The 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s seem to have all separate, unique personalities, but these last 17 years seem to just be one big chunk of time that has no significant meaning.
FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT
These last 17 years have an “oh no” feel that just gets bigger and louder with each consecutive year
I was watching Hasan Minaj’s episode on fast fashion and he talked about how fast fashion companies put out new collections each week instead of having a major release 4 times a year for each season. And then drew the comparison to Netflix putting out new content every week unlike traditional tv channels that also used to introduce new shows seasonally.
Dissolution of unions and rise of gig economy means working class people don’t take regular holidays and vacations anymore they just work continuously until they have a nervous breakdown or have random short term gigs interspersed with random intervals of under/un-employment.
And these are just two ways in which late stage capitalism is eroding our sense of time.
Speaking of seasons. Climate change is literally changing how seasons work. Plants are blooming at the wrong time. Animals are coming out of hibernation at the wrong time.
it could also just be that it hasn’t been enough time since the 2010s for us to invent a culturally salient idea of what that decade was ‘like.’ the past doesn’t have any one existence & no entire decade was ‘really’ any one thing or even any set of things—the ‘separate, unique personalities’ that we’re discussing are more a product of the nostalgia industry, marketing, design, & other post-hoc processes than they are something that describes the ‘real’ essence or coherent ‘feeling’ of a decade, because that’s just not something that organically exists. if we have a clear idea or set of ideas about what we associate with each decade, that says more about how we think now & why, and the kinds of associations that have accreted (or been designed) around that decade and why, than it does about the actual historical existence of anything in that decade. & of course a decade is itself an ultimately arbitrary span of time.
“How I used to love the dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbided their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and full of poetry.”
Cixous touching on her early childhood memories is always a gift- in the order of knowledge that is universal yet largely inaccessible, knowledge we recognize but can only rarely retrieve (that’s excavation- retrieving the unretrievable):
“The way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound. We’re always stopping ourselves in mid–sentence because we’re so terrified of saying the wrong thing. Speaking is a kind of misery. And I guess I comfort myself by finding the rhythms and accidental poetry in everyone’s inadequate attempts to articulate their thoughts. We’re all sort of quietly suffering as we go about our days, trying and failing to communicate to other people what we want and what we believe.”
William Louis Sonntag aka William Louis Sontag (American, 1822-1900, b. Pittsburgh, PA, USA) - Sunset On the Maine Coast, Paintings: Oil on Canvas, Private Collection
