TIME magazine put out a story last week titled "The ‘00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell." It's an essay going over the low points of the last 10 years, accompanied by images like dangling chads, the World Trade Center and post-Katrina New Orleans.
Whether or not you feel like the last 10 years have been one disaster after another, now is a good time to consider the 2000s.
The Future's average reader — and average staff member — has only been around the last 20 years or so. This could make it difficult to put the "decade from hell" in perspective.
Quantitatively, it's been a rough patch. Numbers for poverty, unemployment and debt tell a grim story.
Not to mention that many of the problems that made the past few years so bumpy will take years to fix. The amount of debt the U.S. has racked up is so large it's been called generational theft.
No matter how nice your personal narrative of the last decade is, there is plenty of evidence that, collectively, things have been kind of bad.
While it doesn't sound too peachy, this is actually good news for us young people.
While it's rarely constructive to gripe, labeling the 2000s as the "Decade from Hell" has a certain therapeutic value. After a rough day at work and a car accident on the way home, it can be comforting to call it all a bad day — it means that it doesn't always have to be so bad, and that tomorrow can easily be better.
Nobody should expect the next decade to be an easy one, but writing off some of the collective fatigue and ennui to a bad decade can help us do a better job as a generation in the decade to come. After all, it may not have been our mistakes that brought us a crappy decade, but it will most certainly be up to us to make sure another one doesn't come around.
Calling it a bad decade sets the next generation up for success, really. Even in consideration of the problems that have been left to us, the bar has been set kind of low.
Because of the benefits of hindsight, we can see how the financial crisis, the development of al-Qaida and the blundered resuscitation after Katrina were all things that had (now) clear warning signs.
If today's college students learn from the abundant meltdowns, catastrophes and scandals of the last decade, then we can move forward knowing that we can make ourselves look pretty good in the context of history.
is a member of the 
2 comments