I still find myself thinking about this very compelling argument from Adam Conover:

I think we’ve all felt the flattening of time, especially since 2010. I’m not the only person who still thinks of the 70’s as “about thirty years ago” and the 90’s as “about ten years ago,” and this is largely because that’s what the math was the last time we used decades as a meaningful rubric.

I distinctly remember that around 2012 I started joking about how “I can’t believe 2008 was fifteen years ago,” because time had already started feeling broken. Obviously around 2023 the joke kind of played itself out, and I remember that moment as well. Those memories don’t even feel far apart to me. Part of that is just individual aging — every year is a smaller percentage of our lifetime than the year before it — and the technology boom that took place through the 2000s has made a big lasting change in how we communicate and consume pop culture. But I think Conover is spot on that the fact we never settled on a good name for the 00’s or the 10’s really did change our perception.

I also buy his conclusion that the way that using named ‘generations’ has swooped in to replace decades is harmful. It’s not that today’s teenagers and today’s thirty-something don’t have meaningfully distinct collective experiences worth discussing. But if our only way of describing the difference between 2000’s-era internet culture and today’s Tik Tok trends becomes “millennials” vs “gen alpha” or whatever, we lose sight of the fact that every one of us is a different person than we were ten years ago, and that everyone living in the world today is living through this era together.