The surreal decade of the teen years is going to pass, when it was odd to say the aughts or aughties and the teenies, we will soon cross into the new decade of the new twenties. What will this new decade bring and what lessons did we learn, if any, from the past decade that we can carry over to the new?
Everyone experiences their time and place differently from one another. Another person’s lost decade will be their neighbor’s best. That means we shouldn’t hang the weight of the decade on any one thing. But every decade does bring something to the world that is new, exciting and a change that almost everyone in the world seems to benefit from, even if it is just a skosh.
The teen decade is the age of mass adoption of mobile communication. Never has the world been connected to each other from a device that fits in a pants pocket, but it is very real now. What that does in the future is very hard to tell. It appears we are still as random and insignificant as we were before being unknown and disconnected from most of the world. The access to information and knowledge is huge though, but just like the great libraries, I’m not for sure if anyone really takes much advantage of this wealth of knowledge and wisdom that one can drown themselves into. Instead most gravitate towards entertainment.
Social media is just like it was in 20th century America, when we gathered around with friends and chuckled at jokes, talked about sensational current events and listen to others talk about the latest movie, music, books or other mass entertainment distribution. It was the modern life and today, social media is modern life. The bread and circus are still around as part of the human experience as it was in the ancient Roman days.
We still inch forward in progress, as there are still many people whose passion drives them to make a difference or change in the world. These are the people who drive themselves to work like crazy, to soak up all the knowledge they can, to dive in to learning a skill, to make mistakes and learn, and to think contrarian and practical thoughts to move the gear of human motion forward towards a better future. With the connected world, this will bring more people into the special realm of movers and shakers and the more we can bring out to do great things in the decade of the 2020’s, the better we all will be. That is what we hope the next decade will bring.
