“It’s been a good decade, would be nice to have another one. I’m just joking though because climate change.”
That’s what our Special Sections editor, junior Noelle Barrera, said when we asked her how she felt about the past 10 years. And to be quite frank, we agree.
It’s hard to say too many positive things about this decade because, well, we weren’t really individuals for the first half of it. Though some of us were nearing our teens, most of us weren’t even in middle school yet. Even then, some of the biggest moments in our life have happened in the past decade: We graduated high school, we started college. Some of us moved to a new city, some of us are living on our own for the first time.
Of course, along with all of those empowering moments, there are also all of the awkward middle school dances, awkward encounters with crushes and just the overall awkwardness that comes with growing bodies and minds.
All this talk about the past decade has gotten us thinking about what’s to come. Think about it, by the next turn of the decade, most of us will be in our thirties. We’ll have jobs and lives and homes and friends all different from the ones we have now.
There’s also the whole topic of climate change. Who knows if this planet will even be inhabitable in a decade? We digress.
New years’ celebrations are hard. There’s a lot of pressure to make lists: lists of resolutions, lists of memories, lists of people to reach out to because it’s been too long. There’s pressure to get things done or to have gotten things done, to have achieved something greater than yourself or to have somehow changed as a person, hopefully for the better.
So, we’re not going to think about that this year. Sure, we’ll joke a bit about the inevitability of all-too-real artificial intelligence and the impending catastrophe that awaits our world, but we’re not going to feel too pressured to live up to the end of the year. Instead, we’ll celebrate the small things.
In the past year, we’ve all survived exams, whether by an inch or by a longshot. We’ve become new people, even if we didn’t mean to. We probably should all try to drink more water, just in general, but we drank enough water in the past year to keep us here, and that’s got to count for something.
Deciding you want to change a part of your life and actually doing that is a great thing, but you don’t have to wait for the new year, and you definitely don’t need to do it just because of the new year. You don’t even need to do it because of the new decade. Do it on your own time.
