Good riddance to a tortured decade of tantrums and trolls
IN 80 days time another decade comes to an end.
Most evoke a certain feeling by just the mention of their name: the Roaring Twenties, the Nifty Fifties, the Swinging Sixties. But the one about to bite the dust has been so forgettable we don’t even know what number to give it (the Twenty Tens?) let alone find an adjective to capture it.
So, can I be the first to christen it the Tortured Teens because it was a decade which pushed many of us to the brink of breakdown while throwing a big stroppy tantrum on social media at the forces we blamed for screwing our lives.
It started with the financial crash which almost bankrupted the world, although the people who caused it were given a free pass to carry on speculating and buying super yachts with the proceeds. Greece and Ireland nearly went to the wall while many Britons went to foodbanks to eat, or shop doorways and hostels to sleep, as austerity governments slashed spending on those at the bottom while rewarding those at the top with tax cuts.
The punishment of those who had little by those who had plenty let in self-serving, crypto-fascists who called for rebellion against the evil elites. Elites they were in the same country club as.
This populism led to Brexit paralysis
here and Trumpian lunacy in America, otherwise known as banging your head against a wall whenever you turned on a news channel.
In the Tortured Teens every hit film had to be about a superhero, music was so bland Ed Sheeran became a megastar and you only heard decent tunes when a legend like Bowie died. A time when Netflix deservedly murdered traditional telly because all it was showing was washed-up ex-reality TV contestants dancing, baking, or eating a wallaby’s scrotum.
A decade when most adults had a parent with dementia who had to sell their house to get into a care home. When Uber killed black taxis, Spotify killed CDs, Amazon killed the high street, everyone was offended by everything and irony died a slow death as successive Tory prime ministers vowed to save the NHS. In the Tortured Teens tantrums were thrown in restaurants when your only choice was sucking fusion cuisine off a piece of slate, and in pubs when the hipster in front of you demanded to sample every craft ale tap before buying.
It was the decade when trolls were given a free pass to spread poison from their mum’s spare bedroom and conversation died as people lived life through their hand-held selfie machines.
Even as ISIS were beheading victims in caves, people watching on their phones had pop-up adverts reminding them about their recent Botox enquiry.
So how apt that the Tortured Teens ends with a sulking man-child like Trump creating a vacuum in the Middle East which could end up as the Third World War while another one, Boris Johnson, sticks his fingers in his ears and whistles as grown-up politicians yell at him for leading us into a no-deal wasteland.
And young people block roads and airports to warn that we’re selfishly destroying planet Earth, but there’s only one thing we’re emotionally invested in as we gawp excitedly at our selfie-machines:
“It’s... Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
‘‘ Netflix killed TV, Uber killed taxis and Amazon killed the high street