Why Do People Defend This Decade So Much?

Don’t get me wrong I’m not a hater of our current zeitgeist but I’d be the first to admit, it has some major issues but when you criticise it slightly people jump to say you’re just out of the loop or out of touch, let’s examine some problems with the 2020s in its pop culture that I’ve personally noticed.

It’s Fashion: it has a major familiarity problem that I believe is very unique to only this time period and no were else, if I travel back to 2009 I’ll instantly recognise the fashion of 2009 some stuff might seem familiar, but it was definitely of it’s time, while now things are so heavily borrowed from other times it’s crazy.

It’s Movies: Remember I mentioned familiarity well try to look up the IMDb lists for films coming out this year and next year all reboots, sequels, remakes and reimaginings with only a few mid budget original scripts for Oscar season I feel like we’re never getting out of this stale 2010s trend.

It’s Music: I like the music now but I only like it because it sounds old which is not a good thing at all I prefer to hate current music for sounding too new and unfamiliar, I’ve been listening to the Phonk genre and imagining what it’d be like for this genre to take over rather than the nostalgic sounding hits that belong on the radio in 1998.

It’s TV: Streaming is the norm now replacing cable, back when we watched cable it started to look extremely stale and primitive so streaming helped with that and further popularised prestige television especially in the mid to late 2010s, but now streaming is starting to look very samey and run of the mill with too many options and shorter seasons I feel like it’s trying way too hard to replace cinema by making 8 hour movies rather than actual tv, I swear Wednesday always felt like a stretched out film rather than an actual show.

It’s Video Games: Gaming today is sticking to the past trend of being insanely greedy by enforcing micro-transactions and premium features all of which are just a way for you to spend more money on what you own.

Most of these problems are carried over from the 2010s and were dialled up to 11 because of the pandemic, when people often point out the issues pertaining to this decade we get the typical response of us being too old or out of touch despite a lot of us here being in our 20s/30s.

I get that it can be quite annoying when people say that the pop culture we’re in has no identity, movement or monoculture but there is a little bit of truth to what is being stated here some people have a lot of theories such as blame social media, blame late stage capitalism, blame AI, blame American Politics, blame Gen Z, blame Boomers, blame Smart Devices etc etc.

The thing to do is to find out why this decade lacks more than what it has compared to other time periods and I feel like a shift is ultimately inevitable go back to 2008/09 and the same discussion was had until Heath Ledgers Joker won an Oscar, we had the first African American US president, we had a major economic crisis, Avatar became the highest grossing film and all the music was pure escapism all in a span of just a year or two.