A lesson learned from Y2K: HOW THE 2000s BECAME EVERTHING, by Colette Shade

 Success means nothing if it’s not built to last.

            It was a bit of a surreal and fascinating experience reading Colette Shade’s wonderful new book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, as it was the first book that attempts to tell a history of the decade when I became an adult (time never stops marching on and will eventually consume us all). Shade tells the story of the famous “Aughts” through a deeply personal lens, combining her own experiences living through that decade with a deeper analysis of the trends of American culture, many of which were shaped by larger global changes that ordinary Americans were completely unaware of.

            Shade’s book seems partly inspired by the wave of 2000’s nostalgia that has arrived on cue in this decade, which she compellingly argues is not so much nostalgia for “things were so much better back then!” (I was there—they were not), but more so nostalgia for a time when people genuinely had hope about the future and looked to it with optimism, rather than the creeping dread that so many people around the world now feel these days. Shade does a great job capturing how the world felt to middle-class Americans circa 1999, when the stock market was on a roll that we all thought would never stop, and so many of us still had good jobs, and pensions, and homes, and good credit lines, etc. etc. She points out what a paper tiger that 1990’s economy actually was: how it depended on using globalization to exploit poorer countries; on shaky housing and tech loans that greedy corporations recklessly handed out without limit; on being able to consume resources without limit regardless of the environmental and climactic consequences. The boom of the 90’s could never last given how shaky its foundations were (although the country wasting trillions of dollars in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly did not help).

            In between these larger economic observations, Shade also tells stories of frustration that are all too familiar for those of us who came of age in that decade. I knew even then how terribly the media treated women, but Shade directly connects the decade’s cultural obsessions with the development of her eating disorder, as TV and magazines told her every day that women should be skinny, curvy, have perfect hair and teeth, and mainly complement themselves on weight loss challenges. One of her most funny and stunning revelations is how 2000’s-era models often came from the broken remnants of the Soviet Union—where there were millions of blonde, skinny, desperate women who were willing to do just about anything to be able to send money home to their families, and who then played an indirect role in setting all the impossible beauty standards of that decade. She also has entire chapters pointing out the absurdity of the infamous Hummers and mcmansions of the Aughts (symbols of the empty celebration of excess that defined the decade), as well as how the culture’s mass embrace of hip-hop enabled white people to daily sing various ethnic and homophobic slurs while insisting that “it wasn’t really what they believed.”

            Overall, Shade’s book is a fascinating, well-written book that tears down the façade of the 2000’s as a fun-loving decade, and shows how much of the darkness of our modern world originated from our failure to properly tackle the world’s problems when we were still positive and prosperous enough to be in a position to do so. We as a society will never be able to build a better world until we recognize that we have to build an economy and a society that is built to last, and to survive the various global challenges that younger generations will be forced to encounter throughout this century. Until we do, we will always be stuck in these nostalgia loops, longing for a time when it looked like everything was better, even if it was all just on the surface.