21 December 2019 (Paris, France) – Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year (and new decade) ahead. Ok. Moving to the more politically correct I wish you all a “Happy [insert your religious/non-religious end-of-year-observance here]”.
Alas, we live in age of perpetual crisis. The 2010s disrupted everything … but resolved nothing. I think we’ll remember the last 10 years as a time of crises. During the 2010s, there have been crises of democracy and the economy; of the climate and poverty; of international relations and national identity; of privacy and technology. There were crises at the start of the decade, and there are crises now. Some of them are the same crises, unsolved. Others are like nothing we have experienced before. Some of them are welcome: old hierarchies collapsing. Others are catastrophes. All these crises, so close together, have made the 2010s seem much longer than the two previous decades. The world of the 2000s has been swept away.
The social commentator, Peter York, had it right, in 2010:
The real keynotes of the next decade will be fragmentation … fantasy and paranoia … and impossible new situations.
And the creation of social media networks over the last decade and a half, starting with Twitter in 2006, and the conversion of traditional media into non-stop news services, have made awful events seem relentless and impossible to ignore. We have become perpetually anxious.
So we fell into using that short, bland sentence that has become ubiquitous in almost every conversation: “It is what it is”. Usually, it means: “I’m learning to live with something negative” – a personal setback, a wider injustice, difficult circumstances. It’s a mantra for an age of diminishing expectations.
Ah. All that cognitive science, all that “behavioral revolution” stuff hasn’t taken hold to systematically adopt the perspectives and tools that help us take big leaps.
BUT ENOUGH NEGATIVITY! IT’S XMAS! But let’s get real. The historians among us know Xmas hijacked the Roman holiday festival of Saturnalia, celebrating the shortest night of the year with feasting, orgies, and gift giving. It was a wild bacchanalia in which criminals ran amok and gift-giving was simply a means of avoiding violent robbery. Meanwhile, mistletoe was prized by the Druids as an infertility cure – which gives a slightly queasy aspect to its modern status as the office flirt’s favourite vascular shrub. Over the years, we’ve filtered out most of this stuff; replaced it with chocolate and tinsel.
And as my non-Christian friends tell it we have ignored the fact that Christ actually would have celebrated Hanukkah.
So a bit of irreverence. In 2010, excentricGrey (a long-time media client of mine based in Portugal) produced a delightful video “The Digital Story of The Nativity” which used the then-dominant digital media tools Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, etc. I found it delightful. I still do:
I hope you can have a festive time this holiday season.
