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The afternoon Joe Biden announced his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, eight days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and well into a year of axis-tilting events, @DifficultPatty posted a question on X, thirsty for an answer: “Which wine pairs best with unprecedented times?”
“All of them,” replied one user.
“Apocalypse IPA,” said another. “It’s a real thing.”
Also real are the times we continually find ourselves. All devastation and disquiet. That’s the vibe of late, anyway. New historical benchmarks sprout with wild surprise on what feels like a weekly basis, and a collective mood has developed across social media that we live in a constant state of “unprecedented times.”
The phrase, now a fixture of the zeitgeist, initially shot into pop discourse around 2015 during Trump’s first presidential campaign, a campaign, you’ll remember, that fed on a specific American lust for political agitprop. Not long after, as the spread of Covid-19 reengineered work and home life, the phrase further lodged itself into our shared vocabulary, recast as a convenient descriptor for an increasingly inconvenient future. It has since become shorthand for the continuous spiral of everyday reality.
A study conducted in 2020 by The New York Times and research firm Sentieo found that the phrase saw a 70,830 percent increase in usage in corporate presentations from the previous year (outpacing du jour expressions like “new normal” and “you’re on mute”). In a 2020 article published by MIT's alumni newsletter, titled “Surviving and thriving in unprecedented times,” Christa Babcock, a director of sales and growth strategy at Accenture Song (and an alum of the business school), advised entrepreneurs to embrace the difficulty in front of them: “Expect that things will not return to the way they were and be thrilled about it.”
Only, for the rest of us, the constant, uncomfortable change was the problem.
The phrase was gaining traction offline and on. “Only difference between millennials and gen z is how many ‘unprecedented times’ u live thru before climate change swallows ur house,” @bocxtop tweeted in February 2022 when X was still called Twitter. That same year, 19 students were gunned down at an elementary school in rural Texas and California was hit with record unemployment. In grocery stores across the country, food prices steadily climbed as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Today, the phrase has magnified beyond actual meaning, a cheap emblem of our erratic cultural mood. It is uniformly used to describe just about every fresh hell that emerges, from the US election and the conflict in Gaza to the escalating dangers of climate catastrophe. Living through “unprecedented times” is the new normal on social media.
Congestion pricing in New York City? “More unprecedented times is all,” Jared of @TransitTalks said on TikTok. Also unprecedented: giant spiders, a canceled Tenacious D tour, relationship break-ups, and the unraveling social unrest in the UK.
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This era of apparent precedent-setting is not only defined by bad news, of course. The phrase has no particular allegiance to disaster or personal woe. It applies wholesale. Lil Jon’s performance at the Democratic National Convention? Simone Biles winning the most Olympic gymnastic gold medals? Green energy growth in Kansas? Astounding and uncommon occurrences but also, that’s right, unprecedented ones.
“I’m ready to go a month without something unprecedented,” @midwestsidegunn said recently on TikTok. “Bring back boring. I’m ready to be bored.”
That’s unlikely, given the domino effect caused by Biden’s departure from the race in July, portrayed just as you might expect. It only spawned more unprecedentedness: the genuine possibility of a Black and South Asian woman president, and a reenergized Democratic Party that just weeks ago was on life support. A callback to a politics of hope from the Obama era, Kamalamania has again ignited the promise of what for so long felt like an impossibility.
“You know, the story of my life and the history of our country is that progress is possible, but not guaranteed,” former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said at the DNC this week. Along with Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren, women who were also well acquainted with overcoming the impossible, Clinton spoke to the urgency of now, and the weight of the moment before America. Democracy is under an extraordinary threat, she said, portions of the country already warped by the unreality of Trumpian politics, but it can be defended, reborn even.
By Thursday night, Harris had solidified the nomination. Millions of people watched from their homes, TV screens aglow with a message of hope, believing that this next turn into unprecedented times, far from their last, would bring a steadiness long dissolved by a power-indulgent MAGA movement.
The future, a friend recently reminded me, is a litany of unprecedented moments: ache and anguish persist, but so do awe and amazement. Rather than bemoan the fact that “the cold reality of the status quo has set in,” as one X user colored the Harris-Walz ticket, Andrew Drummer celebrated. This time, there was reason to rejoice.
“Fucking great! Things as usual would be a welcomed reprieve for a little bit,” Drummer replied. “I’m done with living at the end of times in unprecedented situations. We welcome precedented times!”
Correction: 8/29/2024 5:30 PM EDT: Wired corrected Christa Babcock's job title and publication in which her article appeared, and added context for when that article was first published.
