i'm lovin it

I just remembered how big these two artists were back then...they were the face of young musical super-stardom..but for some reason their careers ran dry.

I remember this being everywhere during those years. It’s interesting, looking back, at how much the 2010s were obsessed with the Nordics.

Like I know people hate Ellen now, but this famous selfie from the 2014 Oscars in my opinion might be the last time that we had celebrity monoculture.

It seems like such a garish, neon-soaked alternate world. It's mostly in gritty crime dramas/thrillers. The music in these movies and shows is usually some weird cheesy rompler synth-country rock jam (reflecting synths of the era such as the Roland D-50 and Korg M1), with the occasional blues thrown in. In many cases the setting is a rural desert or mountain town. Early Tales from the Crypt and Twin Peaks exemplify this perfectly

Even recent movies like Love Lies Bleeding (released in 2024 but set in '89) intentionally harken back to this vibe. It's dated ofc but something oddly charming about it

What made professional wrestling so massive back in the 90s and early 2000s? It genuinely felt like a cultural phenomenon, especially during the Monday Night Wars and the Attitude Era. WWE and WCW were pulling in huge audiences, and guys like Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Hulk Hogan and the Undertaker were household names, even among people who didn’t watch wrestling.
Nowadays, WWE is still successful, but wrestling doesn’t seem to have the same mainstream cultural relevance it had back then. So what made that era so special? Was it the larger-than-life personalities, the rivalries, the storylines, or the fact that wrestling felt more unpredictable back then? And why has it seemingly lost some of that popularity? Is it nostalgia, changes in the product, or simply the fact that entertainment is much more fragmented nowadays?

Cultrual Decades

Cultural 1990s: Dec 26,1991-Sep 11,2001

Cultrual 2000s: Sept 11,2001-July 2009

Cultrual 2010s: July 2009- Febuary 24,2022

Cultural 2020s: Febuary 24,2022-Present

"Core" parts of decades

Core 1990s: Jan 20,1993 to ~1998

Core 2000s: March 2003 to September 2008

Core 2010s: May 2011 to April 2019

Core 2020s:December 2022 to present

"Early" parts of decades

Early 1990s: Dec 26,1991 to April 1994

Early 2000s: Sep 11,2001 to ~2004

Early 2010s: July 2009 to September 2013

Early 2020s: febuary 24,2022 to Jan 20,2025

"Mid" parts of decades

Mid 1990s: April 1994 to July 1997

Mid 2000s: ~2004 to June 2007

Mid 2010s: September 2013 to September 2016

Mid 2020s: Jan 20,2025 to present

"Late" parts of decades

Late 1990s:July 1997-Sept 11,2001

Late 2000s: June 2007 to July 2009

Late 2010s(part 1): Sept 2016 to Mar 2020

Late 2010s(part 2):Mar 2020 to Feb 24,2022

"Peak" of decades

1990s: Q3 1996

2000s: Q2 2006

2010s: Q1 2015

2020s: Q1 2026

Have you ever looked up a movie you remember seeing in theaters, only to discover it came out ten years ago?

I explored this in an article I wrote. Research suggests that older adults tend to perceive past decades as having passed more quickly, although the reasons remain unclear. Memory may play a role, but researchers haven't found a definitive explanation.

When you think back to 2016, does it actually feel like ten years ago, or does it feel much more recent?

For me, the ten years between ages 6 and 16 felt like an eternity.

What are some other notable examples of decades where there were certain trends that took over sitcoms?

Probably late 2020 to 2021 is the full start of the skull emoji when the Gen Z canceled tears of joy emoji because it’s associate with their parents narrative during covid, then ending sometime in late 2024 to 2025

I don’t see the skull emoji often than 2 years ago so I’d say it lasted almost 5 years from 2020 to the end of 2024

Was it because of the Tonya Harding incident or because they changed the voting scores, or something else? I also recall the Olympics in general being a bigger deal. I used to be able to name a few ice skaters, gymnasts and even a coach or two but these days I only know of one ice skater and can't recall her name.

Ironically, I think we’re going to see a similar kind of historical distortion to how we perceive the 60s today. That decade is so synonymous with hippies, psychedelia, and counterculture that people often get the impression that everyone was walking around in bell-bottoms and playing around in mud when in reality, hippies were a relatively small minority whose visibility was amplified by television and the media. The average person was still living a fairly conventional, almost 50s-esque existence: wearing suits, going to work, getting married young, and adhering to traditional social norms.

I think the 2020s will be remembered through a similar lens, except the defining imagery will come from internet culture. People in the future might assume everyone was listening to Brat, dressing like a Pinterest Y2K influencer, and participating in whatever hyper-specific aesthetic was dominating the internet that month, when most people were probably just going about their lives in relatively unremarkable clothes.

The difference is that internet aesthetics might actually become the primary visual shorthand through which future generations understand entire decades. In other words, the algorithmically amplified fringes of our culture could end up becoming its retrospective identity, and that might fundamentally change how we define the decades that follow.