That’s it. We’ve made it to the end of the decade. Where did the time go? As we enter the roaring twenties, it’s a time for looking ahead to the coming ten years and wondering what on earth is in store for us.
Many will look back on the twenty-teens as a pretty miserable decade and one where we perhaps could have done a better job at managing the technology that has made its way into our everyday lives. Our predictions for the words of 2019 reflected this and to be honest, we weren’t too far off the mark.
We’ve had a long hard think about the trends and buzzwords for the year to come and here’s our definitive list of the words that will define 2020:
1. Eco-shame
2019 was the year most of us finally woke up to the realities of the climate emergency. In fact, ‘climate emergency’ probably should have been in our 2019 list! Campaigning from the likes of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, joined by hundreds of thousands of school children around the world, drew our attention to the threat of climate change like never before.
In 2020, it’s thought that we will all start to feel ‘eco-shame’ if we fail to do our bit to reduce our impact on the environment as consumers. More will be done to try to shame people into changing their behaviours and thinking long and hard before buying plastic-wrapped veg or jumping in the car to do the school run.
2. Civil media
Social media has arguably become toxic and many of us are beginning to realise that the corporate machines of Facebook and Instagram probably don’t have our best interests at heart. Younger social media users are beginning to seek out smaller, more intimate and meaningful online ‘spaces’ that some people have referred to as ‘civil media’. It will be fascinating to see where we go from here and whether the big platforms can survive a mass migration.
3. Enoughism
This is the term that describes the movement whereby people try to be happy with what they have, rather than constantly striving for more or better. Too many of us feel like we are on a constant ‘journey’ somewhere and that instead of living each day as it comes, we are living each day in order to get to a better day in the future. Enoughism says we should all just enjoy the now and stop craving a potentially non-existent better tomorrow. Amen to that!
In conclusion, from a quick look at the language trends it looks like we will all try to be on a path to ‘betterness’ (there’s another buzzword for you!) in 2020. You could say that we made a right old mess of it in the twenty-teens so it’s time to put it all right in the 2020s, or at least challenge the paradigms that became all-too-prevalent. No pressure then!
