It is difficult to resist the temptation to somehow recap, label, or otherwise sum up the last ten years. But it’s not impossible. As we reach the end of this decade, a lot of people are trying very hard to figure out what the hell has happened to us, while others are merely phoning in hastily-written trash, so they can get started on their vacations. I, on the other hand–I am sympathetic to the plight of my fellow nobodies; I just want to get on with my life. Such as it is.

I also question whether it’s even possible to sum up any given ten year span; furthermore, I would like to humbly suggest that it’s impossible to ever achieve an emotionally satisfying observance of the passage from one arbitrarily defined period of time to another. That sort of thing always, always, always comes much later. That suggests that one of the most vital parts of the work of assigning significance and coherence to past events is allowing ourselves to forget.

Well of course. However complicated decades past must have been for the people who were living there at the time, we people of the future have collectively devised a shorthand way of summing up-and dismissing-all that inconvenient complexity. The 50′s? Repression. The 60′s? Hippies. The 70′s? Disco. You could just as easily substitute a number of one-word descriptions, but people will generally know what you mean.

The urge to codify and summarize the past ten years, it seems to me, is part of a powerful desire to simply write-off the entire decade. Let’s get a label on it and get it out the door. Moving up, moving on, no time to look back, let’s only do this once and get it over with.

We tend to remember the good stuff, and let the bad stuff slide. I think that many of us want to let the last ten years slide. One thing I know about end-of-decade round-ups is that they are pretty depressing.

Then again, just because it is difficult for those of us with fresh memories of this recent decade to summarize it in any distinct, pithy way, that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen eventually. In fact, while for us it might be impossible, for future generations it will be inevitable.

Twenty years from now, the kids of tomorrow will be under an even greater pressure to package and label the 2000-2010 era in such a way that it becomes easy to dismiss. They will have a name for this time period, and they will decide its defining characteristic-because they’ll have to. They won’t have time to carefully consider all the implications of all of the events that took place, so it will behoove them to develop the same kind of shorthand, brush-off type language that you and I have developed for the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s, that we use when we don’t want to think too hard about them.

Of course, this means that when we elderly people will try to impart some instructive tale from this benighted decade, we can expect to be fobbed off with a wave of the hand, and an insolent, “The 00′s? Facebook, right? Got it,” or what ever it is that they’ll say.

In the not so distant future, kids who haven’t even been born yet will be the ones to decide what’s important about the time we live in, as they lazily reconstruct the decade anew, based only on what little cultural detritus manages to filter down through the years.

Hey, we did it to our elders. What’s to stop it from happening to us?