“The age of perpetual crisis: how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved

nothing”, Andy Beckett, in The Guardian, 17-12-2019

In an era of bewildering upheaval, how will the past decade be remembered?

People have long used decades to frame the past. Think of how potent “the 60s” has
been. But the artificiality of the exercise means that the more you look at a decade, the
more complicated it seems. A decade is experienced in an infinity of ways. It is made
up of fragments. It blurs at the edges with other decades. Ghosts of previous ones live
on within it, and premonitions of those to come gradually infiltrate it.
How will we remember the last 10 years? Above all, 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. Sometimes, a single day’s events – a Brexit showdown, a
Donald Trump meltdown – have felt more dramatic, and more exhausting to follow,
than entire years did during the 1990s and 2000s. In Britain – supposedly one of the
world’s most stable, gradualist democracies – politics since 2010 has often been
manic. Parties have hastily changed their leaders and policies; sometimes their entire
guiding philosophies. Last week’s general election was the fourth of the decade; the
1980s, 1990s and 2000s had two apiece.
The sheer turmoil of the 2010s has sometimes made what came before seem distant
and utterly different. “The changes we’ve undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are
astonishing,” wrote the American social critic Rebecca Solnit in 2016. The world of
the 2000s, she concluded, “has been swept away”. In place of centrist politicians and
steady economic growth, the 2010s have brought shocks, revolts and extremists. Hung
parliaments; rightwing populists in power; physical attacks on politicians; Russian
influence on western elections; elderly leftists galvanising
young Britons and Americans; rich, rightwing leaders in both countries captivating

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working-class voters – scenarios close to unimaginable a decade ago have become
familiar, almost expected.
And yet beneath this surface frenzy, politics has, in many ways, been stagnant.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, his approval ratings have been terrible, but
unusually stable. Three-and-a-half years after the referendum, Britain remains almost
evenly divided over EU membership. Despite governing disastrously for much of the
decade, the Conservatives are still in power.
In the 2010s, it has often felt as if everything is up for grabs – from the future of
capitalism to the future of the planet – and yet nothing has been decided. Between the
decade’s sense of stasis and sense of possibility, an enormous tension has built up. It
is still awaiting release. In 2010, a few days after that year’s election had, to
widespread surprise, produced the decade’s first hung parliament, the philosopher
John Gray told me: “Britain will spend something like a decade inching to some sort
of new economic and political settlement.” Gray is often seen as a professional
pessimist, but this time he was too optimistic.
While the decade’s Conservative ascendancy has gone on and on, extraordinary crises
have spread through British society. During the 2010s, the average life expectancy,
which had been growing almost continuously for a century, stopped rising. The
average wage rose more slowly than in any decade since the Napoleonic wars.
A million more children with working parents entered poverty. The number of
people sleeping rough more than doubled. One of the archetypal British public spaces
of the 2000s was St Pancras station in London: once tatty, now renovated, with smart
new shops, bustling food outlets and trains to the continent – a confident intertwining
of private prosperity and state spending. Since 2010, its restored Victorian alcoves
have filled up with people living in sleeping bags and tents.
Beyond the grim new Britain created by a decade of Conservative austerity looms the
even bleaker world being created by the climate emergency. Perhaps the most
frightening of this year’s many apocalyptic books is The Uninhabitable Earth by
David Wallace-Wells. Its chapter titles read: Heat Death. Hunger. Drowning. Dying
Oceans. Unbreathable Air. Wildfire. Plagues. Economic Collapse. Climate Conflict.
It’s intended to be a forecast of the planet’s near future that will shock readers out of
their complacency. But during the 2010s almost all the disasters that the book names
have already started to happen. Global capitalism has largely carried on regardless.

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For many people in Britain and beyond, the 2010s have been a bad time, with the
promise of much worse to come.
How do you live through such a decade? In Britain, it is a question that people
haven’t had to ask for almost half a century – not since the 1970s, until now the most
infamous decade in our modern history. Like the 2010s, it had four elections, a
referendum about our relationship with Europe, fears for the environment, a rising
threat of political violence, and a pervasive sense of foreboding. In 1978 the social
commentator Peter York wrote: “The real keynotes of the 70s are fragmentation …
fantasy and paranoia – impossible new situations.” A few months ago, in This Is Not
a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook, the climate activist Dougald
Hine summed up the 2010s in similar terms: “These are times in which impossible
things happen”.
Yet in some ways the 2010s have been more frightening than the 70s. Then, the fear
was felt more by the elite – politicians, businessmen – than by ordinary people, who
were still enjoying the last of postwar Britain’s relative egalitarianism and social
stability. Nowadays, the fear is almost universal. 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.
And there seems ever more to be anxious about. The divide in Britain over Europe has
become much more bitter. Advocates of undemocratic solutions to Britain’s problems,
such as suspending parliament, have moved from the fringes of politics, where they
plotted in vain during the 1970s, straight into 10 Downing Street. Meanwhile, the
awareness that much of modern life – air travel, car travel, eating meat, shopping,
using plastics – has malign consequences has grown from a minority preoccupation in
the 1970s into an everyday topic. Sometimes in the 2010s, it has felt as if the whole
world we have made, from the tiniest exhaust particle to the most sprawling
conurbation, is toxic. Our language has become precautionary and jittery: “safe
spaces”, “trigger warnings”. Viewed from the 2010s, the fraught 1970s can look like
an age of innocence.
During the mid-2010s, and especially in 2016, the year of Trump’s election and the
vote for Brexit, there was a persistent online craze for declaring particular years in the
2010s “the worst ever”. Exaggeration is a wearyingly familiar online mode, and some

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of the evidence cited was quite narrow and subjective, such as the premature deaths in
2016 of Prince, David Bowie and Carrie Fisher. But the craze spread because it struck
a chord. The 2010s have often felt cursed.
Yet also during the decade a more scientific group of writers, including the famous
psychologist Steven Pinker, started to argue the opposite. Sometimes called “the New
Optimists”, they claimed that life around the world in the early 21st century was, in
fact, as good as it has ever been – in terms of health, wealth, amenities and the
prevalence of peace. Many of the upward graphs they presented were convincing, as
far as they went, but that was usually only up to 2015 – just before the point at which
pessimists usually say the 2010s took a turn for the worse. And when the graphs did
go beyond 2015, they were not always reassuring. The number of people living in
democracies was falling; the number of people killed in wars and terrorist incidents
was rising. As one of the New Optimists’ favourite sources, the website Our World in
Data, had to admit this year: “In some aspects the data suggests the world is getting
worse.”
It could be a blip. The 2010s could be just a pause in humanity’s erratic upward
progress. But there are signs that even Our World in Data doesn’t completely believe
that. “Our world today,” it says, “is neither just nor sustainable.” Over the last 10
years, even some of humanity’s cheerleaders have started to lose faith.
Yet to characterise the 2010s as one long crisis is too simple and bleak. A decade
usually contains different phases. In Britain, the 2010s can be divided roughly into
three. First, from 2010 to 2012, there was a period of turbulence and bewilderment, as
the economy, voters and politicians struggled to absorb the shocks from the financial
crisis of the late 2000s – and to accept that the prosperity and relative stability of the
previous two decades might be over.
Gordon Brown’s ponderous New Labour government fell. David Cameron’s more
supple, and shameless, coalition of Conservatives and Lib Dems replaced it. Having
gone along with Labour’s fairly expansive approach to public spending for years in
opposition, during the 2010 election the Conservatives attacked it as reckless and
unaffordable. They claimed that Britain was facing a huge government debt crisis,
citing a superficially similar but much deeper one that was already bringing chaos to
Greece. It was a form of political message – the warning of a systemic collapse – that

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had been popular in the 1970s and had then fallen gradually into disuse; but it would
become a standard practice for all parties as the 2010s went on.
Once in government, the Conservatives imposed austerity. At first, the word had an
unfamiliar, retro ring, redolent of the 1930s, the last time a British government had
carried out cuts on the scale Cameron intended. In response to the return of hard
times, another bit of language from the 1930s became ubiquitous in the early 2010s,
printed on mugs, posters and tea towels: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. But many
Britons did not. During 2010 and 2011 there were protests and riots across the country
– not on a Greek scale, yet large and sustained enough to spook many commentators.
At the end of 2011, with an economic slowdown largely caused by austerity also
underway, the latest edition of the Economist newspaper’s annual compendium of
predictions, The World in 2012, replaced its usual capitalist cheerleading with
warnings about an economic “great stagnation” and further “mayhem on the streets”
of the west. “The world won’t end in 2012,” predicted the magazine. “But at times it
will feel as if it is about to.”
For some less establishment voices, the turbulence was promising rather than
threatening. In 2010, after taking part in large, fierce protests against the education
cuts, the political and cultural writer Mark Fisher declared: “We’ve broken out of the
end of history. What’s certain is that the old world is disintegrating, and soon it will
not be possible to even pretend that we can return to it.”
Yet all these prophecies were slightly premature. From 2012 to 2015, there was a lull
– the decade’s second phase. The economy recovered. The 2012 London
Olympics distracted people and cheered them up. The same year, Barack Obama was
re-elected as US president: there still seemed to be a future for charismatic centrist
leaders. Even the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, which for a long time
promised to rupture the status quo, ended in a vote for stability.
Austerity also proved less politically explosive during the mid-2010s than its critics
hoped and some of its advocates feared. The fact that the cuts were cumulative, and so
ubiquitous, made austerity hard to organise against – or even think clearly about in the
round. The cuts proved numbing as much as enraging. At the same time, the increases
in public spending during the previous decade meant that some state services were
well enough equipped by 2010 to absorb the cuts without obvious immediate damage.
In 2017, the chief finance officer of a London hospital trust told me that its medical

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outcomes had only started deteriorating once the cuts had been underway for half a
decade. In much of Britain, austerity took a long time to be fully felt.
The Conservatives won a majority at the 2015 election before that could happen. A
jubilant Cameron told his party conference soon afterwards: “I really believe we’re on
the brink of something special … We can make this era – these 2010s – a defining
decade for our country … one which people will look back on and say: ‘That’s the
time when the tide turned.’”
In 2015, many in the political and business elite, untouched by austerity themselves,
still believed that the troubled late 2000s and early 2010s had been an aberration, and
that the good times had now resumed. For many other people, there was a more
tentative hope: that the great unravelling that had begun with the financial crisis could
be kept at bay or ignored, at least for a while. You can sense this escapist feeling, still,
especially in wealthier parts of Britain, in the queues outside shops with hot new
products, in all the heaving, deafening new restaurants. For a lot of people, at least
some of the time, the lull of the mid-2010s goes on.
Yet since 2015, ever more potent forces have been gathering to disrupt it. The third
phase of the 2010s – the phase we’re in now – has been more unpredictable,
unsettling, and sometimes thrilling, than even the aftermath of the financial crisis. The
capture of the Labour party in 2015 by Jeremy Corbyn and the left; the 2016 Brexit
vote, and election of Trump; the shock 2017 British election result and hung
parliament, the revival of the far right in Britain, the US and across Europe – even the
fact that this list is so predictable tells us how much political upheaval has become
normalised. During the early 2010s, it was hard to say with confidence what Britain
would be like – politically, economically, socially, or in overall mood – from one year
to the next. Nowadays, it’s hard to look a month ahead.
One way to cope with chaos is to accept it. Over the last couple of years, a short,
bland sentence has become ubiquitous in British conversations, from interviews with
Premier League footballers to soliloquies from Love Island contestants: “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, when many people no longer assume – unlike their postwar
predecessors – that they will become richer than their parents, and live in an ever

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more sophisticated or just society, on an ever more hospitable planet. When people
say “It is what it is”, they are rarely challenged. Instead, they are usually heard in
respectful silence. In a difficult world, fatalism and stoicism are useful qualities.
Another coping mechanism is escape. Possibly the most revealing leisure activity of
the 2010s is shutting yourself away with a TV series: typically a drama set in another
country or another era, with an addictive, slowly resolved plot, many characters,
elaborate settings, and enough episodes to allow for watching in binges. In an age of
squeezed incomes, TV dramas are worlds you can explore on the cheap.
But pricier forms of escapism have been in demand, too. Theatre productions promise
to be “immersive” – one of the decade’s favourite promotional terms – by placing you
inside the spectacle, sometimes for extended durations. Sales of expensive, fuel-
guzzling SUVs, often with tinted windows, grew rapidly across the world during the
2010s: drivers increasingly want to be raised above and sealed off from the street.
Meanwhile, upmarket restaurants, such as the Chiltern Firehouse in London, a former
fire station which reopened as a luxurious, enclosed compound in 2013, feel more and
more like stage sets: so completely designed and choreographed that the world outside
temporarily disappears. Even the great winners of the 2010s – the 1% – sometimes
want to forget.
During the decade, it became cooler than usual in Britain to eat comforting things:
bread, cakes, pies, even grilled cheese sandwiches. The Great British Bake Off, first
broadcast in 2010, made cooking with lots of carbs and sugar respectable again.
Meanwhile, more and more restaurants and cafes started offering a meal designed to
obliterate the day: the boozy bottomless brunch. Alcohol, starch and fat – these are the
tastes, perhaps, of a society that wants to procrastinate, to not think about the future
too much.
Clothes have become more cocooning: enormous puffer jackets, scarves the size of
small blankets, fleeces and woolly hats. In the 2000s, clothes and silhouettes were
leaner and more formal – tight suits, skinny trousers – as if people expected to seize
exciting new opportunities, or at least to work in offices. In the 2010s, social mobility
has stalled, and many of the jobs being created – and often taken by middle-class
graduates – involve zero-hours contracts and outdoor work. Baggy, warm, informal
clothes are for people who expect either to be hanging around at home, waiting to

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hear that their labour is required, or to be hauling parcels and takeaway orders, out in
the cold.
Perhaps the human silhouette that most embodies the 2010s is that of the thousands of
cyclists working for the food delivery service Deliveroo, which was founded in
London in 2013 and now operates in dozens of cities across Europe and beyond. The
huge insulated containers the riders carry on their backs, like uglier, unprotective snail
shells, seem to say: Work is a burden you must accept, however much of your dignity
it takes away.
In a working world that requires quick switches between inactivity and activity, that
values powers of endurance, caffeine is a vital drug. In many British town and city
centres during the 2010s, otherwise emptied out by online commerce, cafes
proliferated, replacing shops and pubs as the busiest indoor spaces. Many of these
cafes are full of people silently working, rather than socialising, or dosing themselves
with double espressos so they can go and work somewhere else.
Another way to cope with the 2010s has been to work obsessively on yourself. From
the 1950s to the 1990s, being young in the west was often associated with lounging
around, or rebelling, or living for the moment. But in the 2010s being young often
means relentlessly working and studying, polishing your public persona, and keeping
fit. The massively popular Hunger Games novels and films, about young people being
forced to compete to the death with each other by a cruel, middle-aged elite, came out
between 2008 and 2015. Intended as dystopian science fiction, they quickly began to
seem like more like satire, or even social realism.
“The worse things get”, writes the American essayist Jia Tolentino, “the more a
person is compelled to optimise [themselves].” This can be presentational: a carefully
maintained Instagram feed (the app was released in 2010). Or it can be physical.
Yoga, marathons, triathlons – it’s not hard to see their renewed popularity over the
last decade as an effort by people, conscious or otherwise, to hone themselves for a
tougher world.
New consumer devices for collecting personal data, such as the Fitbit Tracker, which
first went on sale in 2010, mean that this self-optimisation can be measured, and
compared with the efforts of others, as never before. This process has created a new
hierarchy, particularly within the American middle class, but increasingly in its
European counterpart, too, which privileges the leanest people, the most punishing

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exercise classes, the most body-conscious brands of workout clothes. Only in a
decade so concerned with self-improvement and self-presentation could “athleisure”
become a fashion category, and toned arms become such a potent status symbol for
people who never need to do manual work.
And finally, the harsher world of the 2010s has also prompted many people to
undergo a more private, less visible toughening – one they may not even acknowledge
to themselves. They have got used to walking past the decade’s casualties in the
street, and not giving them much thought. In the 2010s, as in Victorian times, if you
want an untroubled mind, it doesn’t pay to look at the world around you too hard.
Other reactions to the turmoil of the last 10 years have been less individualistic. One
person’s crisis can be another’s opportunity, and the difficulties since 2010 of so
many previously dominant value systems – capitalism, centrism, traditional
conservatism, white male supremacy – have opened up space for new political
movements, at a rate not seen since the 1960s.
Some of these movements, such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, are revolts
against age-old injustices, largely made possible, and then accelerated and amplified,
by the new digital networks. Others, such as Extinction Rebellion and Corbynism,
have been reactions to glaring inadequacies in modern mainstream politics: its
inability, or unwillingness, to address the climate emergency; or to create an economy
and society that works for the majority.
Other, more rightwing insurrections, such as the campaign for Brexit, have been
partly driven by nostalgia: a yearning to go back to the slower, simpler Britain that
supposedly existed before today’s globalised, unsettled country. And yet – in a
disorientating twist typical of our times – the Brexit movement also has a ruthlessly
modernising side. Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of its most prominent figures, may dress
like an Edwardian patriarch, but he is the co-founder of an international investment
fund, and the beneficiary and advocate of an ever more footloose, disruptive
capitalism.
One thing all the new movements of the 2010s have in common is that they have
already changed how millions of people think, both inside the movements and outside
them. Another is that we don’t know, yet, how permanent and influential that change
will be. #MeToo could turn out to be one of many heavily resisted campaigns in
feminism’s long struggle – or it could transform, for good, how women and men

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relate to each other, and how women think about themselves. The Brexit movement
could be a passing nationalist surge – or a force that revives the Tory party for the
long term.
Most of these movements have an impatient, millenarian quality – an expectation that
momentous change is close at hand. This is a huge shift away from the politics of the
1990s and 2000s, when western politicians such as Brown sought to reshape society
through modest, incremental reforms, such as making school class sizes smaller. In
the end, grand schemes such as Brexit may disappoint – or worse. But the 2010s have
reacquainted voters with the idea that politics can be about big promises and
fundamental choices.
More quietly, the 2010s have also brought a renewed realisation that culture is
political – after decades when most creative people and cultural critics avoided that
conclusion. Literary and art prizes now regularly go to people whose work is overtly
political, such as Margaret Atwood, or more subtly so, such as the architecture
collective Assemble, who won the Turner prize in 2015 for helping to rebuild a
rundown part of Liverpool.
In recent years, such competitions have begun to be scrutinised for their sensitivity to
questions of race, class and gender. Although prizes are inherently elitist, they are
now also increasingly expected to promote greater equality in society as a whole. It is
a contradiction characteristic of the decade’s politics, where a greater awareness of
the injustices suffered by many social groups, and sometimes a greater willingness to
redress them, co-exists with an intensifying individualism – with a growing
preference for letting people self-identify and respecting each person’s particular life
experience. Whether these collectivist and individualist tendencies can co-exist in the
long term is a question that the decade has not resolved.
What is more, the reawakening of politics since 2010 has only been partial. In the
decade’s four British general elections, the turnouts have been 65%, 66%, 69% and
67% – only a modest improvement on the apathetic turnouts of the 2000s, and well
below the 20th-century average. Even the supposedly critical Brexit referendum was
devalued, to a degree, by the non-participation of more than a quarter of the
electorate. The indifference of many potential remain voters – turnout in some
Europhile areas of London was lower than in general elections – was as much
responsible for the final result as the commitment of many leavers.

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In 2012, Mark Fisher said that Britain was suffering from “depression economics and
boomtime politics”: the disengagement prompted by the relatively comfortable 1990s
and 2000s was lingering on, despite the reopening of so many economic issues by the
financial crisis. Seven years later, apathy remains a habit for many Britons. Politics
may have become much more vibrant, ambitious, and relevant over the past decade,
but they haven’t noticed. Or, worse still, they don’t like it.
In many areas of our lives, the 2010s have been less transformative than we often
think. In 2011, the music critic Simon Reynolds published Retromania: Pop Culture’s
Addiction to Its Own Past, a book about the power of nostalgia in the early 21st
century that still resonates today. He argued that digital technology, far from enabling
more creativity, had actually made it both harder and less essential for artists. Instead
of coming up with new ideas, they could now roam the internet’s infinite archives,
and build careers out of clever hybrids and pastiches of previous forms.
Since Reynolds’ book came out, the mounting crises of the 2010s have made the
avoidance of the present in favour of the past even more appealing. Pop culture from
the 1990s, in particular, such as the cosy TV series Friends, has become hugely
popular again. In our often backward-looking society, “Time itself seem[s] to become
sluggish,” wrote Reynolds, “like a river that starts to meander”.
In the 1970s, a similar feeling of cultural time slowing down – just as political events
were speeding up – spread through western culture, from pop music to fashion,
architecture to academia. The confident, future-orientated mindset of mid-20th-
century modernism was gradually replaced by the doubting one of postmodernism,
which questioned, as many people do now, whether progress and truth were possible
at all. And even in politics, for all the decade’s dramas, the 70s actually resolved little.
Most of the decisive changes to Britain and the US during the late 20th century didn’t
come until afterwards, with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s seminal 1980s
governments.
A similar dynamic may be at work now. Brexit has yet to happen. Global capitalism
has yet to alter course, as growth slows and inequality grows. Trump’s presidency has
yet to be judged by the electorate. Britain has yet to experience Boris Johnson’s
equally risky brand of populism as a form of government, in any significant sense,
rather than as simply a crude but effective new way of winning elections.

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A radical government of the left, while appealing to an increasing number of young
voters, remains a more theoretical prospect still. The climate crisis is probably only
just beginning. Digital technology has only just started to change us. And many of the
people involved in all the political activism of the last 10 years are just beginning
their careers as voters, as possible politicians.
If you think the 2010s, our age of crises, have seen too much upheaval – or if you
think things haven’t been shaken up enough – just wait.

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