No, 2020 Was Not the 'Worst Year Ever.'
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A lot of things happened last year, and I don't just mean that from an American perspective. I think a lot of things happened last year that affected the entire world. [Music] And if I saw a response to any of this more than anything else, I think it was the idea that 2020 was just a bad year, or maybe that it should have been cancelled, or that it just sucked, or something like that, which just tried to take everything troubling that happened and wrap it neatly together in a bow reading, "Well, the year was just bad."
1:00 As a consequence of all that, I kept seeing people lamenting how much worse the year could get, what else could have gone wrong, just when we all thought 2020 was the worst 12 months of our lives.
This got me to thinking: well, how—what was it that made people say 2020 was a bad year? Of course, there's an obvious answer to that. The events that took place in the year weren't good events, so it makes sense to say that the year in which all such events took place was itself not good. And that's it, right? Like, that's not just the obvious answer, that's the answer. It just makes sense to say that 2020 was a bad year. It just makes sense to say that 2021 might be better. It just makes sense. And call me over-analytical for not liking that answer, but I don't like it. It hasn't told me anything. It has not quenched my thirst to figure out what the hell is going on when we say this, "I don't know why, it just makes sense."
2:03 "What makes 2020 a bad year is that people thought it was a bad year." Well, yeah, no [ __ ], but what made people think that? What conditions specifically initiated in people's minds the idea that the whole of 2020 was bad? Well, bad conditions. It's probably not that deep, but no, I'm still not satisfied with that answer either.
If you told me that I was being bad and I asked you why you thought I was being bad, you wouldn't say, "Well, because you were doing bad things." You would likely list for me some actions which I would also recognize as bad: I did something bad, where "something" is replaceable with something else assumed to be bad necessarily. I was maybe lying to damage your reputation, vandalizing your house, or defecating on your porch. These are all just bad things that people in civil society are expected not to do because their being bad
3:03 is self-evident and necessary. So what was it in 2020 that was assumed to be necessarily bad? The best answer to that question is death, I think.
"Over 450,000 people around the world have died because of coronavirus." "Close to 200,000 Americans dead." "The U.S. reporting more than 371,000 American lives lost." "4,300 coronavirus deaths." "20,000 in just two weeks." "The world's surpassing one million deaths from the coronavirus."
Death, and all of the disruptions to regular life that it entails—being trapped at home, cut off from the regularities of life, facing economic scarcity, being reminded on the news repeatedly that people across the country are suffering from disaffected conditions, and seeing your government repeatedly impotent in the face of all that, "They are dying," "That's true," "It is what it is." The fact is, death is inevitable. So here
4:06 really is an answer that ties all this together: 2020 was a bad year because its events reminded us of the inevitable, our necessary unfreedom as agents—subject, slaves to death. And pardon me if that's a little bit dramatic, but why wouldn't this remind us of the inevitable?
I think all of this is really scary for people. You'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who embraces the coronavirus as something which is going to make people healthier and happier, or somebody who thinks that being killed by the police is a liberating experience which just fills you with joy. No, for many people, these are terrifying things, threatening not only the fabric of day-to-day life, but life in particular. This is something that can [ __ ] kill you.
But again, hold on. This is pretty obvious. That we fear death is not a stunning revelation. So if it's so obvious, why bother trying to
5:06 look into it? It's probably not that deep. And yeah, I would agree, it's probably not that deep, but I'm just trying to make a little bit more sense of it.
So as shallow as everything I've said thus far is, I think if we want to understand it, it leads to questions which the statement that 2020 was bad only partly answers. First, it can lead one to ask: well, where does our inevitability begin? We already know where it ends: death. Once we're born, death is the only certainty. It cannot fail. The devil is in the details—details like, where does it begin? What about five minutes before we die? Is that inevitable? If the five minutes after that point seem inevitable, then what about the five minutes prior to it? Then we could say, "Well, what about the five minutes prior to that?" and so on and so on until the very moment we're born. That would seem to be a totally fatalistic position, and indeed this entire issue seems to raise the question of fate and its relation to us as supposedly free agents.
6:07 At some point, our freedom will conflict with the inevitability of our death, a future event which is contingent to our current circumstances. There's a certain shock in that fact, a shock in the realization that at some point—we don't know when, but at some point—we will have made a decision which is going to directly contribute to the inevitability of our demise. In that way, I think it's fair to say then that when someone says 2020 was a bad year, they're partially implying that 2020 was bad because of all those who would suffer the inevitability of death; so many did so in this year, perhaps unnecessarily.
But wait, hold on a moment here. People die every year. Why is 2020 any different? What about Hurricane Katrina? What about SARS or H1N1? Well, I think a second question arises not only as to humanity's involvement in inevitability in general, but the involvement of the living in inevitability in particular.
7:07 Right now, when it comes to regular judgments about day-to-day affairs, people are generally inclined towards their immediate surroundings, and it is these things, their immediate conditions, which elicit the quickest, most visceral responses in them most of the time. So, being out of touch with the past, these past tragedies don't really affect us as much. And if we're going to say from a certain personal perspective whether or not a past tragedy affects us as much as a current tragedy, well, the current tragedy is going to weigh out whether or not it ought to.
So regardless of how things actually were in past years, we could say that not only was 2020 bad in general because so many people died, but 2020 was bad particularly for me, whoever is answering the statement, because, "Well, I could remember how I felt in 2019 or how I felt in 2018, and comparatively, I seem to have felt worse in 2020 than I did
8:07 in those past years."
But where the first question was answered based on facts about life and death, the second rests in personal conditions, sentimental feelings about those facts. Putting those two answers together then, we might be able to say that people would have called 2020 bad because, "Well, so many people died last year. That made me feel scared, frightened, and helpless." And that, I think, is a pretty alright answer, one possible explanation as to what initiated the idea in people's minds that 2020 was a bad year. It is, in part, a statement of relief and exhaust valve decompressing the pressures that the year may have put on people, both objectively and subjectively.
But I still think there's something really unsatisfying about this. This answer doesn't tell us why, for instance, the millions of people that died in 2019 weren't given the same treatment. Maybe for some people they were, but this video is based on the fact that news outlets and memes
9:08 lamented 2020 ad nauseam. As far as I can tell, that didn't really happen for 2019, 2018, or any other year thus far. So what gives?
The answer, I think, seems to lie in how material facts about one's life—one's housing, access to news of their livelihood—create personal responses. Thus, for instance, the rich don't need to care about poverty. They should, absolutely, but in terms of their own lives, they're safe and secure in their gated communities. Not only is poverty something which they don't experience, but it's something which they physically don't see. The environment in which their minds and opinions are situated is literally out of touch.
It's a problem that's not new, not by any means. In the Italian writer Boccaccio's famous work, The Cameron, we read of this exact sort of urban flight from popular conditions, but in the context of a very different kind of disease. In Bocasio's time, the Middle Ages, the pandemic ravaging the world was very
10:08 different but harrowing all the same he wrote of pigs chewing on the corpses of the dead of the total dissolution of the law and of upper-class men and women attempting to flee from such conditions if that sort of thing interests you then i highly recommend you check out curiositystream this video sponsor because they've got a great documentary on it curiositystream is a streaming service with thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles on pretty much every subject you could imagine psychology economics and even history of the middle ages it's all there the video that i alluded to earlier is called black death the invisible enemy and it's actually from a series of videos available on curiosity stream called butterfly effect i highly recommend you check it out if you're interested in making comparisons with current events in the past if you found this ad transition to be a little bit annoying too well they've also got you covered there because they've partnered with me and numerous other educational creators on our website nebula unlike the professionally produced documentaries on curiosity
11:10 stream here on nebula you'll find not only an ad-free copy of this video but of all of my other videos as well as those from creators like second thought adam nealy and real life lore what's curiositystream's role well if you sign up for it at the link in the description or right here at curiositystream.com mr amazing you'll get nebula completely for free oh and by the way that's in addition to another 26 off discount the curiosity stream itself costing you less than 15 a year after discount if any of that sounds enticing and you'd like to learn more about the middle ages or the black death then go to the link in the description or use the link on screen now it really helps me out and keeps this channel going now on with the video then as now attempting to flee disease often proves futile it is inescapable and i think it's that which warrants the broader response no matter how well off you are you can contract covet no matter how well
12:12 armed you are, you're not going to shoo away a rightfully angry mob. Between 2019 and 2020, there is then a shift not only in who is affected by conditions expediting inevitability, but consequently an attitudinal shift in the locale where inevitability is found. There is thus a destabilization as concerns where and how material and personal conditions relate—a tear in time.
A man in 2019 could have declared the year good because any badness inherent in the year was due to what he would have thought were objective conditions; his feelings and emotions were enough to deal with them. The same man would have declared 2020 bad because his personal feelings and attitude were not sufficient for such dealing, a fact mirrored in the decay of his own environmental conditions. His concrete material conditions are worse off in light of the all-pervasive nature of the virus threatening to kill him or the riots threatening the status quo of the justice system. 2020 was a bad
13:13 year, thus, not only because more people perceived it as such, but also because such perception was entirely dependent on people's being exposed to negativities they were not exposed to in past years. 2019, then, was a good year for many people because they didn't have to worry about anything—there was nothing for them to worry about. 2020 was, however, bad for the same people because, well, now they do have things to worry about.
Again, I think this is kind of obvious. COVID and racial rioting were heavily reported on and affected the entirety of America. Coveted itself affected the entirety of the globe. I think it is, however, naive to say that these things in themselves weren't negativity novel enough to declare all of 2020 bad. Was racial injustice any more tolerable in 2019 or 2018? Were the sufferings of those without healthcare any less in those years, or the preventable deaths any less
14:14 repugnant no i don't think they were they were only less seen goodness and badness than being dependent on how people feel about what they see it seems that what could have been called good years in comparison to 2020 or simply years in which less people were able to smell the stink of suffering going on beneath their noses so was 2020 bad yeah i think it was but it also was in many ways no worse than the events of so-called better years which have only now revealed their true colors i think instead of lamenting how the year should have been cancelled the better question now is well what can be done to make 2021 better this is mr amazing thank you for watching
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