What the Hell Happened to our Culture after the 2000s?

Have you ever felt like the our culture came to a near standstill in the past 10-15 years? Well, you’re not alone. For me, the year our cultural stagnation started is around 2008. Now, I’m not saying things haven’t changed at all. I’m saying that, technology aside, things have severely slowed down since then. I anticipate that this topic will be quite divisive, and some people will feel like things have advanced greatly since the 2010s while others feel like we’re still living in an updated version of the 2000s. In my mind, the pre-millennium decades, (50s-90s) all felt so distinct and different from each other. In 2002, Vice City, which was set in 1986, felt like it took place on another planet. By the late 2000s, The WWF Attitude Era felt like a relic of an ancient civilization. Going back to the late 2000s in games like GTA4, while fun, just doesn’t have that same WOW factor. I think there are two primary reasons for this phenomenon (along with things like 9/11 and Covid): 1) The death of Monoculture - Monoculture being the grander shared experiences and fandoms we used to have like Beatlemania, Michael Jackson, Star Wars, etc. 2) The internet/technology essentially replacing our cultural focus, which ended the cultural golden age of the 1950s-1990s (you could maybe squeeze the early 2000s in there). One of my favorite Youtubers, David V Stewart, has discussed a similar topic called “Cultural Ground Zero“ before. The general idea is that the culture entered a non-stop period of regression since the year 1997. It’s a fascinating idea and worth looking into. You can read about it here: I agree that the culture may have died in 1997. If you looked at it like a bell curve, maybe 1997 was the peak. But you still at least had some 90s culture bleed into the 2000s (aka 90s cool). I feel the late 2000s was the point where that feeling of cultural regression REALLY started to kick in. Let me know what you think! I’m sure I’ll get plenty of comments about how out of touch I am. But if thousands, and potentially millions of us have noticed this trend, we can’t all be wrong (I think)!