Things are going to get worse before they get worse
Cursing calendar years doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere
A lot of people kicked 2021 in the ass on its way out. The year was a hard one, so it got called out.
However, sympathetic though they are, can-you-believe-the-year-we’ve-just-had jokes are getting worn out. They’re 5 years old!
Know Your Meme’s page about them, “Fuck 2016”, was made in 2016, and its videos and images (including an XKCD strip) are overwhelmingly about 2016.
A Google Trends comparison of “fuck 2012” through “fuck 2016” shows a gradual ramp-up in “fuck” declarations from 2012 into 2015, before they inch up in July 2016 and explode in November and December 2016.
Days after Donald Trump’s election, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ended its 3rd season with a literal bang: after John Oliver declared 2016 “an uncommonly shitty year” the episode ended with a long montage of anti-2016 vox pops and Oliver blowing up a “2016” effigy.
Searching Google Images for the phrases “fuck 2009” through “fuck 2015” returns only a few scattered relevant images for each year (quite a few of which just look like album/EP/single covers); “fuck 2016” brings back screenfuls of cusses, John Oliver screenshots, pictures of dead celebrities, middle fingers, and YouTube thumbnails.
The joke didn’t get a rest between 2016 and this year. See Google image results for “fuck 2017” (which even capture a Shutterstock photo of someone holding a “FUCK 2017” sign), “fuck 2018”, “fuck 2019”, and of course “fuck 2020”; see Google Trends results for the same phrases holding up through 2019, and zooming up again in 2020; see John Oliver blowing up an effigy of 2020.
To be fair, the joke’s more than a joke. 2021 obviously sucked shit in a lot of ways, as did 2020. But if we’re being serious about shitty years instead of just joking, we can’t keep being surprised by shitty year after shitty year. The pandemic’s elevated the horrors of life to a new level, but the pre-pandemic normal was itself pretty awful! Long-term patterns and systematic factors are in play, and it’s stupid to ignore them just to act like each new year’s outrages are coming out of nowhere.
Suppose, following the lead of the original “fuck 2016” meme inspired by deaths of artists like David Bowie and Prince, that celebrity deaths are my metric of a year’s suckitude. I count 390 deaths in Wikipedia’s “Deaths” subsection for 2016, which may seem a lot, but Wikipedia also lists 375 for 2015 — there’s no statistically significant leap in 2016 that signals a world spinning off its axis. Even the pandemic made surprisingly little difference to Wikipedia’s annual list of deaths: 2021 had only 325 deaths!
Granted, those lists are hand-assembled and could’ve been deliberately curated to have similar lengths. What if I look at the automatic counts of pages in Wikipedia’s “[year] deaths” categories for 2016 through 2021? Those categories have (“approximately”) 9584, 9568, 9563, 9613, 11,898, and 11,144 pages respectively. So, approximately speaking, in non-pandemic years Wikipedia already averaged 9600 pages about each year’s deaths, and COVID-19 added only about 20% on top of that. And there wasn’t an abrupt increase in 2016: the “2014 deaths” category has 9507 pages and the “2015 deaths” category has 9656. Celebrity faves were dying at a fairly steady rate before David Bowie and Prince (and before Trump’s victory and the Brexit referendum).
Going back further offers a clue as to what’s going on. “2013 deaths” has 9244 pages, “2012 deaths” has 8766, and “2011 deaths” has 8603, so deaths of people with Wikipedia pages did accelerate a little during the 2010s. Given how gradual the acceleration was, it was probably driven by slowly changing factors, and an obvious candidate for a slowly changing factor is the Baby Boom, which was strongest in the US in 1946 and the 1950s.
Lots of celebrities born in the Baby Boom became celebrities in the 1960s and 1970s, and entered their 60s and 70s in the 2010s. From demographics alone, it was predictable that the 2010s would be the leading edge of the celebrity-Boomer die-off — and even without the pandemic the 2020s would likely be its peak.
That’s just one structural factor (the Baby Boom) feeding into one aspect of modern life sucking (celebrity deaths). Do we get a rosier view on our run of Dumpster Fire Years by looking at another aspect?
No, not necessarily. Take politics. There the Baby Boom manifests as population aging, which favors conservative politics since older people are more likely to be eligible to vote, more likely to vote when eligible, and tend to be more conservative. Another structural factor, education polarization, has also nudged US politics toward the right, and shows no sign of stopping. And the US’s historical record of the president’s party losing House and Senate seats in midterms implies that we can expect a Republican Congress after this year’s midterms, with all of its regressive consequences.
Or take what might be the biggest structural factor of all: climate change. Total emissions of greenhouse gases have been climbing. Emissions of carbon dioxide itself, for which we have up-to-the-year estimates, dipped slightly in 2020 but rebounded in 2021. Merely keeping a lid on emissions (not managing to cut them, but not allowing them to climb further) puts humanity on track for a disastrous 3 °C of global warming; meanwhile, the rush of floods and wildfires of the past couple of years took place with only 1 °C of warming. As for the next couple of years, the average global temperature could step above its greenhouse-gas-enhanced trend, because the Pacific Ocean’s in the cool La Niña phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, and when it inevitably drifts out of that cool phase we can expect an anomalously warm year or two. In both the short term and the long term trouble’s on the horizon.
One can cite countervailing trends, like the centuries-long pattern of improving labor productivity and GDP per capita. But positive trends like rising incomes didn’t quell people’s sense of everything flying out of control through sheer mounting stupidity, before or during the pandemic. What play on our minds are the trends that make things worse, or reveal how things have become worse, like
an expanding cohort of resentful, conservative, aging rentiers;
climate change;
the War on Terror;
the slow, inadequate recovery from the Great Recession, and vicious austerity economics;
heightened economic and medical inequality during the pandemic, as well as COVID-19’s direct impact on our physical and mental health; and
Most of these trends are ongoing. We should brace for the world to continue feeling hectic and hostile. Things are going to get worse before they get worse. But if we keep a handle on why things get worse, we might do better than recycling idle “what a fukken year, am I right?” cracks year in and year out. We might eventually fix our problems.