This Decade Was One Wild and Depressing Ride

I decided to sit down to my computer and punch out a summary of this decade. But fuck, where to even begin with this one?

If someone told me in 2010 we'd be ending this decade debating whether or not it's okay to punch a Nazi in the face, I would have thought you were batshit. But here we are.

We started out with The Great Recession. I started unemployed, as I had lost my job doing security at a car plant in December 2009. I was unemployed for a few years after that. Lost my faith in God. Eventually got a job, got pushed into a career I didn't really want but kind of had to take because not too many people were hiring in 2012. Had two kids. Had bariatric surgery. Ran a half-marathon. Started powerlifting. Got old. Pretty much all in that order.

Ten years ago I wrote for a liberal blog and I wrote a post that said, "This Decade Sucked". I complained about the economy and the music. I said that emo shouldn't have become its own genre. It feels weird that I hated emo then.

Now, I'm still going to be complaining about music and the economy. I wish I didn't complain about emo ten years ago, because now rock music isn't even on the top 40 stations. It's completely vanished from them. If you want to hear rock music, you have to listen to the stations specifically designated for rock music. The music industry is treating rock the same way we treated country music the past thirty years. And we're not seeing a lot of new artists, either. That's the scary part for those of us genuinely concerned about the future of the genre. Rock and roll might be on its last legs.

And the economy. Jesus Christ, the economy. If you want to wonder why ideologies on the far sides of the political spectrum got so popular, just look at the shit state of the economy. Fascism and socialism both grew because people are broke, pissed off at being broke, and want someone to blame. And no, I'm not doing a "both sides" bit. The leftists are correct. The rich are to blame. Fascists can eat all the dicks. It's not the fault of immigrants that you can't pay the rent. But I've often mentioned in leftist circles that we probably wouldn't be where we are if we were doing alright under capitalism. I probably wouldn't care so much that I was selling my labor if I was at least getting a decent rate of return on it.

I've talked a lot about depression since starting this blog, and I think that when people look back at this decade, they're going to say that it was a depressing one. One in ten of us has clinical depression. One in three of us will take an antidepressant at some point in our lives. We even have depression memes now, just so we can laugh at our pain.

We're broke. We're lonely. We're tired. We started out the decade that way, and we're finishing it that way.

This decade was depressing.

It's also been a wild ass ride. All throughout the world, people are pissed off and revolting against their governments. We have an actual neofascist in the White House, and he only got there because he was a C-list celebrity who ran on a campaign of shit talking and bigotry. We've had conspiracy theories out the ass. Social media has completely taken over our lives and it's got us in a constant state of sadness and rage!

And the technology! Holy shit, ten years ago it wasn't impossible to watch a t.v. show on a smartphone, but it was really fucking hard. You usually had to illegally download an MP4 from Torrent and then you could only watch it if you had a phone with a large enough screen. Now, television sets seem kind of quaint, and we're in the age of peak t.v. Even refrigerators run on wifi now. How crazy is that? There's rich assholes out there with $4,000 refrigerators that we can literally hack and cause all their food to spoil from a thousand miles away, and that technology will probably be in all our homes soon! 

This decade may have been depressing af, but at least it wasn't boring. It's been one wild and depressing ride.