Analysis the Decade Has Ended, but It Will Never Be Over⁠↗

At the end of the decade, users are still finding and commenting on that early crude photo posted by Krieger, as if they were visiting a World Heritage site, or scrawling on the Parthenon. “Where it all started,” one user wrote recently, and the “like” button became “more important than air and water.”

Maybe the only person who can tell us when the decade started is Beyoncé, who owned it start to finish, from Sasha Fierce to “Homecoming,” through debt-ceiling crises and Taylor Swift and Hurricanes Sandy and Maria and Harvey. “Who run the world?” Beyoncé asked 27 times in that anthem. “Girls” was the answer each time. At the start of this decade, women became the majority of the U.S. workforce (they still earned 74 cents for every dollar men made). This decade, for the first time, a woman was nominated for president by a major political party — and won a clear plurality of votes in the ensuing election (she lost anyway to a man accused of sexual assault by more than 20 people).

Being alive in the 2010s meant seeing what America wants to be, and feeling what it actually is. It meant feeling a bit of uplift while on a downward slide. Our self-diagnosis was “late-stage capitalism.” It explained our wanton ennui. It explained why Dr Pepper dangled $100,000 tuition checks during halftime competitions at college football games. It explained why families in Congo are suing five American tech companies for injuries endured by children mining for materials that end up in our phone batteries. It explained why Amazon stationed ambulances at one of its stifling warehouses as its employees worked themselves into unconsciousness.

We stream. We swipe. We can watch anything, hear anything, order anything. Instantly. It’s not enough. For all the early talk of hope, Americans are becoming unhappier, according to a recent United Nations report. The current U.S. birthrate is the lowest in 32 years. In 2015 life expectancy began to decline for the first time in 60 years. Over this decade, addicts turned from prescription opioids to heroin to fentanyl; since 1999 the risk of death from drug overdoses spiked 909 percent for people ages 55 to 64. The largest relative increase in contemporary suicide rates occurred among children ages 5 to 14, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This decade started in the wake of a Great Recession — followed by mass demonstrations against Wall Street and the 1 percent — and will end with the 400 wealthiest Americans paying a lower tax rate than anyone else. This decade, for the first time in human history, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 415 parts per million — exactly as Exxon predicted 40 years ago, before it began to promote climate denialism that remains alive and well.

Being alive in the 2010s meant waiting to be slain with a gun, or waiting to hear that someone you knew had been slain. In an accident, or a drive-by. In an encounter with a police officer in suburban Minnesota, or with a neighborhood watch volunteer in a gated community in Central Florida, or on the streets of Ferguson, Mo. During a mass shooting: in a church, in a dance club, in an office park, at a country-music festival, a congressional meet-and-greet, a congressional baseball game practice. “All my friends are dead,” said a 6-year-old girl after a shooting massacre at her elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. “All my friends are dead,” said a 98-year-old man after a shooting massacre at his Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. “Push me to the edge,” sang young rapper Lil Uzi Vert in his debut album. “All my friends are dead.”

There are now infinite ways to numb anxiety, to thwart boredom, to ratify your own beliefs and prejudices in defiance of reality. A planetary threat becomes a hoax. A constitutional investigation becomes a witch hunt. A coalition becomes a conspiracy. Change becomes loss, or a sense of loss.

Millennials became the most populous generation this decade, but owned a seventh of the wealth that the baby boomers had at their age.

Trump started the decade as a waning TV personality, a donor to the Clinton Foundation, a bankrupt casino owner looking for validation. Trump ended the decade as the 45th president of the United States, all-powerful but resentful, impeached but uncowed, calling the free press “the enemy of the people,” claiming that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want,” joking that he might serve more than eight years, making more than 15,000 false statements during his term, mortgaging an entire political party to pay for ego and revenge.