It’s the time of year when everybody with a blog-like product is expected to weigh in on how this year compares to other years in recent (or not-so-recent) history. And in my usual career-limiting fashion, I really don’t have a blazingly hot Take about 2021 as a year.
On a personal level, it’s been very much a mixed bag. On the good side, I finished writing and editing A Brief History of Timekeeping (due out Jan 25, but you can pre-order it…), I recorded a series of lectures for The Great Courses (which look good, and will be out sometime next year), and I was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in recognition of my science outreach work, which was a really nice honor. On the bad side, we had a couple of really major losses in the family with the deaths of my Uncle Joe and especially my grandmother. Those two alone make it hard not to head into 2022 on a down note.
On the other hand, you know, death is inevitable, and all that. And there’s been a lot of good stuff in the family, as well. After a super rough end to the 2019-20 school year and a kind of rocky 2020-21, SteelyKid had a really good start to this year, and is fired up about the prospect of high school next year (much as that makes me and Kate say “Yikes!”). And The Pip is rounding into a pretty awesome Little Dude, who’s really into sports and video games but also excels at school, and is slyly hilarious. We are so very lucky with who our kids are turning out to be.
This is the point where I’m supposed to pull back and assess the national and global state of [vague expansive gesture] all this. And that, in turn, is where I just comprehensively fail to have any kind of coherent and dramatic Take to offer.
I can’t even find anybody else’s dramatic Take to co-sign. I’ve read (or at least skim-read) what feels like dozens of overwrought essays about how 2021 Was The Absolute Worst or arguing that This Is The Year That Exposed The Brokenness Of Everything, and I just can’t quite buy into those. Which is not to say that things haven’t been bad, just that I’m not entirely sure that it was ever reasonable to expect something dramatically better. A huge fraction of the “Everything sucks now” #Discourse seems based on a comparison to some wildly unrealistic ideal world of pure imagination, in which transformative changes happen instantaneously and effortlessly.
What’s kind of mind-boggling about this is that, in so many ways, we’re in a much better place than many of the very same people now pushing out downer Takes were telling us to expect at earlier points. When the pandemic went global in early 2020, there was a ton of chatter about how it could take 18 months to develop and test a Covid vaccine that might be as good as a flu shot (if it was even possible, because nobody had ever made a coronavirus vaccine before). Twenty-odd months later, we’ve given out billions of doses of vaccines that even with some waning immunity are way better at preventing serious illness that we were being told to expect. The January 6th riot was supposed to be the Fort Sumter of a new civil war, a harbinger of a new normal of escalating political violence, but that really hasn’t happened— lots of ugly yelling, but very little shooting. A total collapse of the public health system and/or the global economy has been mere days away, what, four times now?
In actual reality, we just keep bumbling along, and have ended up in a place that’s not exactly great, but not that awful, either. Because, you know, that’s kind of what we do as a species. Had you described the broad outlines of the current situation to me in March of 2020— Biden in office but his agenda mired in Congress, vaccines available but not quite universally distributed or accepted, the economy kind of messed up but not a complete disaster— I would’ve said “Yeah, that seems about right.” Some of the specific details are more floridly crazy than I would’ve expected, but in big-picture terms we’re probably slightly to the good side of what it was reasonable to expect.
So, in the end, I land on “Yeah, 2021 was certainly a year.” There’s no shortage of things I would’ve liked to go better, but also any number of ways it might’ve been much, much worse. I just don’t really buy most of the sweeping conclusions that I see being drawn from this; I certainly don’t see a case for it being worse than 2020.
I’m not that sad to put 2021 in the metaphorical rearview mirror, and there are good reasons to expect better from 2022 in some respects. Of course, there also reasons to expect some other things to go badly. It’s been a year, tomorrow it’ll be a new year, and we keep plugging along because that’s what we do.
Not really a stirring note on which to end and throw you the traditional buttons, but, you know…
If you want to offer hopeful tidings for 2022, or spit on the grave of 2021, the comments will be open.