If you're the terminally sentimental type, the end of the year is a bit of a bacchanal. Whereas being overly reflective tends to elicit groans for the first 358 days of the year, those last seven are a beautiful exception. In that timeless void between Christmas and New Year's Day, even the stodgiest among us can be caught taking a moment to stop and reflect upon all that's transpired since this time last year. For us sentimental folks, there's a real joy in having everyone around you overtly indulging in something that feels like a guilty pleasure most of the time. It's like if they had one week out of the year where everyone was allowed to smoke inside.
I can remember driving around on New Year's Day of 2020, riding just that sort of sappy high, firmly on my bullshit as I partook in my then-yearly tradition of listening to Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne", a song about the cruel passage of time and sort of cheating on your spouse due to nostalgia. As the sax solo closed out the last chorus, I thought about how stable things felt. I was moving in with my girlfriend, had a book on the way, and my man Bernie Sanders was racking up the primary wins. I'd be turning 30 that year and the world seemed to finally be on even footing. I slammed the restart button on my Fogelberg and kept cruising, unknowingly, towards the weirdest and most unsettling years of modern history.
I don't need to tell you that this decade's been off to a rough start. We've all been living in some variation on the same mess for years now and while this world's never been a perfect or easy place to live, I think a lot of us had held out hope that this might be the year where things started to drift back towards some sense of stability. With the lockdown years far in the rearview and an election against a then-diminished Trump on the horizon, I think a lot of us went into 2024 hopeful that normalcy might be back on the menu. Instead, each month seemed to bring with it a suite of increasingly concerning news items.
The year began with the open deterioration of air travel, as we saw repeated issues with Boeing planes. Panels blew off mid-flight, landing gear failed, astronauts were stranded in space, and all this culminated not in meaningful litigation or punishment, but in the sudden deaths of multiple whistleblowers who raised concerns about conditions at the company. This sort of corporate espionage isn't new (I saw Michael Clayton), but for most Americans it was a sign that corporations now have so little fear of reprisal for it that they feel comfortable committing it in broad daylight.
Even our goofy viral news had a haggard, exhausted quality. The notorious Willy Wonka Experience fiasco was painted as a funny case of expectations meeting reality, but further reporting revealed it to be a series of labor violations thinly veiled under uncanny AI-generated posters. As the job market continued to stagnate and AI slop continued to overrun the internet, it became a little harder to look at images like this and not think, "good lord, has it gotten that bad?"
Our joy, which was most evident in the grand fracas that was BRAT summer, was tinged with a distinct dancing-while-the-world-burns nihilism, and who could blame us? By the height of summer, we'd seen months of student protests brutally crushed by armed police as well as an assassination attempt on Donald Trump by...a deeply confused right winger?
The speed at which new and confusing things would happen outpaced our ability to process them, leading to a sort of collective throwing up of our hands. Things hit their true apex as summer wore on and election season heated up, leading to the disastrous first presidential debate followed almost immediately by President Biden being diagnosed with COVID-19. That diagnosis (and a series of conversations I'd pay money to see transcripts of) spawned the following tweet from the leader of the United States of America:
I'm sick
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 17, 2024
Yes, there's a second tweet, a real B- play on words, but nobody remembers that. What people remember is the time the president beefed a debate, immediately got covid, and tweeted "I'm sick."By the end of the month, Biden had bowed out for Harris. By the time Trump won reelection in November, not that many of us were surprised. The oft-relitigated 2016 election was like thieves in the night. It was a sudden, baffling disruption to the status quo. By contrast, this election was more like being tied to train tracks. None of us were pleased with the result but we'd be lying if we said we didn't see it coming. As the results were finalized, the richest men in the world all made their pilgrimages to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring and make thinly veiled bribes in the form of donations to Trump's "inauguration fund." News organizations softened in anticipation of the retribution to come and the current president faded into the background. We entered the beginning of a two month holding pattern, a collective gritting of the teeth while we waited to see how bad things will get.
At this point, no one would've blamed you for thinking that it would be impossible for the last month of the year to live up to the manic insanity of the previous eleven, but December came in swinging with the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson at the (alleged) hands of Luigi Mangione. It was a bloody baptism for a world without a social contract. The murder itself was methodical, with Mangione remaining at large for days only to get caught at a McDonalds by an anonymous tipster. It was a collision between America's gun violence, healthcare, and income inequality issues, and the perpetrator was hot enough to put on tee shirts.
Having almost forgotten what it looked like to see a rich guy suffer consequences, America immediately turned Mangione into a beloved folk hero. There was no shortage of attempts from politicians and the media to counteract this, but in a country that has openly celebrated murderers like Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse, the cloying appeals that we please think of the victim (while forgetting about the victim's many, many, victims) fell mostly on deaf ears. A recent poll showed that 2/3 of Americans believe that the healthcare industry was at least partially to blame for the murder. Finally, some victim blaming we can get behind. We all spent the next few weeks getting ourselves put on various government watch lists (a happy new year to you, FBI guy reading this) and eagerly awaiting each new detail of the case.
The Thompson killing (and the intense reaction of those in power) feels equally likely to be the origin point for a new era of American class consciousness or just another weird news story from a year packed full of them. But by this point, we all recognize that normal's never coming home. This version of the world, the one informed by the pandemic and the political and cultural chaos that followed, is the one we're stuck with. The whole world's a Midjourney image now, a regurgitated slurry of problems that are off-putting and eerily familiar. The best way to stay sane is to avoid staring too hard at any of the details. Things will get weirder and worse before they get better, and to expect otherwise is to leave your guard down.
For all I know, by the time this gets out into the world, we could all have shifted to talking about the raw milk induced resurgence of bird flu or maybe the Hawk Tuah girl will get arrested for arson. There's no predicting the future because there's no "way we do things" anymore. The adults in the room are either in panic mode or hastily filling their pockets before the walls cave in. We're adrift in the thick of it, the beginning of a period that history books will probably have a name for. But the loss of normal doesn't have to be all bad. Normal wasn't perfect. January of 2020 wasn't some idyllic time without worry. We were in the midst of Trump's first term, with more manageable versions of many of the same problems we have now. Our current situation isn't some out-of-the-blue affliction, but the result of having let our problems (wealth inequality, geriatric rulers, an unchecked corporate oligarchy) fester. If there is one silver lining to this uncanny year, it's that it demands solutions. Whether or not those in power will be receptive to those solutions is another matter entirely, but the days of sweeping societal ills under the rug have come to a close. Let's just hope we can course correct before things get any more bizarre.
That's a wrap on me for the year! If you'd like to check out my year end coverage, a little roundup of some of my favorite pop culture stuff from this year came out today as well. I didn't email it because I was worried about overloading people's inboxes but it's very much there! I also did a lil freeform essay about the movie Interstellar celebrating its 10 year anniversary, though that one's just for the paid subscribers. We're trying new things!
As always, the best thing you can do to support me and my work is subscribe to this newsletter and the second best thing you can do is tell a friend about it. We're hovering close to 2,000 readers which would be a very cool benchmark to hit. If you can spare a post or retweet, I'd be greatly appreciative. See ya next year!