https://www.gq.com/story/the-best-things-about-2020?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethitsThe Best Things About the Worst Year Ever
Yes, there was suffering, heartache, and noise. But if you look carefully, this strange year also served up something surprising: reasons to be hopeful. Here are 18 new ideas that just might shape our whole future.
By Daniel Riley
December 3, 2020
Illustration by Simon Abranowicz
There was a morning in mid-May when my pregnant wife and I were walking down a street near our apartment, and two things happened: First, a man without a mask coughed deliberately at her belly; then a woman asked us to marvel at the crisp white lines in the sky before assuring us those chemtrails would kill us all. It was a distressing morning but run-of-the-mill in the year from hell. For so many, by mid-May, it had been two months of pause and punishment, of loss and suffering and even death most of which was considerably worse than being casually cursed by a witch on a street corner. But it was hard for us, on that May morning, to imagine 2020 providing anything in the way of positive signs of where we might be heading as a species. And yet. There was, eventually, a thawing. We moved outside again. The gears began to grind forward. There were people in the streets. They were mounting a vociferous defense of our common humanity. There were dormant political ideas that suddenly seemed exactly what was needed to meet the new moment. There were rapidly evolving innovations on how and where and when we might work. For so many aspects of life that needed changing, the pandemic was an accelerant. It caused businesses to fail, yes, but it also sped us all along to a potential society of the future. Models that were broken died. But new stuff was born. In late July, our baby was born too. She is living proof, at least within the tight quarters of our family of three, that despite the spring’s sensation of perpetual stasis, the world kept turning, cells kept dividing, ideas kept evolving, and the new and hopefully long-lasting made itself known. My wife and I think a lot about what we will tell our baby about the year she was born. She will no doubt roll her eyes at all our tired stories of the global pandemic. But we hope that we will also describe the summer she was born as the summer that so very much changed for the better. So many ideas had been fixed for so long. So many constraints on what was possible, what was permitted, how a life was meant to be lived. Who knows what we’ll say when we look back on 2020, but hopefully we’ll say that it was the year when so much of what follows began to feel possible, or finally came to fruition that it was the year the future was born.
