End of the '10s

From Reddit

It's time to say goodbye to the '10s. I've been waiting for this for a good while now. So let us sum up just what's been going on, and what will be happening next.

To start with, this isn't the end of a decade.There was no year 0 AD, so we are not entering a new decade until 2021. That said, the way we talk about decades today to make it straightforward is to talk about decades in clumps containing the final two digits. Obviously, everyone knows the '80s, '90s, and '00s, and now we are leaving the '10s. It makes it easier to discuss it this way. Starting in 2010 and ending in 2019, it's not a new decade, but it is the end of a grouping we will look back on.

So the question is, how were the '10s? Compered to the other decades I've been alive, has it managed to become worse?

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you might be surprised at my answer here.

Oddly enough, I would say on an objective scale for myself it was a better decade than the '00s. I can repeat myself next year for 2021, but the fact of the matter is that there was quite a lot of movement this decade. More than expected, actually.

For one, I became a writer. In 2011, I made my first move to learn writing and by 2016 I had begun to get a grip on it and put out my first proper book. It was also the same year the Pulp Revolution began, and I learned where to direct my writing towards. I have much more written, in editing, and in the pipeline, and it all started at the beginning of this very decade in earnest. Next year I'm planning to get 3 books out, and a bunch more short stories, so here's hoping I can manage to keep it going.

This wasn't where I expected to be when I thought of the future back in 2010.

The '10s have been a weird one socially. The chart above does show some good and bad, but it doesn't point out how discourse has changed. It's tempting to say (and I have) that the issue with the '10s is that basic conversation has been destroyed, but that's not really true. That happened much earlier.

The '00s was marked by 9/11 and the fallout from it. This might be hard to imagine, but that even in New York City had worldwide repercussions and shattered many people's delusions of where the modern world was heading. No Utopia was coming. Very slowly did the populace begin to understand as the oldest generation began to die, leaving the generation in charge that was promised a word they would never have.

This bitterness marks the atmosphere of the '00s heavily. Social interactions and divisions only grew harsher with the reality that that empty humanism was a lie, and there was no future ahead for it. This led to a simmering hatred that played itself out through a characterless decade which ended in nothing at all. We might as well be going from 2019 to 2000. That entire decade was the equivalent of a boiling pot.

The crazy overblown theatrics in world politics comes from a decade of frogs boiling in pots and wanting to jump out while others demand they stay. Every side understands this, but no one will work to change it. The '10s didn't start this, it was merely the inevitable end point of this deteriorating attitude. And for that it at least has something going for it that the previous decade of rot did not.

But things have change a lot in such a short time. I can't imagine going back twenty, or even ten, years and telling myself that just about every piece of art worth engaging in would be independent while corporations cratered due to outright, and blatant, hatred of their audience. This is how they're dealing with the death of the old paradigm. It's a glorified temper tantrum. What is happening in the arts appears to be a microcosm of what is happening in the world right now. By 2030, any semblance of the 20th century we knew and grew up in will be gone.

It is a long time coming, but what might finally see the end of the post-modern age sooner than originally thought.

As author David V. Stewart said in one of his Writestreams, we are no longer in the Corporate Period of art. It's just about dead. I've linked this before, but I will post it again because it never stops being interesting. This is his theory of where the arts are at this very moment:

Very good video

So, as I've said, while this decade might have its issues, I can easily say it is a step up from where we were in the dead years of the '00s. If you are a believer in Progress™ then even you must have realized what a nothing decade that was. And yet all of the bad things from this decade from the degradation of the video game industry to the extinction of rock music all originated in the '00s and had their roots in the '90s.

This is merely the natural endpoint of that era.

The new ideas that have come up within the '10s from Retrowave's explosion to anime's refocus on heroics to the Pulprev, and grassroots efforts in crowdfunding comics and books, has shown there is plenty out there worth being excited for in the future. Fresh art exists, and it is getting more and more prevalent by the day, unshackled by the corporate behemoths that ruled your childhood and are now dying around you. The reason they are appealing to your youth to sell to you now is because they have nothing to offer anymore but scraps of another age. Their time is running out.

And they know it.

To be perfectly honest, and without getting into specifics, I started the '10s without any hope at all. We ended the '00s with a whimper, and nothing looked to change anytime soon. It's difficult to remember the climate of the time, but after a decade of nothing it was difficult to imagine any sort of recovery for such a bad time period. And nothing did happen, at first.

However, looking back it is easy to see that just like other decades the '10s began to throw off the influences of the previous decade within two or three years. While it hurt the '90s, it has helped the '10s tremendously. Think about it. Tossing aside nostalgic properties, as they are both a crutch and not actually new, when it came to new ideas the '10s was actually very good at being fresh. The weaker new products? They came from corporations and those obsessed with reliving the past. Should you look underneath the surface you will find much new to celebrate.

If we look back on this decade for anything besides surface level complaints, we should find it was a decade of change. And I believe that change is going to lead to better things, in the long run.

Retrowave exploded in this decade

So what does that leave for the rest of us? Pop culture is dead, it can't exist anymore. We are entering a post-pop world, one that the Boomers and younger generations could never imagine. The entire landscape is changing right under our feet and we still need to regain our balance. As the band has said, Pop Will Eat Itself. It did, and we need to leave the carcass behind. There is more to life than bonding over old commercial jingles and television theme songs. We're all about to find out just what that means, ready or not.

No, this isn't the world Star Trek predicted, neither is it the society John W. Campbell nor the Futurians wished for. They were looking at the way things could be if their particular God of Progress™ was still alive and Utopia was obviously a stone throw and deviant jailing away. Technology was getting better, we were getting fatter, and now we could do anything we wanted. It was time to throw away those old outdated ways and get with the times. Their vision was hopeful, in a way, but naive.

But they were wrong, and hedged their bets on the wrong horse. For their reward, they are being erased by their successors decades later. Human nature never evolved, despite what they predicted, and it won't. We still want romance, we still want adventure, and we still want True Happiness. There is more to all that than repeating shopworn '60s slogans and failed textbook theories from losers. Perhaps that is the one thing that we will have learned throughout the '10s that we can look back on when 2030 rolls around.

I started this blog in the center of the decade, 2014. It was five years ago, and even then I had a feeling that a bigger online presence would be necessary in the future. I had spent my time avoiding the online space due to how detached from reality all felt, but soon realized that avoiding the inevitable wasn't going to help. Society was heading this way, and being prepared was a necessary move.

My shift turned out to be a good idea as I've met a wide range of fascinating people and learned far more than I would have otherwise. It turns out that there were many people just as lost as I was and others who knew what they wanted and were aiming for it with everything they had. That's not something I saw very much in the '00s. Times were changing, and for the better.

However, times have changed. It's not very obvious, and on a surface level walking out into public gives the impression that we're still living in 1999, but we aren't in those '90s anymore. And, thank the Lord above, we are no longer in the '00s. We just went through a decade of very subtle change that has begun to boil up around us. The 20's should be something quite different, and I'm excited to find out what that means.

This is why I have a book coming out in the first month of 2020. I'm going to get an early start on this new era.

Coming in the back half of January!

My conclusion is simply that it was a much better time than we will remember it being, at least at first. We're just to close to the times to realize that right now. That's nothing new, though. Give it a few years and you'll see that this was the start of something new and better.

Of course, it wasn't a perfect time, not even close, but you will never go through a decade in your life where something doesn't go wrong. However, there is a definite difference from where we were even back in 2011 compared to now. You can't really say the same with the characterless blur that was the '00s. Where we're going next is a mystery, but at least it feels as if the path can really go anywhere from here now. That's not something I thought I would have said a few years ago, but that turned out to be the case today.

Now for the future!

So let us send off the strange, bizarre decade that was the '10s off with a bang. It deserves it if only for being such a roller-coaster of weird. To the good times and the bad.

I will see you all again in the '20s, and I hope you have a very pleasant New Year's celebration. You earned it for making it this far.

Goodbye, 2019. It was certainly an experience I won't ever forget. Now for 2020 to show us what it's got. Be prepared, because things are about to get really exciting.

The end of 2010's best album