Roy Tang

Today is the last day of the 2010s. I was originally planning a short retrospective on the past decade, but that felt a bit unfair to the other decades prior which hadn’t received such reflection, so let’s go through all of the four decades I’ve lived through so far.

• 80s: Having been born in 78, the 80s were my “growing up” years.
  • I lived through the EDSA revolution, but I don’t remember much of what was actually happening in society during that time. My world then was playing around at home and being sleepy in the mornings before shuttling off to school.
  • Life was learning and playing and growing up with family.
• 90s: The 90s were my decade of identity, of figuring out who I was.
  • This was my decade of high school and college.
  • All of my current tastes in fiction and music and friends and hobbies can more or less be traced back to the 90s.
  • Life was more learning and meeting people and forming friendships.
• 00s: The 00s were my decade of work.
  • I went out in the world and figured out how it works and what I was good at and how I could make a living doing it.
  • I spent most of the decade with my head buried in work during the day and otherwise enjoying life where opportunity presented.
  • Life was work and learning how to buy stuff for myself and to manage my finances and forming more friendships and walking the conventional way through the world.
• 10s: The 2010s were for me a decade of frustration.
  • I slowly came to grips with the shortcomings of humanity, the world, society, industry, governance systems, and even individual people.
  • It was during this decade that I paid more attention to politics both local and international to issues threatening the future of my country and the world.
  • On the bright side, it was also during this decade that a lot of my hobbies, formerly considered fringe/nerdy, cemented their place in mainstream culture: the decade of gaming, superheroes, megahit fantasy tv series, and so on.
  • Life was work but also dissatisfaction with work, and dissatisfaction with the world in general and the beginning of searching for alternatives to the conventional way through the world.

I’ve tagged this entry as “decadenotes”, which is a bit of hopeful optimism that this blog will still be around in more or less the same form 10 years from now. I don’t know what the coming decade will bring, but I do know that the likelihood is that I only get maybe 2-4 more of these, optimistically, so here’s to hopeful optimism about the decade(s) to come.