On the mantle where we keep all of the Christmas cards we receive, one particular card captured the mood of this year best. Atop a photo of a happy family in tastefully coordinated holiday apparel, in lieu of the usual upbeat “wishing you joy” or “Merry Christmas” message, the card read:
“It’s fine. We’re fine. Everything is fine.”
If you’re so inclined and haven’t sent out cards yet this year, online custom print shop Minted offers a New Year’s card you can send friends saying, “2020 – one out of five stars, would not recommend,” or one where you can upload a photo of your dog and declare, “It’s been a ruff year.”
That there is a market for such cards at all aligns with people’s overall assessment of a year that included a pandemic, an economic collapse, a presidential impeachment, civil unrest, and an election in which sharp divisions were laid bare. Over 1.7 million people died of a virus most had never heard of at the start of the year, murder rates are up by double digits in major cities across the country, and the economy remains in trouble as people remain unemployed and businesses remain shuttered.
The awful reality of 2020 is rendered even worse through the lens of a media environment that focuses on the worst (for instance, hyping up isolated instances of supposed bad reactions to the coronavirus vaccine instead of contextualizing just how rare or possibly unrelated they are) and the ease with which people stuck at home can “doomscroll” by devoting tons of time to scrolling through social media, unconsciously searching for content that makes them feel, even if the feeling is bad.
It is worth noting that, in recent years, it has been more fashionable to declare that the year was terrible and to wish it good riddance. It seems almost quaint now that we know what 2020 had in store. In 2016, the death of beloved icons including Prince and David Bowie combined with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were all used to create a popular narrative that the year had been “the worst.” By 2019, despite a relatively strong domestic economy, there were plenty of articles declaring the year quite bad, saying, “We know you want 2019 canceled, reported and blocked.”
But this time, “what an awful year” isn’t just a meme of a dumpster on fire or a lament about beloved celebrities we’ve lost on our most recent trip around the sun — it is how people are thinking about their own lived experience in the midst of a historic global crisis.
In 2019, 47% of registered voters said that they thought the year had been a good one for their family, worse than where things had stood in the mid-2010s, where majorities had said the year was good but certainly better than in 2009 in the aftermath of the financial crisis where only 34% said it had been a good year.
But in 2020, the numbers crashed. Less than one in four said it was a “good year” for their family, while a whopping two-thirds said it was bad. In this month’s recent Echelon Insights national poll, when respondents were asked what words they would use to describe 2020, the top responses were stressful (56%), frustrating (51%), and depressing (49%). Some 40% found the year “isolating” while only 2% found it “uniting.”
How will we reflect on this terrible year in the decades to come? The most upbeat take is that we may come to look back on 2020 more fondly due to the power of nostalgia, which smooths away the rough edges.
Or perhaps we will come to see it as a necessary evil: with the devastation of the year clearing a path for something better to be built, that the things came to a head this year in painful fashion, racial tensions, government dysfunction, economic destruction, have at some fundamental level paved the way for greater unity and a healthier way of life in the future. Like a fire that destroys but also clears away underbrush to make room for new life, perhaps 2020 has realigned our way of life in ways some will look back on positively.
The good news is that there is hope. A coronavirus vaccine is being rolled out, relief measures have finally been passed by Congress and signed into law, and the concerning rise in infections and deaths that marked the start of December may be tapering back off again in the United States. While assessments of the present are grim, views on the future have generally remained upbeat even in the face of crisis. In Echelon Insights polling, some 44% of people, a plurality, believe 2021 will be better than this year, and only 11% believe 2021 will be worse for them.
President-elect Joe Biden is fond of quoting Ernest Hemingway, saying, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Here’s to hoping that though 2020 broke many things in our world, we emerge stronger in 2021.
