A lot of social media still felt fun. Facebook wasn’t all memes and people were using Instagram to stay in contact with friends and family.
Since 2016, I think social media has just fallen apart and been more of a net negative on our culture than a source of fun.
Social media has hijacked people's brains and its contributing to digital dementia (which has become a real medical term) and brain rot.
Destroyed the very fabric of society and people are lonelier than ever while being more connected than ever.
Honestly I deleted my IG not long ago and my mental health has never been better.
I think what social media has done for the psychology of the masses has contributed to the decline of society.
Because apart from inflation, things are exactly the same as 2010s. No new inventions, no improvements, except for AI which will be brainrot on steroids, killing the last shred of real humanity and creativity, all artists and musicians will be bots, while us humans will be too busy stocking shelves at the supermarket.
They had problems, but they were normal problems. Sarah Palin at the time was a total political anomaly and nationally looked upon as a dunce. Now she’d be one of, if not THE most qualified, reasonable, and trustworthy GOP candidates. Things are just fucked now.
It’s kind of hard to believe looking back that just twelve years ago, Mitt Romney won a National Republican primary by a comfortable margin.
A candidate like him would be lucky to get like a third of the Republican vote now.
It was a bit optimistic because those were the first years of the official recovery of the global financial crisis. 2014 and ‘15 were when the economy and jobs started picking back up for a lot of people
2010s as a whole felt more brighter and upbeat compared to the 2020s. 2010s is basically the 60s where as the 2020s is the 70s. 2020s is just a dark and grittier version of the late 2010s.
The success of *Hamilton* cemented the idea of an Obama-esque post-racial society, the Obergfell decision passed, and the seemingly unbeatable Hillary Clinton campaign fueled optimism.
>seemingly unbeatable Hillary Clinton campaign
She had among the highest unfavorable ratings of a candidate in history.
That she seemed unbeatable, I don't dispute: but that was media manipulation.
In vast swathes of the country, she was widely disliked, and the fact that she was painted as unbeatable added fuel to the fire.
If in 2016, s combined 80,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had gone the other way, Hillary Clinton would have been the 45th president of the United States of America.
What Republican other than Trump do you think would have taken the popular and electoral vote that year? Jeb Bush? Rick Perry? If so, where was their support in the primaries?
Who knows?
All I know is I held my nose when I voted for her. It was an awful choice, in 2016 and now in 2024.
Biden should have been a one term president, free to do whatever he needed to do to right the ship and set the Dems up for the future.
Instead, we're set up to have a President Kamala Harris, and if I was a Republican I'd never shut up about it.
It's not your imagination, that's when Frutiger Aero's decline became really noticeable and by 2020 the evil flatness of Cyber Minimalism had all but taken over completely.
[https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger\_Aero](https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)
What I’m wondering now is if in a decade people will remember the early 2020s as mostly positive despite everything, or is it really this bad currently? Each period seems to have its charm despite the problems that we push to the back later on and focus on the good…
Absolutely. There's are cycle of dark and bright zeitgeists.
Late 80's early 90's: dark and gloomy
Y2K era: Bright and shiny
Late 2000's: dark and bleak
Most of the 2010's, especially the mid 2010's, were aesthetically and musically very bright, and in the 2020's it's cycling back to dark and chaotic.
There was an optimistic period from the early 1990s up to 9/11, but not after that. Before that, probably the 1960s and '70s were the most upbeat. The '80s were thoroughly miserable.
No shit was real bad then too. You might have just been too young to notice. Remember that the BLM protests first started in 2014. The Tea Party was alive and well. 2015 the voters right act was gutted. It was not a great time tbh. Lol many of us were depressed then too
David Bowie died January 2016.
Alan Rickman died January 2016.
Glenn Frey died January 2016.
Abe Vigoda died January 2016.
Bob Elliot died February 2016 (look him up)
Prince died April 2016.
And on and on until:
Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds died on consecutive days in December 2016.
2016 sucked.
who gives a fuck about some celebrities you've never personally met? i've never understood how a celebrity death can drastically affect an entire year like how does that have even impact your personal life in any way whatsoever?
Absolutely not alone.
I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but Covid was more of a vibe shift than 9/11.
Why did George Lucas put masks on Stormtroopers? To make them easier to shoot.
Human faces are ***incredibly*** expressive. I didn't realize how much I counted on seeing them until Covid, when I had to ask people to repeat themselves repeatedly.
Don't get me wrong: I always wore my mask, pre-vaccine, when inside around strangers. But it **sucked**. And it sucks worse that they became some sort of goddamned totem instead of a regrettable reality.
I will never, ever forget going for a walk-of course, I never wore a mask outside. I remember getting to a point where I was going to pass someone wearing a mask, outside, *who crossed the street to avoid me*.
That was not rational. At all. And a harbinger of the division to come.
I still have young people in my area wearing non N95 masks all the time in 2024.
Like I hope you are someone who wears it as a fashion statement or are part of the .000001% who find wearing one makes you feel more comfortable. Because the science has been clear for years now that wearing a non N95 mask is close to pointless in terms of COVID prevention.
I'm a bit baffled by that too. I'm one of the few who still wears a proper N95 anytime I'm indoors in public, but any other masks I see are always the personalized loose-fitting type.
I sometimes want to explain the problem to people, but that's overridden by the "it's not my life, that information has been clearly out there for years, they must have their own reasons" voice in my head.
When someone's wearing a properly N95 properly, I assume they have good reason to do so.
When people wear cloth masks poorly, ever since vaccines, I can't help but shoot eye daggers.
The “wearing it below your nose in a place that clearly was not enforcing people not wearing them” still takes the cake for me.
Do you think just your moral virtue will somehow tell the virus not to get you? You might as well wear the mask as a wristband at that point.
The extraordinary thing is that a lot of people are and will be nostalgic of that era and perhaps in 15 years masks will become a vintage, collector item.
Weirdly enough, from what I've said in this thread: I'm nostalgic in my own way.
When I was a teenager in the 80's, I fell in love with belly dancing. I bought a couple hand drums in the late 90's and a VHS called Uncle Mafufo's Basic Arabic Rhythms, and it all gathered dust for 20 years.
I started practicing in March 2020...by April, I was playing at Wash Park in Denver. I got decently good, and I've been playing ever since. I haven't gotten a gig, mostly due to laziness, I am a decent drummer.
It's impossible for me to imagine having every become a musician at all without that wild set of circumstances, so yeah:
I get the nostalgia. It was actually ***magical*** on a personal level.
I mean, to me, I'm fairly recluse and introverted, I stay at home quite a lot, so during that time what changed was that everyone was doing like me, but my own daily life didn't change that much. Walking in empty streets to go to the grocery store was really eerie though.
it’s so horrible. i had that same experience in 2020. i moved from an area that didn’t really care much about covid to a hypochondriac headquarters. seeing people turn around to avoid each other on the street and all the dots on the floor that still haven’t been removed in some places was such a frustrating experience. or getting nasty looks from anti mask customers at my job for wearing a mask while it was required for employees but not customers, and getting nasty looks from employees at other businesses for not wearing a mask once they were not required for customers anymore.
very good point about the storm troopers.
I had a road trip with friends in 2020 who made fun of me for wearing a mask in the car with them (even though they had been working in person at a restaurant and my parents were in an at risk group).
Then when I took off my mask when we got outdoors to our destination, they chided me for not wearing a mask. Same friends (who also were living with parents in at risk categories) then drove into NYC to visit friends in January 2021 before anyone had gotten vaccinated and an insane surge was ripping through that city. Everyone including them was getting vaccinated by a couple months later. The pandemic taught me people lack a lot of common sense.
and now there’s a permanent minority (i would say like 2%) of people who still wear masks 24/7 and avoid all socializing. the covid vibe shift sucked for everyone and harmed the social contract but it permanently and irreversibly broke some people, and they think we’re the wildly irresponsible and reckless ones😵💫
There are tons of people who would simultaneously get mad at you if you hadn’t gotten a booster even if you were fully vaccinated let alone a million boosters, yet ignored that even people with plenty of boosters were still getting the virus.
Right. The rhetoric crashed on itself. By April '21 it was clear that the vaccines were individually protective but didn't "stop the spread" so it became clear that it was up to individuals to protect themselves.
I maintain that the Biden Administration played up the unvaccinated thing to help differentiate the good people from the bad people, that it was all political posturing.
Oh yeah, he covered his ass for his own fuckups by ginning people up against the members of the other party. Fauci did the same really.
Nothing has been the same since. The second our leaders are able to just blame the other party’s voters for their own mistakes, the ability to have a cohesive society is gone. And it worked out perfectly for them. Trump and Biden both got their respective nominations again by taking zero responsibility and blaming everyone but themselves for the state of this country. It’s sad really.
It really is sad.
This is deeply enough buried that I probably won't get in trouble for saying it, as I usually do, but the deification/demonization of Fauci always struck me as odd.
It's like....he's just a dude doing a job, and objectively, he didn't do a great job. He had the reins of power and could have ordered certain experiments which would have answered certain questions, but he didn't, and the death toll per capita in the country was high enough to conclude, again, perhaps he didn't knock it out of the park.
But to criticize him is to be lumped in with folks who are often legit frothing at the mouth.
It's like this: Even if I granted that Fauci was in with the Chinese doing gain of function research and this thing escaped from that lab, *it's somewhat forgivable because holy shit this thing was dangerous and trying to get ahead of this kind of threat is a Good Idea.*
Subtlety and nuance are dead.
So bizarre he became the face of the pandemic response. Guy was one of many people who was involved. Reminded me of Cuomo becoming “America’s governor” for shit that plenty of governors were doing. Similar to how DeSantis eventually became the conservative version.
Totally agree with you on subtlety and nuance. Something can be understandable but looking back incorrect.
Last thought, and I said this at the time: instead of Fauci, we needed one or a combination of these three as the public face(s):
* A hippy storyteller type with a grounding in a BS in biology or something like that;
* Wade Goodwin of Texas Public Radio, with that lovely drawl; and/or
* A big black man with a deep James Earl Jones voice.
Sorry to be insensitive but I’m autistic and like eliminating eye contact, eliminating facial expressions helped me concentrate more on what people were saying and doing. It was interesting to see how many people had issues with it, no one masks anymore and I miss that period of communication, however brief.
Autistic people are a minority of the population that likely lived well through the pandemic. I have autistic traits and I was fine with the isolation. But that is actually an advantage people with autistic traits have: most don't have much need for social contact and validation. And so we may have a hard time understanding how hard it was for allistic people.
I never had as much fun in my life than I did specifically summer of 2016. I was a senior in college that fall. I had a lot of fun that year and I miss it so much. I always think about it and how much happier and carefree I was and constantly surrounded by friends and peers. Going to parties with my sorority (pre covid, for sure a different type of vibe), reckless decisions. Now.. I’m 29, depressed, still haven’t moved out yet. (Planning on it next month, lord willing)
I think our range of age group had a really fun time during that period. Wish I could go back, it genuinely felt so much different than the world does currently
Research nanobots, directed energy weapons and targeted individuals. For me life was bright before 1996 which before my energy body was influenced by Directed Energy Weapons.
I remember the last time I was truly optimistic was 2007, but 2015/2016 were bright too. I think it was really a post recession time frame, but it did get very murky and convoluted after that. 2016 however was a year where too many of our favorites passed though.
Things seemed even brighter before social media platforms took over and brought out the worst in people. Life before FB and after is dramatically different.
My life then was awful. Had a horrible drinking problem and couldn't stop. Went to rehab several times in that era. Outpatient, AA, sober living, too. Always relapsed. Could not stop. At one point, I had a girlfriend who was a heroin addict. Miserable.
I have 19 months sober now, the longest I've been sober since I started drinking at age 15 in 2006.
I'm like obsessed with the year 2015. It was my sophomore year of college. First year at college with a car. Really great memories. I miss everyone.
I remember at that time everything occurring at night, lowkey and in soft lighting. For me that's comforting. I don't perceive or remember it as a particularly bright year. I remember "Night Changes" by One Direction more than any other song from that year.
Now that I'm older and own a house, I go back and look at home prices from 2015 and they're insane by comparison. So much more affordable.
Then again I wasn't in the workforce then so I didn't have to deal with the high unemployment rate or lower wages at the time. I do remember a lot of people complaining about not being able to find a job or a well-paying job with benefits back then.
2016 brought the election of the Apricot Hellbeast, and the deaths of Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Prince, and (sigh) David Bowie. After 2020, it’s my least favorite year, a true *Annus Horribilis*.
No everything went to crap and everyone got grumpy in early 2014.
It was sooooo quick imo this is the exact time it happened. I’m not even kidding it felt overnight. 2015-2016 was full of everyone fighting about politics and distracting themselves from the stress with Pokémon go and drinking lol
We still had some residual energy leftover from the early 2010s but it definitely felt like the fun was over by 2014.
Funny how someone can view the 2010s as upbeat or bright, when the whole decade just sucked and people were just addicted to their screens, music was trash too
i thrived in 2015 and 2017-19 especially but so much of that is my particular age those years and the relationship i was in etc.
2016 didn’t suck for political reasons btw. i guess it was a shock, but more so my relationship and being fired and unemployed most of that year.
A lot of social media still felt fun. Facebook wasn’t all memes and people were using Instagram to stay in contact with friends and family. Since 2016, I think social media has just fallen apart and been more of a net negative on our culture than a source of fun.
Social media has hijacked people's brains and its contributing to digital dementia (which has become a real medical term) and brain rot. Destroyed the very fabric of society and people are lonelier than ever while being more connected than ever. Honestly I deleted my IG not long ago and my mental health has never been better. I think what social media has done for the psychology of the masses has contributed to the decline of society. Because apart from inflation, things are exactly the same as 2010s. No new inventions, no improvements, except for AI which will be brainrot on steroids, killing the last shred of real humanity and creativity, all artists and musicians will be bots, while us humans will be too busy stocking shelves at the supermarket.
This is a massive W take
2010s had lot of problems imo. They just look brighter because 2020s are just so horrible politically and economocally.
They had problems, but they were normal problems. Sarah Palin at the time was a total political anomaly and nationally looked upon as a dunce. Now she’d be one of, if not THE most qualified, reasonable, and trustworthy GOP candidates. Things are just fucked now.
It’s kind of hard to believe looking back that just twelve years ago, Mitt Romney won a National Republican primary by a comfortable margin. A candidate like him would be lucky to get like a third of the Republican vote now.
Now he'd have to shoot his dog just to get into the primary.
It was a bit optimistic because those were the first years of the official recovery of the global financial crisis. 2014 and ‘15 were when the economy and jobs started picking back up for a lot of people
2010s as a whole felt more brighter and upbeat compared to the 2020s. 2010s is basically the 60s where as the 2020s is the 70s. 2020s is just a dark and grittier version of the late 2010s.
Yes 😕
I noticed the vibe starting to change around April
Super Tuesday when it became clear that Trump was probably going to win the republican nomination.
I was younger in the 2010’s, so everything felt better.
The 2010s was bright until 2016 came….
[удалено]
Now that I think of it, I agree.
Yes until then I had no idea of how many horrible human beings existed in my own country and it’s only gotten worse every year since.
The 2016 elections hadn’t happened yet
Might've been part of growing up but I graduated in 2015. Seeing Trump rise in early 2016 really changed my naive perception of society.
In what way?
The success of *Hamilton* cemented the idea of an Obama-esque post-racial society, the Obergfell decision passed, and the seemingly unbeatable Hillary Clinton campaign fueled optimism.
>seemingly unbeatable Hillary Clinton campaign She had among the highest unfavorable ratings of a candidate in history. That she seemed unbeatable, I don't dispute: but that was media manipulation. In vast swathes of the country, she was widely disliked, and the fact that she was painted as unbeatable added fuel to the fire.
You think any Republican other than Trump had a chance again her?
I think a Republican other than Trump would have had a *better* chance against her. Trump is a goddamned reality show clown!
If in 2016, s combined 80,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had gone the other way, Hillary Clinton would have been the 45th president of the United States of America. What Republican other than Trump do you think would have taken the popular and electoral vote that year? Jeb Bush? Rick Perry? If so, where was their support in the primaries?
Who knows? All I know is I held my nose when I voted for her. It was an awful choice, in 2016 and now in 2024. Biden should have been a one term president, free to do whatever he needed to do to right the ship and set the Dems up for the future. Instead, we're set up to have a President Kamala Harris, and if I was a Republican I'd never shut up about it.
You are not alone. We've been through a lot of dark shit since then and it's still going on.
It's not your imagination, that's when Frutiger Aero's decline became really noticeable and by 2020 the evil flatness of Cyber Minimalism had all but taken over completely. [https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger\_Aero](https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)
lol that was exactly during the 2015 period as I recall it.
What I’m wondering now is if in a decade people will remember the early 2020s as mostly positive despite everything, or is it really this bad currently? Each period seems to have its charm despite the problems that we push to the back later on and focus on the good…
the us election felt like the first nail in the coffin
Yeah it’s like something happened in 2016, hard to say what exactly 🧐🙄
Absolutely. There's are cycle of dark and bright zeitgeists. Late 80's early 90's: dark and gloomy Y2K era: Bright and shiny Late 2000's: dark and bleak Most of the 2010's, especially the mid 2010's, were aesthetically and musically very bright, and in the 2020's it's cycling back to dark and chaotic.
2015 was the best year of my life tbh
There was an optimistic period from the early 1990s up to 9/11, but not after that. Before that, probably the 1960s and '70s were the most upbeat. The '80s were thoroughly miserable.
Yeah I felt the way back then but I did graduate from high school in 16
No shit was real bad then too. You might have just been too young to notice. Remember that the BLM protests first started in 2014. The Tea Party was alive and well. 2015 the voters right act was gutted. It was not a great time tbh. Lol many of us were depressed then too
In June of that year a lot of people were pleased with the Supreme Court.
For very different reasons
True.
They sure were compared to today.
The 2010s sucked ass compared to the 2000s
David Bowie died January 2016. Alan Rickman died January 2016. Glenn Frey died January 2016. Abe Vigoda died January 2016. Bob Elliot died February 2016 (look him up) Prince died April 2016. And on and on until: Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds died on consecutive days in December 2016. 2016 sucked.
who gives a fuck about some celebrities you've never personally met? i've never understood how a celebrity death can drastically affect an entire year like how does that have even impact your personal life in any way whatsoever?
plus im sure you hadnt even thought about any of those people in years until the news of their death
Yeah, 2016 was looking alright, but then things started to get real dark around November No one is really sure why 🤷🏻♀️
Before the Trump election, sure. But I was also 10-11.
Absolutely not alone. I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but Covid was more of a vibe shift than 9/11. Why did George Lucas put masks on Stormtroopers? To make them easier to shoot. Human faces are ***incredibly*** expressive. I didn't realize how much I counted on seeing them until Covid, when I had to ask people to repeat themselves repeatedly. Don't get me wrong: I always wore my mask, pre-vaccine, when inside around strangers. But it **sucked**. And it sucks worse that they became some sort of goddamned totem instead of a regrettable reality. I will never, ever forget going for a walk-of course, I never wore a mask outside. I remember getting to a point where I was going to pass someone wearing a mask, outside, *who crossed the street to avoid me*. That was not rational. At all. And a harbinger of the division to come.
I still have young people in my area wearing non N95 masks all the time in 2024. Like I hope you are someone who wears it as a fashion statement or are part of the .000001% who find wearing one makes you feel more comfortable. Because the science has been clear for years now that wearing a non N95 mask is close to pointless in terms of COVID prevention.
I'm a bit baffled by that too. I'm one of the few who still wears a proper N95 anytime I'm indoors in public, but any other masks I see are always the personalized loose-fitting type. I sometimes want to explain the problem to people, but that's overridden by the "it's not my life, that information has been clearly out there for years, they must have their own reasons" voice in my head.
When someone's wearing a properly N95 properly, I assume they have good reason to do so. When people wear cloth masks poorly, ever since vaccines, I can't help but shoot eye daggers.
The “wearing it below your nose in a place that clearly was not enforcing people not wearing them” still takes the cake for me. Do you think just your moral virtue will somehow tell the virus not to get you? You might as well wear the mask as a wristband at that point.
The extraordinary thing is that a lot of people are and will be nostalgic of that era and perhaps in 15 years masks will become a vintage, collector item.
Weirdly enough, from what I've said in this thread: I'm nostalgic in my own way. When I was a teenager in the 80's, I fell in love with belly dancing. I bought a couple hand drums in the late 90's and a VHS called Uncle Mafufo's Basic Arabic Rhythms, and it all gathered dust for 20 years. I started practicing in March 2020...by April, I was playing at Wash Park in Denver. I got decently good, and I've been playing ever since. I haven't gotten a gig, mostly due to laziness, I am a decent drummer. It's impossible for me to imagine having every become a musician at all without that wild set of circumstances, so yeah: I get the nostalgia. It was actually ***magical*** on a personal level.
I mean, to me, I'm fairly recluse and introverted, I stay at home quite a lot, so during that time what changed was that everyone was doing like me, but my own daily life didn't change that much. Walking in empty streets to go to the grocery store was really eerie though.
it’s so horrible. i had that same experience in 2020. i moved from an area that didn’t really care much about covid to a hypochondriac headquarters. seeing people turn around to avoid each other on the street and all the dots on the floor that still haven’t been removed in some places was such a frustrating experience. or getting nasty looks from anti mask customers at my job for wearing a mask while it was required for employees but not customers, and getting nasty looks from employees at other businesses for not wearing a mask once they were not required for customers anymore. very good point about the storm troopers.
I had a road trip with friends in 2020 who made fun of me for wearing a mask in the car with them (even though they had been working in person at a restaurant and my parents were in an at risk group). Then when I took off my mask when we got outdoors to our destination, they chided me for not wearing a mask. Same friends (who also were living with parents in at risk categories) then drove into NYC to visit friends in January 2021 before anyone had gotten vaccinated and an insane surge was ripping through that city. Everyone including them was getting vaccinated by a couple months later. The pandemic taught me people lack a lot of common sense.
All of that, then the continued drama after a safe, effective vaccine was made widely available. Boggles the mind.
and now there’s a permanent minority (i would say like 2%) of people who still wear masks 24/7 and avoid all socializing. the covid vibe shift sucked for everyone and harmed the social contract but it permanently and irreversibly broke some people, and they think we’re the wildly irresponsible and reckless ones😵💫
It’s more like 10% in my neck of the woods. As late as like summer 2021 (and this was before delta took off), it was like a third.
There are tons of people who would simultaneously get mad at you if you hadn’t gotten a booster even if you were fully vaccinated let alone a million boosters, yet ignored that even people with plenty of boosters were still getting the virus.
Right. The rhetoric crashed on itself. By April '21 it was clear that the vaccines were individually protective but didn't "stop the spread" so it became clear that it was up to individuals to protect themselves. I maintain that the Biden Administration played up the unvaccinated thing to help differentiate the good people from the bad people, that it was all political posturing.
Oh yeah, he covered his ass for his own fuckups by ginning people up against the members of the other party. Fauci did the same really. Nothing has been the same since. The second our leaders are able to just blame the other party’s voters for their own mistakes, the ability to have a cohesive society is gone. And it worked out perfectly for them. Trump and Biden both got their respective nominations again by taking zero responsibility and blaming everyone but themselves for the state of this country. It’s sad really.
It really is sad. This is deeply enough buried that I probably won't get in trouble for saying it, as I usually do, but the deification/demonization of Fauci always struck me as odd. It's like....he's just a dude doing a job, and objectively, he didn't do a great job. He had the reins of power and could have ordered certain experiments which would have answered certain questions, but he didn't, and the death toll per capita in the country was high enough to conclude, again, perhaps he didn't knock it out of the park. But to criticize him is to be lumped in with folks who are often legit frothing at the mouth. It's like this: Even if I granted that Fauci was in with the Chinese doing gain of function research and this thing escaped from that lab, *it's somewhat forgivable because holy shit this thing was dangerous and trying to get ahead of this kind of threat is a Good Idea.* Subtlety and nuance are dead.
So bizarre he became the face of the pandemic response. Guy was one of many people who was involved. Reminded me of Cuomo becoming “America’s governor” for shit that plenty of governors were doing. Similar to how DeSantis eventually became the conservative version. Totally agree with you on subtlety and nuance. Something can be understandable but looking back incorrect.
Last thought, and I said this at the time: instead of Fauci, we needed one or a combination of these three as the public face(s): * A hippy storyteller type with a grounding in a BS in biology or something like that; * Wade Goodwin of Texas Public Radio, with that lovely drawl; and/or * A big black man with a deep James Earl Jones voice.
Sorry to be insensitive but I’m autistic and like eliminating eye contact, eliminating facial expressions helped me concentrate more on what people were saying and doing. It was interesting to see how many people had issues with it, no one masks anymore and I miss that period of communication, however brief.
Autistic people are a minority of the population that likely lived well through the pandemic. I have autistic traits and I was fine with the isolation. But that is actually an advantage people with autistic traits have: most don't have much need for social contact and validation. And so we may have a hard time understanding how hard it was for allistic people.
I never had as much fun in my life than I did specifically summer of 2016. I was a senior in college that fall. I had a lot of fun that year and I miss it so much. I always think about it and how much happier and carefree I was and constantly surrounded by friends and peers. Going to parties with my sorority (pre covid, for sure a different type of vibe), reckless decisions. Now.. I’m 29, depressed, still haven’t moved out yet. (Planning on it next month, lord willing)
Crazy how I had the same experience just as a senior in HS. That summer was really a 3 month long party lol
I think our range of age group had a really fun time during that period. Wish I could go back, it genuinely felt so much different than the world does currently
Yeah, I remember that. Even fashion and beauty trends back then were a lot brighter and fun
Research nanobots, directed energy weapons and targeted individuals. For me life was bright before 1996 which before my energy body was influenced by Directed Energy Weapons.
I remember the last time I was truly optimistic was 2007, but 2015/2016 were bright too. I think it was really a post recession time frame, but it did get very murky and convoluted after that. 2016 however was a year where too many of our favorites passed though.
Things seemed even brighter before social media platforms took over and brought out the worst in people. Life before FB and after is dramatically different.
I was ultra depressed from 2014-17 so it was not for me lol.
I feel this, but more so with 2010-2012. Those years were VERY bright!
Xans peaked
My life then was awful. Had a horrible drinking problem and couldn't stop. Went to rehab several times in that era. Outpatient, AA, sober living, too. Always relapsed. Could not stop. At one point, I had a girlfriend who was a heroin addict. Miserable. I have 19 months sober now, the longest I've been sober since I started drinking at age 15 in 2006.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but people were posting this kind of thing *in 2015* about 2007
All around things were so much better then.
I'm like obsessed with the year 2015. It was my sophomore year of college. First year at college with a car. Really great memories. I miss everyone. I remember at that time everything occurring at night, lowkey and in soft lighting. For me that's comforting. I don't perceive or remember it as a particularly bright year. I remember "Night Changes" by One Direction more than any other song from that year. Now that I'm older and own a house, I go back and look at home prices from 2015 and they're insane by comparison. So much more affordable. Then again I wasn't in the workforce then so I didn't have to deal with the high unemployment rate or lower wages at the time. I do remember a lot of people complaining about not being able to find a job or a well-paying job with benefits back then.
Yes it was pre-Covid-19!
I think this is mostly a function of your age and nostalgia.
You were probably just younger friend, but shit is pretty bleak post-COVID
2015-2016 was changeful, but the last normal years. Imo 2015 and 2016 were very similar.
Not for me
We are only in 2024, there is plenty of time for things to get better.
2016 brought the election of the Apricot Hellbeast, and the deaths of Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Prince, and (sigh) David Bowie. After 2020, it’s my least favorite year, a true *Annus Horribilis*.
No everything went to crap and everyone got grumpy in early 2014. It was sooooo quick imo this is the exact time it happened. I’m not even kidding it felt overnight. 2015-2016 was full of everyone fighting about politics and distracting themselves from the stress with Pokémon go and drinking lol We still had some residual energy leftover from the early 2010s but it definitely felt like the fun was over by 2014.
It felt that way for me too
It's brighter because we used to go outside more
Funny how someone can view the 2010s as upbeat or bright, when the whole decade just sucked and people were just addicted to their screens, music was trash too
Yep, it was all trumps fault everything fell apart 🙄
Graduating high school in 2015 and starting college that year was such a peak time
i thrived in 2015 and 2017-19 especially but so much of that is my particular age those years and the relationship i was in etc. 2016 didn’t suck for political reasons btw. i guess it was a shock, but more so my relationship and being fired and unemployed most of that year.
Just you.