Afternoon Joe Eight days after the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump and a year of events that have shaken the country, Biden announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race. @DifficultPatty posted a question to X in search of an answer: “What wine is best suited for unprecedented times?”
“All of them,” one user replied.
“Apocalypse IPA,” said another. “It’s the real deal.”
The situation we are facing all the time is also real. Everything is full of devastation and anxiety. At least, that is the atmosphere these days. Every week, a new historical benchmark appears with surprise, and across social media, there is a constant atmosphere that we are living in “unprecedented times.”
Now a staple of the zeitgeist, the phrase first came into public conversation circa 2015 during Trump’s first presidential campaign, which, as you may recall, tapped into the uniquely American appetite for political instigation. Since then, the phrase has become shorthand for the relentless cycle of everyday reality. Soon after, as the COVID-19 pandemic upended work and home life, the phrase further entrenched itself in our shared vocabulary, recast as a handy expression for an increasingly inconvenient future.
A 2020 study by The New York Times and research firm Sentio found that the phrase saw a 70,830 percent increase in year-over-year use in corporate presentations (surpassing buzzwords like “the new normal” and “you’re on mute”). In an article published by MIT titled “Surviving and Thriving in Unprecedented Times,” business school alumna and CEO Christa Babcock advises entrepreneurs to embrace the challenges ahead, saying, “Be prepared for things not to go back to the way they were, and look forward to that.”
But for us, constant and unpleasant change Was problem.
The phrase garnered attention offline and online. “The only difference between Millennials and Gen Z is how many ‘unprecedented times’ we survive before climate change engulfs our homes,” @bocxtop tweeted in February 2022, when X was still called Twitter. That same year, 19 students were shot at a rural Texas elementary school, California suffered record unemployment, and grocery stores across the country saw food prices rise steadily in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Today, the phrase has been stretched beyond its actual meaning to become a cheesy symbol of our unsettled cultural mood, uniformly used to describe nearly every new hellish event that emerges, from the US election and the Gaza conflict to the threat of climate disaster. Living in “unprecedented times” has become our new normal on social media.
New York City congestion pricing? “This just adds to the unprecedented times,” Jared of @TransitTalks said on TikTok. The same can be said about giant spiders, the canceled Tenacious D tour, romantic breakups, and widespread social unrest in the UK. It’s all unprecedented.
