Turn of the century optimism as viewed by a young millennial

It doesn’t seem that long ago that the world seemed to be a place of limitless possibility. As a younger millennial, the aughts and early teens were also the years when I was young and naïve, but I think I wasn’t alone in this fever dream. We had solved most of the world’s problems, and we were on track to solve the ones that we hadn’t. Environment, geopolitics, economics, and inclusivity. Though trouble had been brewing for a while, it was perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic that showed everyone how little control we truly had over things.

For all our intelligence, our ability to shape the environment to suit our needs and shape the world to suit our reality, all it took was a microbe to bring the whole world crashing down. Humanity was powerless as COVID-19 raged across the world. Though the average fatality rate never really exceeded over a single percentage point, a mix of efforts to protect the vulnerable and governmental panic arrested the interconnected globe that neoliberals had so strived for. From this emerged content about the environment healing in the absence of human activity, black squares posted on social media to protest racial justice, a widening political divide, and increased anti-China rhetoric.

Like the potential illusion of optimism of the decades prior, the increased sense of pessimism was surely influenced in no small part by the isolation of the lockdown and our porthole into the world through our screens. Negativity gets clicks, and there was no shortage of either all throughout 2020 and 2021. But even as vaccines were launched, travel returned, and we recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, we maintained the sense of morbidity and loss of control we had gained during the pandemic. The news cycle kept on getting shorter and seemed to be spiraling downwards with bad news: Trump, China, Russia, Elon Musk’s villain arc, US politics, riots everywhere, Isael, and more Trump.

So what happened? Are millennials choosing not to have children and zoomers apparent apathy to blame? In the words of Billy Joel, “we didn’t start the fire.” But we are surely being burned by it. There were horrors, many more and much worse, prior to our time: colonialization, the Industrial Revolution, slavery, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the threat of nuclear apocalypse, and numerous other civil and proxy wars. But then there was a period of tremendous peace and stability, at least for those in the West: the Cold War had ended, and we had won. It was the triumph of Western liberal democracies, the End of History as Fukushima had put it. The Kyoto Protocol had been signed, and we were going to solve the environment problem too. Technological growth was accelerating, and the new American hegemony was working. The first signs that things were going downhill again, the threat to our Brave New World order, was the jihadist terrorist attacks of 9/11.

A rude awakening, a reminder of the jingoistic ideal that freedom was not free, but paid for by military spending. Neocons and liberal hawks disagreed on much except for the need for a strong foreign policy, wars in the Middle East dominating American news cycles. Then there was the subprime mortgage crisis, a reminder that our economic systems stood on pillars of sand created by greedy tradesmen. There were the first rumblings of class discontentment with the protests against the ‘one percent’, but the term ‘liberal coastal elites’ had not yet entered the common parlance; progress was being made on social issues, or so it seemed. Gay rights were becoming the norm, not the exception. America had a black president who ran for nomination against a woman, and won the election against a centrist Republican beloved by both sides of the aisle; imagine this today, a popular political candidate respected by both factions.

A friend of mine who worked in D.C. explained the incestual nature of pre-pandemic politics to me as such: both parties lived and worked together, and were ultimately quite civil with one another. They had each other’s dinner parties and debutante balls to attend, and whatever animosity they showed on C-SPAN, the cronyism of the Capitol facilitated this regression to the center. But the rise of Trump’s brand of populism coupled with the physical distancing of the pandemic lead to social distancing amongst the political elites as well. Suddenly, demagogues with firebrand rhetoric were what drew attention, votes, and clicks.

Clicks are also an undoubted facilitator, if not cause, of the whole debacle. Social media personalities, companies, and algorithms discovering that the easiest way to maximize views and engagement was to induce excitement, rage, and fear. Algorithms pushed content that drew interaction, which only motivated content creators to develop personalities that were increasingly unhinged and removed from reality. The Fox News methodology, but applied to social media, with thousands of variations in the algorithmic battleground, vying for the attention of the viewer. This strategy then returned to conventional media, the tastemakers of the world angling for likes and shares.

And that’s where we are right now, lying in bed doomscrolling, and wondering if it’s ethical to bring children into this world. Perhaps it’s not really all that bad, that the political polarization and the riots are just the results of the click-driven news cycle. Or perhaps it’s always been this bad, and my belief otherwise is like a Midwesterner saying they had solved women’s rights and racism back in the eighties. Only now, we are intensely aware of the issues that we face, every cause with its personalized megaphone to shout about their issues directly at us, and we’re choosing to listen because we crave social media.

Indigenous issues, riots, women’s health, genocide, war, lack of socio-economic mobility, education, immigration, an increasingly divided world, strength of corporations, concentration of wealth, and many more problems are suddenly on top of everyone’s minds. Whether the world is truly in a worse place than it was twenty years ago is a separate question; the world is indubitably in a more pessimistic place than it was twenty years ago. I remember students wanting to solve the world’s problems, children and beauty pageant contestants wishing for world peace. Now it seems like everyone just wants to enjoy their little life without being disturbed. There is a chance that I’m the the only one who has gotten old, that the only the people I interact with have no ambition to save the world. And for the sake of everyone else living on this planet, perhaps it would be better that I am wrong, and I hope that it’s only my worldview that has become shortsighted and pessimistic.