The afternoon joe Biden announced his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, eight days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and in the midst of a year of pivotal events. @DifficultPatty posted a question on X, Thirsty for an answer:“What wine best pairs with these unprecedented times?”
“Everyone,” one user replied.
“Apocalypse IPA beer,” said another. “It’s a real thing.”
The times we find ourselves in are also real. It’s all devastation and unrest. That’s the vibe lately, anyway. New historical benchmarks emerge with astonishing weekly frequency, and a collective feeling has developed on social media that we live in a constant state of “unprecedented times.”
The phrase, now part of the zeitgeist, initially Shot in The term “agitprop” became a popular discourse around 2015, during Trump’s first presidential campaign — a campaign that, you may recall, was fueled by a specifically American hunger for political upheaval. Since then, it has become a shorthand for describing the ongoing spiral of everyday reality. Soon after, as the spread of COVID-19 reshaped work and family life, the phrase became even more embedded in our shared vocabulary, reframed as a convenient description for an increasingly inconvenient future.
TO study carried out In 2020, The New York Times and research firm Sentieo found that the phrase saw a 70,830 percent increase in usage in corporate presentations compared to the previous year (surpassing expressions du jour like “new normal” and “you’re on mute”). In an article published by MIT, titled “Surviving and thriving in unprecedented times” Christa Babcock, a CEO and business school alumna, advised entrepreneurs to embrace the difficulty ahead: “Expect things to never go back to the way they were and be excited about it.”
Only, for the rest of us, constant and uncomfortable change was The problem.
The phrase was gaining traction both in the real world and in the off-world. “The only difference between millennials and Gen Z is the number of ‘unprecedented times’ they live through before climate change swallows their house,” @bocxtop tweeted in February 2022, when X was still called Twitter. That same year, 19 students were shot and killed at an elementary school in rural Texas and California was hit with record unemployment In grocery stores across the country, food prices are rose steadily as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Today, the phrase has taken on a dimension beyond its actual meaning and has become a cheap symbol of our erratic cultural mood. It is used uniformly to describe virtually any new hell that emerges, from the US election and the conflict in Gaza to the looming threat of climate catastrophe. Living in “unprecedented times” is our new normal on social media.
Congestion pricing in NYC? “We are living in unprecedented times,” says Jared of @TransitTalks saying on TikTok. The same thing happened with giant spidersto Tenacious D tour cancelled, Relationship breakupsand the outcome social unrest in the UK. Unprecedented, in every sense.
