time dilation
things right now 57—week of 1.19.26
I always come back to the Lenin quote: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
Like Lenin, I believe in decade-ism. This is the real motivation behind last week’s bout of 2016 nostalgia. Ten years is a long enough time for a period to feel definitively in the past. I warned my peers last year that we were coming up on a decade of Trump. (While he was elected in 2016, his focal position in American political discourse began with his descent down the golden escalator in June 2015.)
For so many people, time stopped in 2016.
Like COVID, the Trump era was supposed to be an aberration, a state of exception that would soon be corrected. But unlike COVID, that turned out not to be true. The temptation in situations like these is to dissociate and wait for the return of the status quo. For COVID, that strategy worked. Work-from-home didn’t last, masking and testing fell by the wayside, and vaccine passports did not become the new normal.
For Trump, not so much. There are still protests in Minneapolis, world leaders like Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney are conceding that the 'rules-based international order' was always a polite fiction, and the bombastic communication style of Trump continues to drive the news cycle.
"Stuck culture" from a few years ago is a response to this desire to pause time. The term, popularized by cultural commentator Paul 'The Lindyman' Skallas in 2022, claimed that cultural products from the 2020s were indistinguishable from cultural products from the 2010s. But the barrage of posts from 2016 tells a different story. The world doesn’t look the same way it did in 2016, Stranger Things notwithstanding.
I wonder if the insistence that everything has remained the same is a millennial twist on Baby Boomers’ perennial nostalgia. The Boomers insisted the cultural products of their childhood were classics: classic rock, classic movies, classic television. That their formative years had witnessed the best pop culture America had to offer.
Millennials, raised on those classics and less confident in the relative quality of their childhood pop culture, claim something slightly different: not that their music, films, and TV shows were the best, but that they have proven uncannily sticky.
Boomers raised during the Cold War in the shadow of nuclear war are waiting for the end of the world and see their time on earth as the swan song of humanity. Millennials raised after the Cold War at the end of history expected things to continue on as they always had—at least in their lifetimes.
But culture isn’t stuck. One glance at PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson’s video for 'Stateside' reveals that when Gen Z nostalgically mines the aesthetics of the 2000s the results reveal a lot has changed…
Why we are newly fixation on time? I have a few hypotheses.
The Mayan prophecy was true and the world really did end in 2012—
And by that I mean the breakthrough adoption of smartphones and social media in 2012 definitively cut us off from the printed historical record.
As the world’s population ages, our perception of time has sped up—
It’s a truism that as one ages, days, weeks, and years feel as if they are passing more quickly. Perhaps the inversion of our demographic pyramid accelerates that speeding up for everyone.
Self-hypnosis via iPhone is causing mass dissociation—
On a bad day, you can lock into your phone and miss the passage of hours if not days, weeks, possibly years…
Whatever the case, it does feel like we are exiting the period where decades passed and nothing happened and entering the phase where historical change will occur in a matter of weeks.
