00's
So. In my internet wanderings I've been running across a lot of pop culture lists and reviews and such with titles like "Best Books/Movies/CD's/Politician Goofs/Holy Shit Moments of the 00's." It's a little weird, because until I saw them I absolutely failed to register that we are winding down to the end of a decade. I got finals to worry about, you know?
And, to be fair, decades are completely arbitrary units of time, probably only significant because our fingers give us a base ten fetish. But even so, when we break up the years of history into neat little chunks and we treat each piece as its own separate animal, thinking its own thoughts, feeling its own feelings, of course they start to take on lives of their own.
So it's strange to imagine that happening to a time that I lived. We will move out of this period and it will stop being real life and start being a proper decade. Memories will become history. Actual trends will become stereotypes. The living, breathing people that I see around me will be reduced to a generation, a society, a culture. We will have textbooks about us. We will have VH1 specials. Then we will have BBC period dramas featuring drunk college kids gathered around a laptop to watch music videos on youtube. It happens to everyone alive, of course, but this is the first time I have been self-aware enough to notice it.
The 00's saw me pass from a shitty little kid to a shitty teenager to the shitty little twenty something you see before you today. I like to think that along the way I have started to develop into something resembling a human being with enough knowledge and experiences to justify some of my thoughts and feelings. Formative years, you know? I like to think there's a chance I will live to be a thousand, and I can see wave after wave of meaningless 00's roll past the world. But I will probably not change in any set of ten years as much as I did in these.
It's weird.
And, to be fair, decades are completely arbitrary units of time, probably only significant because our fingers give us a base ten fetish. But even so, when we break up the years of history into neat little chunks and we treat each piece as its own separate animal, thinking its own thoughts, feeling its own feelings, of course they start to take on lives of their own.
So it's strange to imagine that happening to a time that I lived. We will move out of this period and it will stop being real life and start being a proper decade. Memories will become history. Actual trends will become stereotypes. The living, breathing people that I see around me will be reduced to a generation, a society, a culture. We will have textbooks about us. We will have VH1 specials. Then we will have BBC period dramas featuring drunk college kids gathered around a laptop to watch music videos on youtube. It happens to everyone alive, of course, but this is the first time I have been self-aware enough to notice it.
The 00's saw me pass from a shitty little kid to a shitty teenager to the shitty little twenty something you see before you today. I like to think that along the way I have started to develop into something resembling a human being with enough knowledge and experiences to justify some of my thoughts and feelings. Formative years, you know? I like to think there's a chance I will live to be a thousand, and I can see wave after wave of meaningless 00's roll past the world. But I will probably not change in any set of ten years as much as I did in these.
It's weird.