Josh Sherman
Usually for the last post of the year I do a bit of a retrospective / lessons learned kind of post. Not going to bore you with that this year.
Instead, I want to talk a bit about the concept of a decade. The only time I personally seem to reference decades is in regard to music and fashion. When speaking in context of myself, it’s always about where I came from and usually encompasses “the 90s” in which I spent only 4 years of the 1990s in high school.
It actually came as a bit of a surprise to me when I heard we’re at the end of a decade the other day. Guess I’ve been so focused the last few years that I didn’t realize or acknowledge this. It genuinely came as a surprise.
Also, I’m not here to discuss the nuance of the decade starting on the zero or one, that’s a fight I don’t care about at all.
The thing is, at least for me, decades don’t really matter, not in the calendar sense at least. During the last decade I spent time in both my twenties and thirties. The decade may be ending, bit it’s not MY decade.
I’ll probably always say things like “back in the 80s” to describe the first half of my youth, grade school and such, and “but you don’t understand, it was the 90s” to describe the second half, as well as some of my poorly picked tattoos ;)
After the first two decades of my existence, everything shifted to “my twenties” and “my thirties” and I suspect this is the same for most people, even though the media is determined to force the end of a decade down our throats to help sell mattresses and other shit we may not need.
That said, looking back on the last ten years of my life is fairly interesting and includes a substantial amount of personal growth. But I don’t think the decade itself had anything to do with it, outside of access to technology and additional capital.
