Is it meaningful to assign personalities to the decades?

Things mentioned in this podcast:

• The thirty-year nostalgia cycle
• When did the sixties really begin?
• Did the nineties ever end?
• Life satisfaction over time

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're discussing the personality of decades. Nick, go for it.

Well, also, it's more difficult to refer to the noughties. I mean, that's a horrible phrase. And then, and then the 10s, we don't have the Edwardian era to sort of, you know, yeah, make up for it. So you can't even give them a name.

Exactly. Well, they call them the 10s in the 20s.

Yeah. I think that's what they coalesced on. And the things I've read, linguists, the particles I've read suggest that we're probably just going to revert back to that.

Well, that's the thing. There are some people who say it's just been one long 90s. But we'll get to that, I think.

Yeah. Okay. So that's what we want to talk about. Yeah. What do we want to talk about? I've forgotten.

Okay. So yeah, well, talk to me. Why do you want to talk about the personality of decades? Or we can be provocative and just go straight off and...

the 50s, definitely the 60s. And, you know, 70s, 80s and 90s. So yeah, is it meaningful? Well, I mean, I wonder whether I mean, I think it is meaningful, because, well, we do it. So it obviously has meaning for us. But But I think more in terms of the fact that we like to categorise we don't, you know, a single year is a bit meaningless as a period of time. And it seems that kind of 10 years is about the amount of time that you sort of can measure progress across technologies, societally, politically, economically, and so on. So I think as a lump of time, it kind of makes sense for us. And it definitely makes sense for us when we're looking at our near past, where we can gradate to that level, when we start looking back at the maybe just fewer people talked about cultural phenomena and so on, you know, further back in our history. But I wonder whether people did, you know, colloquially, in an unrecorded way, talk about about decades. But it feels to me like when you look a long way back, it's very difficult for us to distinguish between, you know, a particular period of Georgian history and a small period after that. We just want to look at it as a big lump of something that's very different from where we are now. Whereas when we get closer, we want to look in... Yeah, telescoping, I think it's called.

So which begs the question whether 100 years from now, we'll just be talking about, you know, the second Elizabethan era, for example, or whether they will still be talking about the 20s, 30s, well, really, I guess, really the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc. Peter, do you want to come in at this point?

And I think this is, I think this is a good, I think the reason why that is, is reflective of our age, right? I think when you look at the characterization of decades, very often, they're defined by youth culture, right? So, you know, the 50s, the 60s are defined by what was going on in youth culture at that time. And I think there's an element which relates to like, if you look at the 20s, right, then Nick was talking about the 20s being referred to, the roaring 20s, okay. And when people think, when you think about the 20s, what do you think of? You think of the Charleston, you think of Art Deco, cigarette holders, flappers, exactly, that kind of thing, which was probably young high society, right? But also you don't tend to think of, when you read The Great Gatsby, you remember those characters, you know, going around in those elegant surroundings, you don't really remember the sort of dust covered proles who they were referred to occasionally in the book. And I think there's a sense of history being written by the victors, right? And the victors are either the kind of privileged who are, you know, producing popular culture, or the young, and then the young go on and bang on about it for the next 30 or 40 years. The young become the historians. The young become the historians, exactly. So I think the reason you don't remember much about the last 20 years, and why, when you said the 90s, you know, one long 90s, that really resonated with me. But I'm a little bit cautious, because I'm like, is that just because I haven't been

looking at it through technology is, is probably the the best way to do it. Because now, if you think about the way culture is disseminated, it is done, you know, amongst the people who will set the sort of cultural history of the future, i.e. the young people, it is done via social media, a social media context. And maybe one of the reasons why you can't point to culture and say, it's, it's that thing there is maybe it's sort of less physical and less visible. And you know, you are I mean, if you think about cultural artefacts, you know, something like Game of Thrones, which has lasted sort of most of this decade, will probably be a, you know, a cultural reference. And it was a, you know, that kind of TV box set television becoming the primary vehicle for delivering cultural artefacts, as opposed to film, which was, you know, kind of previously, certainly in the 80s and beforehand. And, you know, I know, you've previously done a podcast on memes, the whole idea of memes couldn't really, you know, the way they're distributed couldn't exist previously. And they'll be taken forward as, you know, cultural. Do you remember when we all used to do whatever it was? So, yeah, maybe it's

by looking at change, and when change happens, that's maybe missing the point slightly. You know, if you look at sort of rock and roll, rock and roll did become popular, but it had, you know, had precursors, and it emerged. And what happened was a lot of things aligned, and it kind of reached its peak. And I think the 80s, you know, there's no doubt in my mind that in the 80s, American popular culture reached its zenith, right? You know, I mean, you, but it wasn't as if kind of new genres of movie came out, or there was particularly, you know, more different styles of pop music. It was just that that had all been bubbling along, and it reached a crescendo at that point. It was like, it's like a golden era of all that American consumerism, and so on, just being perfect before it disappeared off, you know. Yeah, I think you've got it, Chris. And I think it's

that cumulative thing of whether it just be something in politics, like a very strong, definable leader, for a long period of time, whether it's fashion, certain, and they sort of all swell in a certain sort of time and accumulate. And so it still can be distinct from another decade. But yeah, no, I think that's what it is. But by the way, I'm going to break the profoundometer for a moment, which is, as I was saying, I think the beginning of the 80s, yeah, they look a bit like the late 70s. And the late 80s start to look a bit like the 90s. But anyway, which is kind of what we're talking is, it's less, it's not so much about change. Yeah, they merge. Yeah. Although, I mean, I don't know.

really taking off. Yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah, that's all the things that actually happened in the 70s that everyone thinks would happen in the 60s. But all the best 60s music was made in the 70s. Anyway,

sorry, carry on. Let's have Chris, so your two answers. Yeah, so the best decade.

Interestingly, there's a New York Times survey of Americans about when they felt America was at its greatest. It was post the sort of, you know, Trump make America great again. And for Americans born in the 30s, 40s and 50s, they said the 50s. And in general, and for Americans born in the 60s and 70s, they said the 80s. And then it smattered around for people born after that. So there was this sort of congregation around the 50s and the 80s for America for America. And it'll be no surprise to you that I will pick the 80s as the decade I think that was the best decade for reasons I've previously sort of gone on about. But is this nostalgia really we're talking about? It's difficult to say how, you know, objectively how high quality the culture was. Yes, it's probably largely nostalgic. I was five to 15 in the 80s. It's my formative time. And I'm very glad it was my formative time. I think the 80s, you know, definitely. They saw you right, didn't they? Yes, they did. They did. In terms of the decade I'd most like to have experienced, I'm not the one I'd really like to have seen. First hand is the is the 30s. I think I just think the amount of cataclysmic activity that was going on. I think it'd have been interesting just to have been there and see whether actually people were more interested in you know, what they were having for tea that night than you know, what was going on.

This Austrian fellow with the moustache.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I mean, it would obviously been dreadful to live through for lots of people. But I think just to witness it, it's the most concentrated period of history. I think we've got where we crammed the most in.

Okay, nice. Nick?

Yeah, I think I think it will be about a certain amount of naivety in the use of technology. So I think we've just been given this technology. And we're using it like idiots at the moment. And I think people will look back on it, and they'll have adapted and use it in a much more sensible way in the future. And they'll look back and say, Do you remember when they first got, you know, smartphones, and they all did that.

So I think in about 20 years time, or 30 years time, we'll look back on this decade in the movies, in the same way we look back at the 30s and the 90s now and all the endless action movies, but this decade will be known for it, for the Marvel and Stan Lee movies, all the endless superhero movies and special powers, where people have special powers movies, but I think people will look back with fondness about that.

You know what people will do, like they say the 50s, all those horror films of the 50s were all about the Cold War, people will look back and they go, they made all these superhero films, people must have been feeling very powerless and out of control, which is why they fantasised about being superheroes.