a decade is a long time

Trapped here at home while the heating repairmen are at work on these failed heaters, I decided to write up a summary of the whole decade now ending: my own life, my friends’ lives, and the world as a whole.

A decade is a long time, and none of us is given too many of them; most likely I’ve used up half of mine already, at least. As I was typing out the major points, I was trying to read them with the unsuspecting eyes of late 1999, which is already a fairly difficult period to recreate in imagination. And what struck me is how many really surprising things happen in a ten-year period. Some of this stuff was fairly predictable, but some of it came from absolutely out of nowhere. Most of it was good as far as my own life is concerned (with the handful of inevitable stink bombs thrown in), but most was utterly awful for the world as a whole. Really, has there been a worse decade for the world since the 1930’s/1940’s? (As my late grandfather put it near the end of his life: “This Century 2000 ain’t worth a damn.” And he missed some of the worst parts.)

And of course in any decade there are births and deaths, and some people who simply disappear. I can now have interesting conversations with two more nephews who didn’t even exist in 1999.

I’ll give myself one A+ grade: for travel. 38 new countries in one decade isn’t bad, especially when I’m actually living in one of the most interesting of those 38. In childhood I’d have been more than satisfied with 10 countries total.

The lowest grade goes to the world as a whole: I give it a D, and it escapes an F only because even worse things are still possible. We should save the F and not start shouting prematurely, because there’s always the wretched chance that we might really need the F for the next decade. I hope not, and I do try to be optimistic whenever possible.

So as not to end on a sour note, I do expect the ’10s to be an unusually interesting decade for philosophy. There are many new possibilities now.