Factually! with Adam Conover - What Happened to Decades?

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) Seriously, what happened to the idea of decades? We’re already halfway through the "20s," yet for the past twenty years, the cultural conversation has been dominated by "generations" instead. Here’s why that shift isn’t doing anyone any favors.Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. So I know it's been 2025 for a month now, but doesn't it kind of feel like we've all been trapped in the same year forever? Like time has been barely passing at all? I mean, the pandemic feels like it was yesterday, but doesn't it also feel like it was a hundred years ago? And how are we already up to Sonic the Hedgehog 3? I don't even remember Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

It feels like two weeks ago we were all making fun of this guy, and now you're telling me I already missed the debut of Tails and Knuckles, and they've already moved on to the pervert hedgehogs for the real Sonic freaks? What the hell is going on? Now look, before you say I'm just getting old, even posters on r slash gen z think something weird is going on. Well, you're right, small boy 2004. getting old, even posters on r slash gen z think something weird is going on. Well, you're right, small boy 2004.

It does feel like time is moving a lot faster. And it's not just because you're a teeny little guy. So I've put a lot of thought into this and I have a theory. I think it's because in the last 25 years, our culture has quietly experienced a huge linguistic shift that no one is talking about, but that has literally changed how we experience and remember the passage of time and alienated us from each other and our own culture. All because the words we use to talk about time have changed. But before I explain, let me just remind you that I'm on tour right now with a brand new hour of stand-up comedy. The Nihilism

Pivot Tour continues in Omaha on February 12th, Minneapolis on the 13th, then Chicago on the 21st, Boston on the 23rd, and then after that, Vermont, London, Amsterdam, Providence, Rhode Island, Vancouver, Eugene, Oregon, and yes, even Oklahoma. Head to AdamKonova.net for tickets and head to Patreon.com slash AdamKonova if you'd like to support this channel directly, and I really hope you do. So I want you to think for a second about how you talk about time these days, how you describe the era that we live in. You might call it the post-pandemic era,

or maybe the second Trump administration, or as I overheard someone say in LA recently, you might say we're entering our fire era, bleak. But you know, we used to have a different way to talk about the passage of time that was pervasive in our society. Up until about 20 years ago, we described the passage of time purely in 10-year chunks called decades. Remember those? The roaring 20s, the swing in 60s, and the no soup for you 90s. You know, it's difficult to overstate how much we structured

our entire culture around these specific 10 year chunks. But I don't have to state it at all because you know it already intuitively. If I were to tell you to close your eyes and picture the seventies, you'd instantly think Bell Bottoms, Big Lapels, and John Travolta Stayin' Alive.

If I asked you what the forties sounded like, you can hear a big swing band in your mind. And if I say the word 90s, you can practically see the Save by the Bell intro, feel the snap bracelet around your wrist, taste the Arch Deluxe, hear Blur's song too, and smell the sickly sweet aroma of Bed Bath and Beyond. The bundle of concepts associated with each decade feels so distinct and meaningful that just the name of a decade evokes a world of associations with that time period and up until the late 90s

We use these decade names almost constantly in everyday speech to describe not just the past but the present Wake up and smell the 90s. Come on. Uncle Phil is the 90s man. It's the 90s. It's hammer time Come on. I can be anything I want to be it's the 90s. Honey. It's the 90s man. Man, it's the 90s. It's hammer time. Come on. I can be anything I want to be it's the 90s Honey, it's the 90s. Remember microchips microwaves faxes air phones for god's sake. Chuckie drag yourself into the 90s I mean the 90s were such an enormous omnipresent concept that even sentient axe murdering dolls understood They had to get with the times The phrase was a cultural shorthand for this pervasive feeling that the world was new and advancing and that the old norms of the past were being swept away. The passage from the 80s to the 90s was seen as this literal cultural vibe shift. But then,

ten years later, something happened that made the vibes suddenly stop shifting. See, in English, we have words for the numbers from 20 to 29, 30 through 39 all the way up through 90 to 99, 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. But we don't actually have a word for the two groups of numbers that precede them, 0 through 9 and 10 through 19. So when the clock turned from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 and we all realized the Y2K bug wasn't actually gonna kill us, we found ourselves in a new decade that we just didn't have a good name for.

Now, if you were around at the time, you might remember that a lot of energy was spent proposing names for the decade. Some literal proposals were the aughts, the double zeros, and even the naughties. That last one probably didn't catch on because it wasn't exactly a naughty time. America was so conservative in those days, people were literally wearing dresses over pants. And the others made you either sound like Grandpa Simpson or just felt bad coming out of your mouth. They didn't match how we use the English language in everyday life. So instead of settling on any of those names, we just started calling the decade nothing.

We didn't say, welcome to the Audies. We didn't say welcome to the Audis, we didn't say welcome to the anything. We all just stopped talking about the decade entirely. Then, 10 years later, once we entered the 2010s, once again we simply could not find a good name to use. I mean, sure, 2013 through 2019 could technically be called the teens, but not 2010, 11, or 12. And the 2010s doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, neither does the early 2000s. It's missing that bouncy 80s, 90s, 70s quality. It's just not fucking fun to say, so we didn't say it that much,

meaning that once again, the decade went by without it ever receiving a widespread popular name. But then, at long last, five years ago, it became 2020. Finally, a year with a good decade name. But by then, it had been so long since we talked in decades, the muscle had atrophied and we just never started doing it. I mean, we are literally halfway

through the 20s right now. Have you heard anybody call this decade the 20s? No! In fact, when I say the 20s, you think of the 1920s. You're not picturing Cybertrucks and Sabrina Carpenter, you're thinking about flappers doing the Foxtrot with F. Scott Fitzgerald. We as a society have simply stopped dividing our cultural timeline into 10-year increments with discrete names. And I know that this is going to sound a little crazy, but I think that that has made it seem like time is blending together, because we've lost our ability to describe in a clear shorthand way how it's changing.

Okay, like here's an example. If your friend threw a 90s party, you'd know to dress up like MC Hammer or Blossom or the chief from Carmen Sandiego. Man, some styles are just timeless. But if they threw a party set in 2012, what would you wear? A trucker hat? A collared shirt? The concept of Barack Obama? Fashion doesn't really feel like it's changed as much in the past 20 years. I mean, look at the clothes from the office. Sure, the colors are a little dorky maybe, but if you wore them today, you wouldn't

look like you stepped out of a time machine. But in the late 90s, people thought the fashion choices of just a decade earlier looked insane. Like, okay, think of the movie The Wedding Singer. This movie came out in 1998, and the entire premise of the movie is making fun of how crazy fashion and culture were in 1985, just 13 years earlier. The suits, the hair, the music. But that time difference is less than the chronological distance between us and the office. Yet the cultural distance feels much greater.

I mean, imagine if they made a movie today about 13 years ago. What exactly would be different? I mean, Taylor Swift was still on the radio, Suits for women were in. Guess what? They still are. Our iPhones today are a little bigger. Who gives a shit? And in 2012, gas prices were rising and politicians were arguing

about the Affordable Care Act, the same shit we're arguing about right now. If you don't believe me, just check out our sponsor, Ground News, and you'll see that we are still talking about these exact same problems in 2025. Like, look at this article about how the GOP is proposing cuts to the Affordable Care Act. The ACA was on the chopping block in 2012 and it still is today more than a decade later. And you can see why ground news is so useful to me when I'm doing my research for these videos because while the headline here is interesting, it's even more helpful to know that this story

was covered by 13 left-leaning publications and only three right-leaning ones. So even though the GOP is making proposals to cut Medicaid, most GOP voters aren't hearing about it, and that is a huge part of the story. They also have a bias ranking for every source that shows you what direction they're biased in, and a factuality rating lets you know you're getting the real facts. So if you want to see all of your news in context and get out of your media bubble, check out our sponsor, Ground News. You can get 40% off of this amazing user-funded service

if you use my special code. Just go to groundnews.com slash factually. That's groundnews.com slash factually. So I wanna be clear. I'm not arguing that our abandonment of decade names caused the nature of time to change or made our culture stop evolving. Obviously, it has continued to. But because the decade names function the nature of time to change or made our culture stop evolving. Obviously, it has continued to.

But because the decade names functioned as a way to socially agree on what had changed and as a shorthand way to describe what those changes looked like, losing them has interfered with our ability to communicate and therefore identify what has changed over the passage of time. And, you know, that's just my own analysis. But there is some linguistic science to back up the idea that words have a huge impact on the way we think about the world and about time itself. So there's this fascinating study that was recently profiled in The New Yorker. In the study, English speakers' ability to describe smells was compared to people

who speak Jaha'i, a language spoken by hunter-gatherers living on the border of Malaysia and Thailand. Now, unlike English, Jahai has lots of unique, specific words for different kinds of smells and the sense impressions that they make. And during the study, people who spoke Jahai were able to name and identify new smells they had never encountered before much more quickly than English speakers. Their noses aren't different from English speakers, but their words are, and because they had the words to describe smells, they literally perceived them more clearly. And there's evidence that this function of language extends to time, too.

Like in English, we think of the past as behind and the future as ahead. As a result, if we gesture about time, we tend to gesture forward for the future and behind for the past. But in Amara, an Andean language spoken by indigenous people in South America, last year literally translates to the year I can see and a long time ago translates to a time way in front of me. So when Amara speakers gesture about time,

they point backwards to talk about the future and forwards to talk about the past. That means that their concept of time is literally affected by the language they use to express it. Now, these studies by themselves don't entirely prove my hypothesis because they're about differences

between two separate languages. And when we're talking about decades, we're talking about a difference within the English language. But this does seem like a relevant analogy and study to me, because we're beginning to understand that the words we have available to us to describe the world around us

do help shape the way we understand and think about the world. And that's another reason why the loss of decades is a problem. Because we didn't just lose the concept, we replaced it with something much worse. Because you know what has replaced decades in everyday speech? Generations. In the last 20 years, generational language and concepts have exploded in popular culture, and as far as I can tell that has replaced decades in the cultural imagination. For instance,

when we talk about fashion for the past 20 years, we don't talk about Audie's fashion. Instead, we call it millennial fashion and Gen Z fashion. And I think that's a problem because look, I've been a critic of the concept of generations for years. My very first YouTube video on this channel was about how generations don't exist. They are a marketing invention.

But you know what, over time, I've come to accept that generations can be a useful shorthand for talking about the differences between different age cohorts, just like decades are the same thing for time periods. But here's the problem. We're using generational language to describe things that have nothing to do with what year you were born at all.

For instance, let's talk about millennial fashion. That doesn't actually make sense because your fashion sense isn't fixed for all time based on what year you were born into It changes according to the trends of the time Trends that affect everyone the Gen Xers in the wedding singer didn't keep wearing their mullets and vests their entire lives Ten years later they were making fun of that shit or think about the musical trend that's often called the millennial whoop Think about the musical trend that's often called the millennial whoop. This specific sound and melody was omnipresent in pop music about eight years ago during the last decade. But it has nothing to do with what generation anyone was born into.

If it did, all of us elder millennials would still be doing it. But we're not going whoa- whoa, with Katy Perry anymore. Now we're all bubba bumping that beat with Charlie. And I know because I'm one of them. Ah, look at me. None of those kids can even tell I had a hip replacement. In reality, trends come and go based on what year it is, not who you are. So when we define an entire era of music or fashion or culture by a generation, that sucks because it basically says

that anyone who's not part of a particular age group didn't participate in it, didn't participate in our shared culture. What I hate most about generational language is that it divides us. It only talks about how we are different as people. Like there's some huge gap between us. But when we talk about decades,

we're talking about a shared experience that we all lived through together, regardless of what age we are. It's a uniting experience. Whether you were nine or 89, if you lived through the 70s, you were staying alive with the Bee Gees and rocking ugly new polyester clothes.

And then 10 years later, you got to throw all that in the trash and make fun of it with your friends, no matter how old they were. Decades kept the focus on the differences between the time periods we all lived through, while generations emphasize the differences between groups of people.

So decades foster togetherness, but generations alienate us from each other. And you know, when we're not defining time by generations, we're doing something equally bad. We're defining it by important traumatic events. And that doesn't make the world feel any better because those events are usually bummers. A lot of the time we call the decade from 2000 to 2010, the post 9-11 era. Instead of the time after 2020 being the 20s, we say post pandemic. And 9-11 and the pandemic were defining experiences of their times,

but they weren't the only things that happened during those time periods. But since we've given these scary emotionally charged moments linguistic dominance, it's made us think of those times as inherently depressing. We are giving the big tragedies too much power to define our collective experience. Like yeah, 9-11 was a big deal back then, but so were Nickelback, Stud Belts, and That's So Hot. So when we think of time as just a series of extreme disasters, we miss those other moments

that make our shared culture more than just the worst things that happen to us. No wonder the past few decades feel so depressing. The words we use to describe them are depressing. So you know what I think we should do? This is my formal petition to bring back decades. Decade names were good things. They were helpful to us because they helped foster a shared understanding of what we

went through together of the communal experiences we all had. And you know what? I think we could use a little shared understanding and experience right now. So let me be the first to say, welcome to the 20s, mother fuckers. Yeah, we're five years late, but guess what? We've still got five more years to figure out what the hell they were about.

We are going to define the 20s through our actions and words right now. We can decide today what we're gonna wear to the 20s parties a couple of decades from now. And yeah, it'll probably be an N95 mask, but also Taylor Swift friendship bracelets? How about slutty fashion for men? We can play Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish and Charlie XCX and do one of those weird dances from the Wicked movie. And sure, we'll also remember the trauma and the chaos and the death,

and maybe these 20s won't roar quite as much as the last centuries. But at least if we call them that, it'll be a decade that belongs to all of us. That was a Head Gum podcast. Hi guys, I'm Ago Wodim. Check out my new show, Thanks Dad, now on Head Gum. I was raised by a single mom

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