A look back from the year 2030.

Every New Years prompts an understandable need to reflect, as well as look ahead. But this even more true on those rare days when we tick over into a new decade.

So, as the seconds count down until we are officially in the 2030s, I thought I would take a second to look back over the last ten years, and review not what happened — which we all know, in unfriendly detail — but what we thought would happen in the relatively innocent year of 2021.

What did we think, ten years ago in 2021?

Back then, we knew that 2020 had been the nadir for America and the world at large. How could it be otherwise? A harrowing election, the impeachment of the President in the rearview mirror, the death of legends from the basketball court to the Supreme Court, and of course, a pandemic that promised to last weeks, but instead stretched the entire year long, killing hundreds of thousands.

Do you remember how optimistically we entered 2021? When you gaze back at those dreams of future past, do you find yourself laughing, or crying?

Are you able to identify the point at which America last grasped onto hope?

We thought COVID would end.

We thought that the vaccine announced in late 2020 would stick. We thought that enough of the populace would be able — or willing — to receive it. We hoped that the virus wouldn’t evolve and mutate like every other one has through history.

We assumed that, some nebulous time in 2021, the restaurants and bars would fully reopen, and Americans would rush back to their families, to trade pixelated smiles on a Zoom call for joyous arms thrown rapturously around their loved ones. We thought we would once again flood back to our movie theaters, our bowling alleys. We thought colleges would open with full attendance, since what students could possibly prefer remote learning?

We thought our cities would stay strong instead of descending into depths of crime, poverty and danger not seen for 30 or 40 years.

We had no idea that an entire generation of young Americans was being molded with such familiarity to existential external dangers that, even once the pandemic had largely passed, their masks remained.

We thought the virus was a moment in history, a temporary blip in American culture — not the catalyst for an entirely new culture.

We thought the economy would turn around.

Some of us opined that the 2020s would be a mirror of the 1920s. After all, we were coming out of equally dark times, with a polarizing president, societal change and an unpopular war; it could only be, we thought, that we were entering a decade of peace and Gatsby-esque prosperity.

Sure, we had anticipated an economic dip in response to COVID, but we thought for sure the tech sector would lift us out.

We expected that, ten years in the future, full-time jobs would still be the norm for the majority of Americans. We did not understand yet how attractive remote working and the gig economy would become for employers, and how easy it would be to outsource almost every single job excepting healthcare, law enforcement, utilities, and, of course, Amazon distribution centers.

Those of us with small children in the 2010s had no idea that, upon their graduation from high school, we would be pressuring them to learn a physical trade instead of going to college. The Liberal Arts degrees we so proudly earned, badges of our eclectic interests and lateral thinking, would be to our children proof of our naive frivolity in the face of great change.

We thought the stores would come back.

Across America, we awaited the day the malls would roll up their steel dropdown doors, and their chainstores would spring back to life, as tulips blooming through the last frost of March.

But we couldn’t comprehend how many would stay out of business forever. How the brands we’d grown up with would disappear into memory, their physical stores retreating to optimistic Amazon backpages. From flagship to tombstone in less than a decade; from thousands of brands, to the dozen that now own everything.

Of course, the monopolies we had reckoned with, to a degree. Amazon, appropriate to its name, had stood tallest for quite a while. But until the 2020s, we didn’t fully appreciate the effect its dominance would have on physical shopping, how quaintly dated the very act of ‘going to the store’ would become.

And the malls! Those hollow giants, the abandoned temples of the consumerist religion we grew up with: we watched them die, to be destroyed and reclaimed by the elements, in some cases, but in others, to be simply left unattended, colonized by squatters. Had you told us that the malls of our youth would, by 2030, become ad hoc group shelters for the hundreds who could no longer afford their rents and mortgages, and whose very land had become utterly worthless, we would have laughed at the surreality.

We thought Joe Biden would be president.

Yes, we saw the articles on the alt-right Facebook groups, and we saw the news networks wringing their hands. No, we never laughed the Magans off; we had understood their power since 2016.

We knew that norms were changing, but an election result was an election result, we thought, a self-evident and mathematical truth that could not be argued with. Yes, we braced ourselves, but deep down believed the right thing would happen. Trump would step aside, and Biden would step inside. The peaceful transfer of power would be respected by the party who most loudly championed the values of freedom and Liberty.

It was not the case.

We knew the red capped mobs would descend in protest. We suspected they might even show up with guns. We did not know there would be so much blood.

We could not have protected the police officers failing (or refusing) to stop the Magans from slaughtering innocents. We could not believe the Supreme Court and Senate would trade centuries of storied sobriety to maintain a fraudulent despot in office.

We would not believe that there was nothing any of us could do about it.

We thought Harris would win too.

It was time for a woman, we thought, and she was next in line. Neither Pence nor Pompeo nor Cotton were trusted entirely with the keys to the Magan empire — as Constantine the Great’s sons squandered his.

Harris, we thought, would mend the rifts, set things straight, return us to sanity. And surely she would have.

We did not think they could so brazenly steal another election.

And yet.

We thought the internet would bring us together.

It may seem impossible to believe, but back then, there were many of us who still thought the internet a benevolent force, even an inherently good one. We wrote off our increasing polarization, and creeping clickbaited extremism, as bugs, not features.

The great behemoths who seemed to rule the ins and outs of our days — Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook — we made the error of assuming that because we paid them attention that they were our employee. It was the opposite way around. We were all working for them.

The internet drove culture, and mutated it at a rate that the virus would have been jealous of. The memes and references of one year would become all but unrecognizable in the next. In the span of a decade, our preferred length of entertainment halved, then quartered.

As our grandparents had started out as workers, and been forced into becoming consumers, all of us were forced to become influencers — and in a world where everyone was an influencer, was anyone? We knew we liked social networks, but we did not believe that making content would be as important (if not identical) to making an income, or putting food on your table. Not having a following became the equivalent of not having a home. We certainly didn’t expect our social platforms to be the providers of our healthcare. Nor did we expect how terrifyingly easy it was for our ‘social credit’ to translate into our financial credit, and vice versa.

We thought that truth would win out.

We all heard protestations about how “the other side” just wouldn’t accept reality. Whatever “side” was ours, we mocked the opposing tribe as out of touch fools, conspiracy theorists, uneducated idiots. Someday, we nodded sagely, they will see the truth.

That was not the case.

The 2020s felt like a massive axe had riven the shared skull of America, splitting us into inalterable, incompatible worldviews, an ideological gulf none of us could traverse. We blamed the algorithms, and the symbiotic relationship that formed; certainly the farther they pushed us away from each other, the more clicks we gave them.

But really, we need to blame ourselves. We couldn’t agree on anything, so we stopped talking. We stopped trying. Soon, we didn’t eat the same food. We didn’t sing the same songs. We didn’t enjoy the same content. We didn’t like each other, want to be around each other, or even want to know each other.

Even at the height of the Civil War, our ancestors still considered themselves countrymen to their enemy. But ours was no honorable fight. Our war started because of beliefs shallowly held, but felt to the bone anyway.

Two nations had once again formed — but it was never our fault, we said.

We thought the States would stay United.

Sure, we knew there were red and blue dyed states, hotspot states and ‘safe’ states, giver states and taker states. And yes, we knew that the chief differentiator had to do with the percentage of cosmopolitan versus rural populace. Yes, we knew that the Electoral College and the gerrymandered districts had inflated the chances of the rural tribe, thus unhealthily increasing their validation.

But the best that we hoped for was better political leaders. A period of moderation, perhaps.

We could never expect what happened.

Take too many elections away from the will of the people, we warned, and the people will react. Impose the morality of a Bible Belt farmer onto a Harvard academic or Hollywood artist, and manifestos will appear against you; dictate the daily life of the cowboy from a DC office or NYC pressroom, and you’re liable to get death threats. But push the two against each other directly, and you’ll surely watch the whole thing go up in flames.

We did not know the ‘Metro states’ of the Northeast, Great Lakes and the Left Coast would be the ones to move first. Yet it all made so much sense; metropolitan taxes would no longer support rural dominance; our governance (and theirs) could be as local as we wanted it; we could all push for policies as progressive (or conservative) as we collectively, regionally wanted. Nationalism and capitalism were Siamese twins, we argued, and they were both dying.

We did know secession was a dirty word, which is why we called it a withdrawal, a ‘Liberexit’, a conscious uncoupling. The rest of the country called it treason. And then the guns came out.

United we’d fallen. Will divided we stand?

We did not know, ten years ago, that today we would be standing on the precipice of a radically different America — perhaps two. We could not foresee that, to save ourselves, we might need to let the rest of us go.

But it is 2030 now.

And we are no longer in the dark. And now we know.