Shouldn't we know by now?
I mean that in two ways. We are past the halfway point of the 2020s. Shouldn't we have some feeling for what this decade is, some recognisable texture beyond the exhausting sequence of things we have had to get through? And after the pandemic, after the images of war, after so much evidence of how fragile an ordinary life can be, shouldn't we know more about what matters? Shouldn't that knowledge have changed the way we live together?
The two questions keep collapsing into one another. I start by trying to identify the decade's music, its objects, its stupid jokes, and end up wondering why everything feels so tired. There is plenty happening. There is so much happening that taking it in can feel like a second job. But abundance does not necessarily become a culture you can feel yourself belonging to. Sometimes it becomes a blur you are expected to keep up with.
What the fuck is this decade? That is the unpolished version of the question. I do not want to clean it up so thoroughly that the feeling disappears. There is anger in it, but also bewilderment. I expected life after a shared catastrophe to contain some visible evidence that we had understood the catastrophe. Instead, it can feel as though we hurried to restart everything that had already been exhausting us, with more grief in our bodies and less patience available for one another.
And somewhere underneath that frustration is an expectation I am still unwilling to give up: that experience should be capable of teaching us something. That we can do more with survival than congratulate ourselves for continuing. That the second half of a decade can become different from its first.
Trying to recognise the room we are in
Think of 1995. Even if your own memories are different from mine, you can probably summon a physical world. A television, a magazine, the particular bulk of a device. The way people wore their clothes. Music encountered through a finite collection of objects and places. Think of 2005 and the objects change. The phone folds. The family computer has its own territory in the house. Your online presence may be something you actively visit and decorate, then leave.
These are partial pictures. Geography, money and age decide which objects were actually in your life. They are also pictures assembled afterwards. Still, they have an apparent coherence that makes the present feel strangely difficult to grasp. You can point at something and feel a decade gather around it. A small object becomes a handle on a much larger atmosphere.
Then I try 2015, and I find myself arguing with the answer. Someone offers a list of popular songs, films and fashionable interiors. Fine. But a list of successful products is not quite what I am asking for. I want something that makes recognition immediate. Vine. The awkward horizontal hoverboard. A certain shouted phrase, a particular kind of short video. Eventually something lands. I can feel the room again.
The irritation before that recognition interests me. Why am I angry at a year for being difficult to remember? Perhaps because I want reassurance that the time had a shape. That it was a place we inhabited, rather than merely a quantity that has vanished. When a decade becomes recognisable, it offers a small confirmation that our lives were happening somewhere specific. The objects can bring back the people. The people can bring back who we were before we knew what was coming.
A retrospective list can also lie by accident. It borrows a catchphrase from a few years earlier, places a later toy beside it, and calls the result one definitive year. The collage feels persuasive because memory already works by association. But we should be careful about mistaking a vivid mood board for a precise history. Earlier decades seem more coherent partly because we have edited them. We are comparing their surviving highlights with the entirety of our present, including the tedious bits nobody will bother to preserve.
That explains some of the feeling. It does not explain all of it. Knowing that memory is selective does not remove the experience of living through a period whose demands feel relentless and whose direction feels uncertain. We can recognise nostalgia's distortions and still ask why the present seems so difficult to settle into.
The decade began by breaking ordinary time
The pandemic arrived near the beginning of the decade and interrupted the simplest assumptions about how a year proceeds. Plans became provisional. Visits became calculations. School, work and domestic space were rearranged, though very differently depending on who you were and where you lived. Some people worked from home. Others had to keep going into workplaces where other people's lives depended on their presence. Some lost income, some lost health, and some lost people whose absence no reopening could reverse.
The World Health Organization characterised COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020. In May 2023, it ended the international public health emergency designation while describing COVID-19 as an ongoing health issue. Those dates mark institutional decisions. They cannot tell us when any particular person stopped grieving, recovered their strength or began feeling secure again. A change in official status does not make a human experience neatly finish. [1]
For some of us, the early 2020s can therefore feel both very long and barely distinguishable. A week once expected to hold separate places and encounters might instead repeat the same few rooms. Important events were postponed, reduced or missed. A person can remember a great deal of waiting without remembering much that gives the waiting a clear shape. The calendar advanced regardless.
I am not claiming that everyone experienced time this way. The experience was unequal, and the inequalities are part of what should have taught us something. Being able to become bored at home was not the same as being unable to pay for that home. Being inconvenienced by distance was not the same as saying goodbye through it. Even the phrase “we all went through it” can flatten what happened if it becomes an excuse to stop listening to the differences.
But there was a reasonable hope available within the interruption. We had been forced to notice dependence. Other people's labour sustained us. Other people's decisions could affect our safety. An ordinary visit, a meal, the ability to sit beside someone without calculation became newly visible. Surely that knowledge would survive the emergency. Surely we would be less casual about the conditions that allow an ordinary day to happen.
That is where “shouldn't we know by now?” starts to hurt. The lesson seemed so basic. We need one another. Time together is finite. Exhausted people cannot indefinitely absorb whatever institutions fail to provide. None of these discoveries required a sophisticated new philosophy. They required us to take familiar truths seriously enough to organise around them.
A lesson does not implement itself
There is a comforting story about suffering that says it automatically produces wisdom. A person endures something terrible and emerges with clarified priorities. A society survives a crisis and becomes more humane. Sometimes people do learn, and sometimes institutions do improve. But suffering itself makes no such promise. It can leave a person frightened, angry, poorer or less able to cope with the next demand. The fact that something could have taught us does not mean we were given the time or support to learn from it.
This makes the question more difficult than a complaint about everybody forgetting. Who had room to reflect? Who was immediately required to catch up? Who was rewarded for reopening the old routine as quickly as possible, and who was still living with consequences that routine had no place for? An exhausted person may return to an unhealthy arrangement because the rent is due. That is not evidence that they failed to understand what happened.
Public learning requires more than private insight. If we recognise the importance of care, that recognition has to appear in the conditions of care work. If we understand that illness can disrupt any life, people need practical ways to be ill without everything else collapsing. If we discover that company matters, there need to be places and opportunities to spend time together without every encounter requiring a purchase. Otherwise, we have learned a vocabulary while preserving the circumstances it was supposed to change.
The disappointment of this decade may partly come from that gap. We were asked to see clearly, and then asked to behave as though what we saw created no lasting obligation. We could thank people. We could call them essential. We could share moving stories about community. The harder question was what those words would cost us once appreciation had to become a budget, a policy, a working condition or a sustained habit.
I do not think the answer is that nothing changed or nobody cared. There were people who cared before the crisis, during it and afterwards, often without an audience. The frustration is that their work can feel less visible than the announcement that we have moved on. We need a public memory capable of retaining an obligation after the immediate drama has passed.
War cannot become the scenery of a bad decade
Then there is war, and the almost obscene inadequacy of placing it inside a discussion of a decade's “vibe”. Someone else's destroyed home is not an atmospheric detail in my disappointment with the 2020s. A child living through bombardment is not there to give my historical period a darker aesthetic. The people in those images have their own ordinary lives, their own memories of music and jokes and rooms they wanted to come home to.
Yet war belongs in this question because the way we encounter it affects our understanding of the present. For those watching from relative safety, footage of civilian suffering can arrive between entertainment, advertising and an argument about something trivial. In the interface, everything occupies much the same rectangle. The moral difference between the items is immense. The action available to the thumb is identical.
Consider one documented fact about the decade's midpoint: UN human rights monitors reported that 2025 was the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since 2022. That finding concerns actual people killed and injured, not a general feeling that the news was grim. It should interrupt the convenience of describing the period as merely disappointing. There are lives for which the damage is specific, bodily and irreversible. [2]
What troubles me is how easily repeated exposure can be confused with having adequately responded. We have seen the image. We know that it is terrible. We recognise the argument surrounding it. Then another image arrives. Knowing about suffering is necessary, but knowledge alone cannot provide shelter, stop an attack or rebuild a hospital. An environment that makes us constantly aware without making us consistently effective can leave us feeling both implicated and powerless.
The response cannot be to demand that every person maintain unbearable emotional intensity at every moment. Nobody can live that way. Nor should we surrender our capacity to care because a feed has made it difficult to sustain. We need forms of attention that lead somewhere: reliable reporting, support for credible humanitarian work, political participation and the persistent insistence that civilians remain human when the conversation becomes tribal.
After so much history, shouldn't that be settled? The question does not arise because the details of every conflict are simple. It arises because certain human claims should survive their complexity. People should be able to sleep, eat, seek treatment and care for their children without becoming disposable. The fact that we still have to argue for those claims can make the word “progress” feel painfully provisional.
The feed gives everything the same short life
There is also a smaller, daily exhaustion, and its scale should not be confused with war or bereavement. It is the exhaustion of encountering so much material that seems to have been made primarily to occupy the space before the next piece of material. A reaction to a reaction. An image that asks for an instant response and offers little reason to return. Another imitation of a format whose original spark has already been worn away.
“Slop” is an ugly word, but I understand why people reach for it. It describes a loss of confidence that what has been placed in front of us deserves the time it takes to consume it. Some of it is generated by machines. Some is made by people responding to incentives that reward repetition and speed. The issue is larger than the tool. It is the feeling that our attention has become a container someone is obliged to keep filling, whether or not they have anything to say.
This can make a decade feel culturally thin even when extraordinary work is being made within it. Encountering good work requires routes towards it, time with it and opportunities to share it. A system that keeps replacing one thing with another can interfere with all three. You may see more images in a day while carrying fewer of them into tomorrow. A work that might have become a companion is passed over as an item.
Attention spans matter here, but I do not want to turn this into another accusation that people are stupid now. The same person who cannot tolerate a crowded feed may spend hours absorbed in a game, a craft or a conversation. Their capacity has not necessarily vanished. It may be answering to the conditions offered to it. We should ask why so many ordinary encounters with culture are designed around immediate replacement.
There is a difference between recognising a phrase and having a memory around it. A phrase can become familiar because you encountered it fifty times. A memory involves somewhere, someone, a moment in a life. The internet can help create those memories, and often does. But repetition alone cannot guarantee them. An endless succession of recognisable references may still leave us wondering where the time went.
Perhaps that is part of what I am reaching for when I demand an object that says “2015”. I want evidence of a moment that stayed. I want to feel that the things passing through us can accumulate into something other than fatigue. The appetite for a decade's identity may contain an appetite for continuity: for a life in which experiences have enough room to become ours.
The past was never as unanimous as the montage
We should also resist the temptation to describe earlier culture as one enormous room where everybody enjoyed the same things. There were always different rooms. Some people were excluded from the largest ones. Others found freedom in communities whose existence the main channels barely acknowledged. The internet has helped people find art, language and companionship that would once have been difficult to reach. Those gains matter.
What I miss is the possibility of dwelling with something in company. That can happen in a small community as readily as a large audience. A group of friends can create a shared reference that lasts for decades. A local venue can become a place around which people organise their lives. A publication can earn the kind of trust that makes a reader stay with an unfamiliar subject. Scale is not the same thing as depth.
Nor were the older decades morally preferable because their objects are easier to recognise. The twentieth century contains recognisable fashions alongside wars, repression and immense suffering. The year 2005 did not become gentle because its phones now look charming. The year 2015 was not universally optimistic because we can remember a funny video. The montage selects things that travel well across time. Living people had to inhabit everything around them.
This is why I cannot accept either easy answer: that the present is uniquely worthless, or that our dissatisfaction is merely nostalgia and can therefore be dismissed. The first erases the people making valuable things now. The second refuses to examine what might actually be wrong. We can be grateful for what the present makes possible and still be angry about what it asks us to accept.
The anger may even contain a useful standard. Beneath “this is all so bleak” there can be a specific demand: I want culture that respects my attention. I want the lessons of a crisis to outlast its slogans. I want ordinary life to be easier to protect. I want our ability to see suffering to be accompanied by a greater determination to reduce it. Those demands deserve more than a nostalgic playlist and a shrug.
The rest of the decade is still being made
We are past the midpoint, but we are still inside the decade. Its eventual story has not been settled. More importantly, the lives being lived now cannot be postponed until someone in the 2030s finds a flattering way to remember them. We need ways to inhabit the present while it is happening, with all its unfinished obligations.
That means taking our own disappointment seriously enough to ask something of it. A feeling that everything is hollow can become another repetitive performance, another contribution to the contempt we already find exhausting. Or it can help us identify what we are missing and make decisions accordingly. Spend time with complete works. Support the places where people can encounter one another. Let a conversation develop without requiring it to become content. Make something whose value does not depend on immediate circulation.
These choices are limited. They do not substitute for public responsibility, competent institutions or the decisions of people with power. A society cannot ask individuals to manufacture a good atmosphere around preventable neglect. The larger work remains larger: protecting people, supporting care, responding to suffering and making a future that people have practical reasons to trust. A hopeful culture needs conditions in which hope is more than an act of personal endurance.
Still, everyday culture is one place where we rehearse how we will treat one another. We can make it safer to be interested, to be serious, to attempt something without knowing whether it will succeed. We can refuse the assumption that everything sincere must be embarrassed out of existence. We can give work and people enough time to reveal something beyond their most immediately marketable quality.
Shouldn't we know by now? Yes. I think we should know that the ordinary things are not guaranteed. That a person is more than their usefulness. That being connected is not the same as being cared for. That the end of an emergency announcement does not end everyone's emergency. We have had more than enough experience to understand these things. The remaining question is how much of our behaviour we are willing to let that understanding change.
I do not need the 2020s to produce a perfect aesthetic. I do not need a novelty object that will look good in a retrospective. I want to feel that we have begun to use what happened to us. That the losses have not simply been absorbed into the cost of continuing as before. That people who are tired can find somewhere to rest, and people who still believe in something can speak without immediately bracing for ridicule.
Imagine remembering the latter part of this decade as the time enough of us began to insist on that. The time we grew less impressed by endless output and more interested in what was worth keeping. The time care acquired consequences beyond the words used to praise it. We would still have arguments, bad art, foolish trends and difficult years. But we might recognise ourselves in the life we were making.
I am angry because I still expect better. I still think we are capable of learning, and that what we learn can become more than something we say. The decade is not finished. Neither are we.
Sources
1. World Health Organization. Coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic. Timeline of the pandemic characterisation and the end of the international public health emergency designation. https://www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19
2. United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. 2025 deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since 2022 UN human rights monitors find. Published January 2026. https://ukraine.un.org/en/308241-2025-deadliest-year-civilians-ukraine-2022-un-human-rights-monitors-find
