The '20s, past and present

[enuja]

"...black and white, slapstick... it is not from the 20s, it came out in 2024." (Heard on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.)

Friend, we ARE in the 20s. I really did hope that Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis (which calls this the winter of '26,) and the fact that we're so far into the 21st century, would lead to us being able to call this decade we're more than halfway through "The Twenties." But, no, apparently not.

In the 1920s, a century ago was 1820! I'm sure that didn't feel recent to most people, but I can pull up a Buster Keaton silent film on YouTube in seconds flat. I've dressed in costumes as a flapper, we think of the booming twenties as a very relevant cultural touchstone.

I've been thinking of contemporary society as moving extremely quickly. I keep saying: "We live in the future," for so many reasons, and mainly as an alternative to saying that I feel old. Because the reason that it feels that I live in the future is that society, and my everyday life, and my bad habits, have changed so much from when I was in my twenties. Doom scrolling did not used to be a thing! I didn't used to be able to video chat with my family across the country, or take and send pictures with great ease. I didn't used to have to identify writing and visuals as AI generated.

So yes, technology is changing very quickly, but also, I think we feel more viscerally connected to the 20th century than people in the 20th century did to the 19th. Because we have so much really good information from the 1920s that is visceral and easy to access, and is a big part of our cultural background.

So I guess I'll have to give up on my desire for the 21st century to ever use decade labels with only two numbers. It's just not a thing that's going to happen. I've been waiting for it to happen since the turn of the millennium, but I'm not making fetch happen. Apparently, even Bruce Springsteen can't make fetch happen.