It boggled my mind when I realized last week ago that this is the third decade of the third millennium CE. I know some people will quibble that the third decade doesn’t really begin until 2021. Twenty years ago, we debated whether the third millennium started in 2000 or 2001. But for me, the new decade starts now. Every time I write the date, I have to remember to begin the year with a two. That’s a new decade.
Being in the third decade means that we can no longer consider the 21st Century as something new and fresh. It has been around for over twenty years. A fifth of it is gone. Babies born as the millennium turned are now adults.
I always thought of myself as a child of the 20th Century. I was born in the mid-1950s, almost smack dab in the middle of the century. I spent more than four decades of my life in that century.
But now we are entering the third decade of the 21st Century. I’ve lived twenty years in this century—almost a third of my life. By the close of this decade, I will have spent thirty years in this century—40% of my life. I hope to live at least as long in the 21st Century as in the last. So, perhaps I am destined to be a citizen of the 21st Century. I can hope.
A lot has happened in the last twenty years. Remember the Y2K fears? Many people thought computer systems would crash to a halt when the year rolled over to 2000. Friends of mine filled their bathtubs on December 31, 1999, to be sure they had water the next morning. But nothing happened. We woke up on New Year’s Day to running water and other utilities. The Internet still worked.
We lived through September 11, 2001, and the wars that followed (and still go on). We lived through the Great Recession. We elected the first African-American president, and then the first reality show president.
Social media has exploded in the last decade. The nation polarized, while the stock market rose.
Now, it doesn’t feel like anyone is in charge, that anyone is in control of our nation or the world. We careen from crisis to crisis, from interest to interest, at the pace of the rockets we can no longer launch. Maybe this lack of control has always been true, but it feels more immediate now.
I don’t know whether to like living in the new millennium or not. But, of course, I have no choice. While I might want to yell “Stop!” it wouldn’t do any good. The world spins. Time passes. If I want to spend half my life or more in the 21st Century, I have no choice but to adapt.
What are your thoughts as we enter the 2020s?
