Joe Afternoon Biden announces his decision withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, eight days later assassination attempt on Donald Trump And during a year of axis tilt events, @DifficultPatty posted a question on X, longing for an answer:“What wine is best suited to these unprecedented times?”
“All of them,” one user replied.
“Apocalypse IPA,” said another. “That’s the real thing.”
It is also true that we find ourselves constantly. All the devastation and uncertainty. That is how it feels lately, anyway. New historical norms arise with wild surprise as if weekly, and a general mood has developed across social media that we are living in a continuing state of “unprecedented times.”
This phrase, now an integral part of the zeitgeist, was originally shoot at It entered popular discourse around 2015 during Trump’s first presidential campaign, a campaign that, you’ll remember, fed a particular American appetite for political propaganda. It has since become shorthand for the relentless churn of everyday reality. Not long after, as the spread of Covid-19 reshaped work and family life, the phrase entered our collective vocabulary, recast as a convenient description of an increasingly inconvenient future.
ONE research conducted In 2020, according to The New York Times and research firm Sentieo, the phrase increased in usage in corporate presentations by 70,830 percent compared to the previous year (far surpassing expressions du jour like “new normal” and “you’re on mute”). In a paper published by MIT, titled “Survive and thrive in unprecedented times,” Christa Babcock, a CEO and business school alumna, advises entrepreneurs to embrace the hardships ahead: “Expect that things won’t go back to the way they were, and be happy about that.”
Only, for the rest of us, constant, uncomfortable change used to be problem.
The phrase is trending both offline and online. “The only difference between millennials and Gen Z is how many ‘unprecedented times’ you lived through before climate change swallowed your house,” @bocxtop tweeted in February 2022 when X was still called Twitter. That same year, 19 students shot down Elementary schools in rural Texas and California were attacked. record unemployment . In grocery stories across the country, food prices climb steadily as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Today, the phrase has been amplified beyond its actual meaning, a cheap symbol for our erratic cultural mood. It’s used uniformly to describe just about every new hell that emerges, from the US election and the conflict in Gaza to the terrifying threat of climate catastrophe. Living through “unprecedented times” is our new normal on social media.
Congestion Pricing in New York City? “Unprecedented Times Are Everything,” Jared of @TransitTalks speak on TikTok. Same goes for giant spiderOne Tenacious D tour canceled, broken relationshipand disintegration social unrest in England. Unprecedented—everything.
