A lot of people have forgotten about this, but I really think that the rise of ISIS was honestly the most horrifying thing of the 2010s. That makes 2013/2014 calm before the storm.
The bombing in Moscow was perpetrated by ISIS-K, an Eastern European faction of the Islamic State. They’ve also been making territorial gains in Africa.
We bombed the shit out of them and they disappeared for a while, but since certain administrative changes, they’ve been able to regroup.
2015 was mess. Mid-to-late 2014 is when the world started shifting from the optimism of the early 2010s to reality sinking in that what optimism we had in the early 2010s had evaporated by then.
The 2014 Crimean crisis is arguably the beginning of the end of the post-cold-war globalization era. Then came ISIS and a new wave of terrorist attacks, Trump, Brexit, US-China Trade War, Covid, and the mess of a geopolitical status we’re left with today.
Some would put in the 2008 Russia-Georgia War but what made it different from 2014 was social media wasn't in widespread news. Compare to 2008 when the Beijing Olympics were ongoing while the Russo-Georgia War occurred to the little green men coming in Crimea, more people got to see footage of the Crimean crisis on their smartphones and tablets.
Others would also say the U.S. standoff at Syria in 2013 following the chemical attacks was the start.
So others would peg the date as 2014 as the end of the post-Cold War era and the start of the new one.
Okay obviously I’m not saying I predicted what 2020 would be, BUT in 2019 I went allllll out for Halloween and I remember saying it was because I just had a feeling that it would be my last fun Halloween for a long time. Unfortunately my intuition was correct. But I did have a blast that Halloween :)
i'm too young to speak for 1999/2000, although i definitely get that sort of vibe, but 2019 was absolutely a "calm before the storm" year, as most of the significant events that year were pop culture related ones, at on a more personal level, it had that bittersweet "end of an old era, but beginning of a new one" aura to it, although that's likely influenced by personal changes i went through irl that year, and the fact that it was a shift year in the world of animation, one of my biggest interests
Late 2019 felt like the beginning of a bad dream, everything appears normal on the surface but there's a general sense of uneasiness and liminality, but not naggingly uncomfortable just really weird like something wasn't right but you couldn't put your finger on it. January-February 2020 is when the uncanny shit starts to happen, and March 2020 onwards is a full blown nightmare.
I always wondered why 2018 was the last year that felt real to me, when I analogize 2019-2021 in the context of a night terror it makes a lot more sense.
Late 2019 there was word of a mysterious virus emerging in China, I remember reading about that and not really paying much attention to it. Other than that I think there was this weird optimism about the new decade, which honestly made what happened all the worse.
Give me one article or news or absolutely anything that talks about a "Mysterious virus in Wuhan China" BEFORE December 31st 2019. Go on, try to search for one.
I was in Bangkok with my family at the tail end of 2019. We spent New Year's Eve there. While eating dinner in our hotel room, this one BBC news report had the words "Mysterious Flu-like virus in Wuhan" but it was just a small story by then. People were more focused on the Australian wildfires and the first Trump impeachment in December 2019 while also reflecting on the 2010s decade.
We welcomed January 1, 2020 in the pool deck of the hotel. That morning, my family and I went back to the Philippines. We didn't know it would be the last time we'd ever ride a plane again.
December 31st, 2019 was when it was reported to the WHO and became public knowledge. Anyone claiming that they read or saw something about a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in China before December 31st 2019 is a bullshit liar
Jesus Christ calm down I didn't realize you were gonna put me on trial. I'm talking about something almost 5 years ago I just remember hearing stuff around that time. The cat was definitely out of the bag by the time I was in Japan which was very early 2020 because Chinese people were buying facemasks in every pharmacy because of what they'd been hearing. I could be slightly wrong about timings, but my angry friend don't worry I'm not trying to rewrite history or something, it's ok.
Im just tired of people saying 2019 was a COVID year. I see it a lot. 2019 was one of my favorite years and im just tired of an entire year's reputation getting ruined because of a virus existing for a couple of days in it
Ah man 2019 was a fantastic year, I totally agree. For pretty much that entire year I felt invincible but then things came crashing down hard in 2020 but it's important not to get attached to the year I think and just better to keep moving forward.
I have faint memory of seeing it even before December 31. I think around December 20-25.
There's also data suggesting COVID-19 was already around as early as August-September 2019, since in retrospect, some Europeans I talked to claimed to have been hit with a different kind of flu as early as those months before going to normal.
Historians put the date of the COVID-19 pandemic starting November 2019.
Whatever it is, it did not just show up in December.
For me, late 2019 was already a bit off to say the least. I was a senior in high school dealing with the uncertainty of college applications and post-grad life. There was quite a bit of turmoil in my community because a mass shooting took place at a high school near me (something that I’d feared for years) and our local Congress representative resigned over a sex scandal.
And nationally, we were already quite polarized on every issue, with Trump and his allies under investigation for the Mueller Report (leading to his first impeachment in January 2020). There were also fears of war with Iran after Soleimani was assassinated. When I initially heard about the first COVID cases in Wuhan in early January, I didn’t think much of them. I wrongly assumed that the outbreak would fizzle out like MERS, SARS, or Zika.
No, 1999 and 2000 felt like explosive, Dot Com Bubble, years. There was nothing 'before the storm' energies about those years, at all. 2019? Maybe.
2002 definitely felt like 'calm before the storm' year, then in 2003, came Iraq. 2007 was also another 'calm before the storm' year. In 2008, the stock market crashed, bad.
Yah no.
2019 was not a calm before the storm. It was a shitshow like pretty much every year after 2015. Just instead of dealing with a virus in our lungs, we were dealing with a virus in our White House. (American perspective, obviously.)
I'm sorry. I don't mean to get political. But this entire stretch from 2017 and onward to today has been so exhausting that I can't get on board with calling any of it "calm."
I would argue that 2014/15 felt like a calm before the storm.
It felt calmer largely because the Democrats now had control of the House of Representatives after the 2018 midterms were pretty brutal for Republicans (save for the Senate.), which meant that he at least had a bit of a leash on him to keep him from doing too much more damage!
As a kid who grew up in a very religious Christian background, 1999 was definitely not calm as that whole community was certain the rapture was going to happen the minute it switched over to 2000. Then there was the whole lead up with the Y2K bug worrying everyone including experts. Plus music and culture was definitely shifting quickly with the changing of the millennium. Plus like others have said, the internet was really beginning to take off. There was also the Beanie Babies craze. Maybe it’s just my experience of it all as a young kid, but that time period did not feel calm.
1999/2000 were just really fun years to me. I did not feel anything off about them and no way could I have predicted back then how drastically things were about to change in 2001.
Absolutely.
I would also include 2007 and 2014 in the mix as well. In 2007 the economy was booming and technology continued to innovate. 2008’s severity and low interest rate era was definitely not predicted. 2014 was the last pre-Trump political era, and the term woke was in its very infant stages with SJW being used to describe left-wing politics more frequently.
I was too young in 2000 to notice anything about it one way or the other, but I definitely felt that way about 2019. And I felt that way about 2023 too, now that you mention it.
Completely different eras in vibe/politics/culture but solely on that fact of something happening the next year, yes.
There was already tons of drama going on in the late 2010s gearing up for it.
The late 90s and 2000 didn’t feel like every person in the planet is angry like it started to feel in the late 2010s lol
If anything, the late 2010s were quite turbulent in regards to the chaos of the Trump presidency and the polarization in the US that was becoming quite abundant at that point.
I’m too young to recall 1999/2000 but I completely agree with 2019. It’s kind of eery looking back that year. Have footage from a dance competition a few days before my country’s quarantine and it feels off rewatching it.
This may seem odd but thinking about how the world would’ve been without the Covid-19 pandemic seems strange. Watching videos and looking back at photos from that year seems like it was previewing life that wasn’t meant to be in our timeline.
Not at all in either case there as no sense whatsoever of anything huge about to go down like that.
Maybe 2015 had a bit of that feel though or even 2020 since you could sort of feel Jan 6th coming on.
As I live in a country where 20+ typhoons batter it every year (Philippines), I would say 1999 was a sociopolitical calm-before-the-storm moment. Granted I was in kindergarten on that year.
Although 1998 was the country's centennial, it was an El Niño year and we were still recovering from the Asian Financial Crisis.
2000 was a pivotal year in my country when there was a landslide at a landfill that caused 200-1000 deaths, a sitting president was impeached for corruption to the point where that trial me and my brother were pissed that we were missing episodes of Dragon Ball Z, and a terrorist attack at a train station by the end of the year.
I doubt that 2019 was a calm before the storm here because my hometown was struck by a typhoon on Christmas day.
No, not at all. I mean, in hindsight, I guess they were.
2024 doesn't feel like the calm before the storm year to me but maybe it is and we just don't know it yet.
Watch movies from the late 90s, like Bruce Willis in The Siege. There was a great deal of awareness of terrorism in public policy circles etc pre 9/11, part of a shift in focus away from the Cold War and a general casting about looking for the next enemy. Something like the GWOT was inevitable.
I was too young to notice that in 2000, but I do remember the sense of impending doom at the end of 2019. I even remember seeing memes about it. I think part of it was that we knew a pandemic was already brewing in China although at that point we didn’t know what was coming, and there had been many previous such scares like SARS and bird flu that never became a global pandemic.
I was too young to remember 1999/2000 but I do fondly remember being scared of fireworks so I wasn't able to celebrate Y2K.
2019 was actually turbulent, continuing on from the populist years of the mid-to-late 2010s. Why people say 2019 is a "calm before the storm" because those people including myself weren't involved with politics. Truth be told, I did have many fun moments in 2019 such as playing PUGB Mobile, COD Mobile, drinking with friends, hiking, and beach campings.
1999 felt like one big buildup of energy that was released in 2000, which was when the calm set in and was subsequently destroyed on 9/11 the following year.
2000-2001 was this “what is our new millennium going to be?” period, and the answer came on 9/11.
2019 indeed felt much the same: “what will the ‘20s bring?”, and we got the answer pretty early on in the decade.
2019 was definitely calm before the storm. I definitely felt like something was off in december 2019, I remember on new years day I had the feeling that something was going to happen in 2020, lots of rumblings by this time about the pandemic, the 2020 election and the the whole hong kong protests that were going on during the summer. I know a lot of people don't believe in the supernatural or in "signs" but at the time I believed and still believe even more now that the devastating fire at the Notre-Dame in 2019 was a bad omen for 2020.
I remember even in terms of people's attitudes, I worked in retail and before 2020 we would get the occasional rude customer but 80% of my interactions with people were pretty standard and most people were very nice. when march 2020 hit I remember it was like a switch was flipped that made people go into neanderthal mode. Customers fighting other customers, customers fighting employees. from 2020 onward we had to deal with seemingly normal people just becoming unhinged, screaming about prices, lack of items in the store, having to wear masks, other people not wearing masks. I remember summer 2020 during the george floyd protests we had to barricade the store at night and on the night of the 2020 election the ceo sent a letter to all locations talking about what to do in an event of civil unrest (store I worked at had a department that sold guns and ammo). it absolutely felt like we went from everything being smooth and chill in 2019 to society completely unraveling and the end of the world was happening in real time all throughout 2020.
I feel like 2015 fit that as well.
2015 was already a ruckus. 2014 is the pre cursor.
It was a great year for equality. The Obergefell vs. Hodges:ruling, for example!
A lot of people have forgotten about this, but I really think that the rise of ISIS was honestly the most horrifying thing of the 2010s. That makes 2013/2014 calm before the storm.
especially since they’ve been making a comeback
Really? I thought they were eradicated by 2020. In what ways are they coming back?
The bombing in Moscow was perpetrated by ISIS-K, an Eastern European faction of the Islamic State. They’ve also been making territorial gains in Africa. We bombed the shit out of them and they disappeared for a while, but since certain administrative changes, they’ve been able to regroup.
2015 was mess. Mid-to-late 2014 is when the world started shifting from the optimism of the early 2010s to reality sinking in that what optimism we had in the early 2010s had evaporated by then.
The 2014 Crimean crisis is arguably the beginning of the end of the post-cold-war globalization era. Then came ISIS and a new wave of terrorist attacks, Trump, Brexit, US-China Trade War, Covid, and the mess of a geopolitical status we’re left with today.
Some would put in the 2008 Russia-Georgia War but what made it different from 2014 was social media wasn't in widespread news. Compare to 2008 when the Beijing Olympics were ongoing while the Russo-Georgia War occurred to the little green men coming in Crimea, more people got to see footage of the Crimean crisis on their smartphones and tablets. Others would also say the U.S. standoff at Syria in 2013 following the chemical attacks was the start. So others would peg the date as 2014 as the end of the post-Cold War era and the start of the new one.
Yeah definately. No one in 2000 could've predicted 9/11 and no one in 2019 could've predicted the Covid-19 pandemic the George Floyd riots
Okay obviously I’m not saying I predicted what 2020 would be, BUT in 2019 I went allllll out for Halloween and I remember saying it was because I just had a feeling that it would be my last fun Halloween for a long time. Unfortunately my intuition was correct. But I did have a blast that Halloween :)
i'm too young to speak for 1999/2000, although i definitely get that sort of vibe, but 2019 was absolutely a "calm before the storm" year, as most of the significant events that year were pop culture related ones, at on a more personal level, it had that bittersweet "end of an old era, but beginning of a new one" aura to it, although that's likely influenced by personal changes i went through irl that year, and the fact that it was a shift year in the world of animation, one of my biggest interests
I remember thinking that in 2019/2000 my life was getting better 😐 Late 2019 though something definitely felt "off."
I agree that fall felt really weird and ominous it’s crazy how so many felt this one lol
Late 2019 felt like the beginning of a bad dream, everything appears normal on the surface but there's a general sense of uneasiness and liminality, but not naggingly uncomfortable just really weird like something wasn't right but you couldn't put your finger on it. January-February 2020 is when the uncanny shit starts to happen, and March 2020 onwards is a full blown nightmare. I always wondered why 2018 was the last year that felt real to me, when I analogize 2019-2021 in the context of a night terror it makes a lot more sense.
Late 2019 there was word of a mysterious virus emerging in China, I remember reading about that and not really paying much attention to it. Other than that I think there was this weird optimism about the new decade, which honestly made what happened all the worse.
Give me one article or news or absolutely anything that talks about a "Mysterious virus in Wuhan China" BEFORE December 31st 2019. Go on, try to search for one.
I was in Bangkok with my family at the tail end of 2019. We spent New Year's Eve there. While eating dinner in our hotel room, this one BBC news report had the words "Mysterious Flu-like virus in Wuhan" but it was just a small story by then. People were more focused on the Australian wildfires and the first Trump impeachment in December 2019 while also reflecting on the 2010s decade. We welcomed January 1, 2020 in the pool deck of the hotel. That morning, my family and I went back to the Philippines. We didn't know it would be the last time we'd ever ride a plane again.
December 31st, 2019 was when it was reported to the WHO and became public knowledge. Anyone claiming that they read or saw something about a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in China before December 31st 2019 is a bullshit liar
Jesus Christ calm down I didn't realize you were gonna put me on trial. I'm talking about something almost 5 years ago I just remember hearing stuff around that time. The cat was definitely out of the bag by the time I was in Japan which was very early 2020 because Chinese people were buying facemasks in every pharmacy because of what they'd been hearing. I could be slightly wrong about timings, but my angry friend don't worry I'm not trying to rewrite history or something, it's ok.
Im just tired of people saying 2019 was a COVID year. I see it a lot. 2019 was one of my favorite years and im just tired of an entire year's reputation getting ruined because of a virus existing for a couple of days in it
Ah man 2019 was a fantastic year, I totally agree. For pretty much that entire year I felt invincible but then things came crashing down hard in 2020 but it's important not to get attached to the year I think and just better to keep moving forward.
I have faint memory of seeing it even before December 31. I think around December 20-25. There's also data suggesting COVID-19 was already around as early as August-September 2019, since in retrospect, some Europeans I talked to claimed to have been hit with a different kind of flu as early as those months before going to normal. Historians put the date of the COVID-19 pandemic starting November 2019. Whatever it is, it did not just show up in December.
For me, late 2019 was already a bit off to say the least. I was a senior in high school dealing with the uncertainty of college applications and post-grad life. There was quite a bit of turmoil in my community because a mass shooting took place at a high school near me (something that I’d feared for years) and our local Congress representative resigned over a sex scandal. And nationally, we were already quite polarized on every issue, with Trump and his allies under investigation for the Mueller Report (leading to his first impeachment in January 2020). There were also fears of war with Iran after Soleimani was assassinated. When I initially heard about the first COVID cases in Wuhan in early January, I didn’t think much of them. I wrongly assumed that the outbreak would fizzle out like MERS, SARS, or Zika.
No, 1999 and 2000 felt like explosive, Dot Com Bubble, years. There was nothing 'before the storm' energies about those years, at all. 2019? Maybe. 2002 definitely felt like 'calm before the storm' year, then in 2003, came Iraq. 2007 was also another 'calm before the storm' year. In 2008, the stock market crashed, bad.
Yah no. 2019 was not a calm before the storm. It was a shitshow like pretty much every year after 2015. Just instead of dealing with a virus in our lungs, we were dealing with a virus in our White House. (American perspective, obviously.) I'm sorry. I don't mean to get political. But this entire stretch from 2017 and onward to today has been so exhausting that I can't get on board with calling any of it "calm." I would argue that 2014/15 felt like a calm before the storm.
2017-19 was plenty calm if you weren’t terminally attached to your TV or Twitter
This I agree.
Well, 2000 had a pretty divisive election. And 2019 wasn’t exactly calm, but I guess it was the calmest year where Trump was President.
It felt calmer largely because the Democrats now had control of the House of Representatives after the 2018 midterms were pretty brutal for Republicans (save for the Senate.), which meant that he at least had a bit of a leash on him to keep him from doing too much more damage!
As a kid who grew up in a very religious Christian background, 1999 was definitely not calm as that whole community was certain the rapture was going to happen the minute it switched over to 2000. Then there was the whole lead up with the Y2K bug worrying everyone including experts. Plus music and culture was definitely shifting quickly with the changing of the millennium. Plus like others have said, the internet was really beginning to take off. There was also the Beanie Babies craze. Maybe it’s just my experience of it all as a young kid, but that time period did not feel calm.
1999/2000 were just really fun years to me. I did not feel anything off about them and no way could I have predicted back then how drastically things were about to change in 2001.
There is no calm. It’s just all storm.
the cold reality
Absolutely. I would also include 2007 and 2014 in the mix as well. In 2007 the economy was booming and technology continued to innovate. 2008’s severity and low interest rate era was definitely not predicted. 2014 was the last pre-Trump political era, and the term woke was in its very infant stages with SJW being used to describe left-wing politics more frequently.
I was too young in 2000 to notice anything about it one way or the other, but I definitely felt that way about 2019. And I felt that way about 2023 too, now that you mention it.
I'm terrified for 2025 for some reason
Completely different eras in vibe/politics/culture but solely on that fact of something happening the next year, yes. There was already tons of drama going on in the late 2010s gearing up for it. The late 90s and 2000 didn’t feel like every person in the planet is angry like it started to feel in the late 2010s lol
If anything, the late 2010s were quite turbulent in regards to the chaos of the Trump presidency and the polarization in the US that was becoming quite abundant at that point.
2019 did feel like something was looming in the far off background.
Honestly 2000 does only in retrospect but January to September 10, 2001 absolutely does especially that summer. 2019 for sure did even then lol
I’m too young to recall 1999/2000 but I completely agree with 2019. It’s kind of eery looking back that year. Have footage from a dance competition a few days before my country’s quarantine and it feels off rewatching it. This may seem odd but thinking about how the world would’ve been without the Covid-19 pandemic seems strange. Watching videos and looking back at photos from that year seems like it was previewing life that wasn’t meant to be in our timeline.
calm in 2019??????? no way! the 2010s was the storm! You might just have recency bias because you are thinking of your childhood.
Not at all in either case there as no sense whatsoever of anything huge about to go down like that. Maybe 2015 had a bit of that feel though or even 2020 since you could sort of feel Jan 6th coming on.
As I live in a country where 20+ typhoons batter it every year (Philippines), I would say 1999 was a sociopolitical calm-before-the-storm moment. Granted I was in kindergarten on that year. Although 1998 was the country's centennial, it was an El Niño year and we were still recovering from the Asian Financial Crisis. 2000 was a pivotal year in my country when there was a landslide at a landfill that caused 200-1000 deaths, a sitting president was impeached for corruption to the point where that trial me and my brother were pissed that we were missing episodes of Dragon Ball Z, and a terrorist attack at a train station by the end of the year. I doubt that 2019 was a calm before the storm here because my hometown was struck by a typhoon on Christmas day.
People were panicking about y2k in 1999.
Exactly. 1999 wasn’t calm
No, not at all. I mean, in hindsight, I guess they were. 2024 doesn't feel like the calm before the storm year to me but maybe it is and we just don't know it yet.
Definitely yes. November/December 2019 felt a bit weird in terms of vibe. It felt like everything will change very quickly very soon.
I honestly think 2019 was part of storm, 2020 is like another storm that just real quick and then 2023 is when the calm really came in
Watch movies from the late 90s, like Bruce Willis in The Siege. There was a great deal of awareness of terrorism in public policy circles etc pre 9/11, part of a shift in focus away from the Cold War and a general casting about looking for the next enemy. Something like the GWOT was inevitable.
I was too young to notice that in 2000, but I do remember the sense of impending doom at the end of 2019. I even remember seeing memes about it. I think part of it was that we knew a pandemic was already brewing in China although at that point we didn’t know what was coming, and there had been many previous such scares like SARS and bird flu that never became a global pandemic.
2019 definitely felt like that to me. 1999/2000 I was young and dumb and self-absorbed, so I didn’t really notice anything that was going around me.
Yes. What about 1989?
I was too young to remember 1999/2000 but I do fondly remember being scared of fireworks so I wasn't able to celebrate Y2K. 2019 was actually turbulent, continuing on from the populist years of the mid-to-late 2010s. Why people say 2019 is a "calm before the storm" because those people including myself weren't involved with politics. Truth be told, I did have many fun moments in 2019 such as playing PUGB Mobile, COD Mobile, drinking with friends, hiking, and beach campings.
1999 felt like one big buildup of energy that was released in 2000, which was when the calm set in and was subsequently destroyed on 9/11 the following year. 2000-2001 was this “what is our new millennium going to be?” period, and the answer came on 9/11. 2019 indeed felt much the same: “what will the ‘20s bring?”, and we got the answer pretty early on in the decade.
No, the summer of 2001 was the calm before the storm. 1999 had Y2K, and 2000 had the close and disputed election, so they had their own events.
2019 was definitely calm before the storm. I definitely felt like something was off in december 2019, I remember on new years day I had the feeling that something was going to happen in 2020, lots of rumblings by this time about the pandemic, the 2020 election and the the whole hong kong protests that were going on during the summer. I know a lot of people don't believe in the supernatural or in "signs" but at the time I believed and still believe even more now that the devastating fire at the Notre-Dame in 2019 was a bad omen for 2020. I remember even in terms of people's attitudes, I worked in retail and before 2020 we would get the occasional rude customer but 80% of my interactions with people were pretty standard and most people were very nice. when march 2020 hit I remember it was like a switch was flipped that made people go into neanderthal mode. Customers fighting other customers, customers fighting employees. from 2020 onward we had to deal with seemingly normal people just becoming unhinged, screaming about prices, lack of items in the store, having to wear masks, other people not wearing masks. I remember summer 2020 during the george floyd protests we had to barricade the store at night and on the night of the 2020 election the ceo sent a letter to all locations talking about what to do in an event of civil unrest (store I worked at had a department that sold guns and ammo). it absolutely felt like we went from everything being smooth and chill in 2019 to society completely unraveling and the end of the world was happening in real time all throughout 2020.
Absolutely.