Usually around this time of year I revisit my predictions I made at the start of the year and then make predictions about the next year. It's usually my favorite post of the year and I enjoyed seeing how right or wrong I was. I won't be doing that this year though.
And it's not just because I was wrong about almost everything. Seriously, look at my 2020 predictions and count up how many things I was right about, it's not pretty. It's easy to understand why, the Coronavirus epidemic through everything for a loop and I am not really upset that I didn't predict a 100 year plague and the massive overreaction to it.
I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to go through every single prediction I made after the vast majority of them were made irrelevant after the Coronavirus hit. Some were still right, like President Trump not being removed from office or Afghanistan still being a mess but the rest are kind of hard to even evaluate. I mean how am I supposed to evaluate the Mexican Drug War if the media stopped covering anything other then President Trump, Black Lives Matter and the Coronavirus in 2020? I do believe in responsibility and accountability so I will admit that I was way off base in my predictions.
As for 2021, who knows? At this point we don't even know who is going to be President at the end of this month, let alone what is going to happen over summer and fall. Might as well go to the casino and play nickel slots, you would have better odds of winning. The country and the world are in a major state of flux due to political anger and the coronavirus and I fully admit to having absolutely no idea what will happen this year.
One thing I will also note after re-reading my 2020 predictions was how optimistic I was this time last year. It seems hard to believe but I was seriously hoping that 2020 was going to be the best year in modern memory but it didn't even come close. Though I do think people exaggerate how bad 2020 was in comparison to other recent years (2016, 2015, 2008 and 2001 were all worse in my opinion) there is no question that my optimism did not come to pass.
That's another reason I don't want to make any predictions. I fully admit to being as pessimistic about 2021 as I was optimistic about 2020. I'm been in full "doomer" mode since this summer (the Black Lives Matter riots affected me way more then Coronavirus ever could. Not so much the rioting and mayhem itself but the fact that anyone could ever defend what happened). Any predictions I make have the potential to be biased against the year because of that.
And I don't think that's justified. Just as 2020 turned on a time from a very good year in 2019 it's possible that 2021 will do the opposite. Do I think it will happen? Absolutely not. But I have to admit that I am so pessimistic about the state of the world right now that I'm not fit to make predictions. 2021 could even be a pretty awful year but if it's anything other than 100% worse than 2020, my predictions would be totally off.
The really perverse thing is that in my personal life 2020 was one of the better ones I have had. I made massive amounts of cash thanks to Trumpbucks, hazard pay, bonuses and pay raises and I'm made a big enough of a nest egg that I am considering buying a house. I feel closer to my family and the friends I have left after the BLM meltdown and generally I am doing pretty good when I forget about how messed up the country is. Even my blog did better this year then it has in previous years!
So to sum up, I'm not making predictions this year or reacting to my predictions last year. 2020 was a black swan event that through a wrench into everything and we probably won't know the repercussions for it until years or even decades afterwards. I'm not willing or capable of trying to figure out what comes next, I just know that it will probably be a mess...
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