've no reason to care about the real terms pay of a bin man, but the image of rubbish piling up in the street is so unsightly...
I guess you could say that even though the 70s were a bit of a rubbish decade, there still wasn't all this craziness going on as we have today. Maybe it just seems to us like life was much more simple in a good way back then. I guess people in the 70s were probably saying that about the 1950s as well. But I'm pretty sure that the past few years have not been a time that people in the future will wish they could go back to.
In every decade since the 1940s, things basically got better on average. Lots of shit things happened in the 1970s, but most people had a better life in 1979 than they did in 1969 - they had more money in their pocket, the stuff in the shops was better, more people had more civil rights and so on. Some people had their lives marred by deindustrialisation in that decade, but a much larger number of people saw a substantial improvement in their wages, got on the property ladder, took their first foreign holiday and so on. Pick a post-war decade and you'll see marked improvements in all sorts of areas of the lives of working people. That trend also broadly maps to the period between the start of the industrial revolution and the outbreak of the Great War, albeit on a slightly longer timespan.
The period since 2008 is the first major reversal of trend. Most people were no better off in 2019 than they were in 2009; people are definitely worse off in 2023 than they were in 2013. The reasons for that are complex and contested, but we can at least start by acknowledging that the wheels have in fact come off and this isn't just nostalgia.
Something happened in Britain at the end of the 2000s that put a hard brake on the usual march of progress; "voting in the Tories" is part of the answer, but only part. The Tories of today are unrecognisable compared to the Tories that won the election in 2010. Cameron was daft enough to call a referendum, but he campaigned to remain. I don't think anyone who voted for Cameron in 2010 imagined that we'd end up with Liz Truss in Downing Street, however briefly. The Tories didn't invent Jimmy Faragé.
The only pithy explanation I can give is that we've all gone a bit mad - like Germany's national madness of the 1930s, only in a quintessentially British way that is shit and ineffective and ultimately self-destructive. A certain section of the British public has hypnotised themselves into believing that nothing is going wrong, it definitely isn't the fault of the Tories or Brexit and actually these snowflakes could do with a bit of hardship to toughen them up. I never stole your shoes, you can't prove I stole your shoes and your shoes were uncomfortable.
In the 1990s, there was a magazine called Continuum that denied the existence of HIV. It ceased publication in 2001, because all of the staff had died of AIDS. I'm reminded of that magazine every time I see the front cover of The Daily Express.
I don't think it's as much to do with our mass psychology as it is just the prevailing global headwinds and some rather unwise decisions in how to deal with the obstacles as they came up.
At the very fundamental level, I think we sort of bet on the wrong horse in becoming a more or less entirely service based economy. That was all well and good in the 80s and 90s, but what happened in the 2000s is something we, in fairness, probably couldn't have seen coming, but at the same time really should have taken steps to defend ourselves from. This might sound mad, but hear me out- The problems all started at roundabout the same time as the "on hold to someone in India who hardly speaks English" model of customer service became ubiquitous. Remember when you'd hear someone moan about that at least once a week?
We didn't account for the fact lots of services can also be imported and exported, and in the increasingly interconnected digital age we stepped into from the early 2000s and onwards, companies naturally went ahead and did just that. We are a big exporter of financial services, and we do quite well out of it; but the people in charge didn't see it coming that practically everything else can just be packed up and sent to India for much cheaper. It was one thing having the Niko Belic coming over to do the plumbing, but we were also haemorrhaging plenty of jobs to Mumbai and Delhi.
I think failing to put the brakes on, or at least install some kind of crumple zones and air bags, to deal with the impacts of globalisation when it really started to ramp up in the early 00's is what put us where we are today. The public could see and feel all this happening, and especially after 2008, they felt angry and cheated, but didn't know exactly where to direct that anger. Jim'll seized on that and directed it at Brexit; and meanwhile the establishment flopped around like a level 5 Magikarp, seemingly unable to muster any response other than "B-but th-that's racist! You're a big meanie!", which in retrospect it's amazing didn't work. But here we are.
