Decade in review: 2009 = FAIL, 2000s = WIN

A little while back, I joked to one of my colleagues that I was going to post a picture of myself from last New Years here, with the word “FAIL” plastered across my face. And, well, here it is. After all, if you look at the goals I set for myself when the calendar flipped over to 2009, it was a pretty massive failure.

The book/opus is so far from finished it’s not funny. I didn’t become an intellectually lean, focused machine - although at the time of writing, there are still five days left to make that happen before I jump on a plane to London (at the time of publishing, there will just be three). I’ve got my food issues reasonably under control and my relationship is going swimmingly (touch wood), but I’m not exactly soaring at the great creative heights I’d like to be. But then, as Alain de Botton has shown us, doesn’t everyone feel like that (or everyone who’s a compulsive, affirmation-seeking overachiever, at any rate)? And more importantly, don’t most years fail to live up to our hopes?

But if 2009 feels like a failure, the 2000s feel like a wonderful, unpredictable, transformative beast. I may not feel satisfied when I look back on the past 12 months, but when I look back on the past 10 years I’m amazed by what I’ve achieved, and all the experiences I’ve had, good and bad. Forget 80s and 90s revival parties, I’m already hanging out for the 00s revival.

I’ve read before that we overestimate what we can achieve in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year. I’d take that one step further: we overestimate the what we can change in a year, but we cannot fathom how much we - and the world - can change in 10.

Back at the beginning of the decade, when I was an angsty teenager, I despaired in one of my journals that the things that irked me (mostly boys) would remain forever the same. Life, after all, was but a series of days - and if nothing changed from day to day, how could we expect it to from year to year? But personal progress is not unlike political progress, found in the cumulative weight of days rather than in each individual one. And even if nothing of significance appears to happen on most days, there are still a handful that are momentous. Things just happen more slowly than we would like them to.

On a personal level, I realised last night that as much as I’m embarrassed for the girl I was in, say, 2000 (her naivety, her vulnerability, her painful insecurity), she’s not actually that different a person than I am now. She still enjoyed making up silly stories with her friends, and was excited by the same music, theories, fields and ideas. Her insecurities, while more intense, weren’t actually all that different to the ones I still hold now. She even basically dressed the same (blonde hair and heels aside). Perhaps what we often talk about as transformation is really refinement; not becoming a different person, but becoming better at being the people we were all along.

Read more: Hola 2009: Meditations on a New Year
Aspiration, Longing and Alain de Botton