Youtube has these videos summing up the best hits of each year, and it's a consensus in the comments: 2011 was a GREAT year for popular music, just hit after hit after hit. This was when I listened a lot to the radio too, and for good reason: so many songs were so catchy and still pop right back into memory as soon as they come on. J-Lo, Katy Perry, Beyonce, Lil Wayne, Eminem......titans of music who are still on top in 2022, but......does anyone know what happened to Taio Cruz? Or Lupe Fiasco? Or Rebecca Black? Time is not kind to one-hit wonders I guess.
2011 was also probably the last time to get in on the ground floor of a HUGE 10-year + bull market run after the market had hit lows in March 2009......people were worried about Amazon being "overpriced" back then.....and it just kept shocking analysts over and over again. I was a young 20-something who just went through 3 years of law school and 3-years of undergrad (albeit at the cheaper state university option) and was unemployed, so I couldn't invest with any substantial size of cash, but man that was the opportunity of a lifetime to make life-changing amounts of money if you invested in the right stocks (and really, a lot of stocks were the "right stocks" in terms of going up and multiplying in value). No wonder so many people got rich; wealth was easy to find in the stock market in the 2010's as long as you didn't get scared away from ever investing in by the 2008-2009 crash.
It is really quite a shame that human beings cannot time travel. Obviously the logistics would be ridiculously complicated, but I'm not even talking about trying to change history like kill Baby Hitler or something, just saying it's a shame we can't flip the channel after a devastating year for so many people like 2020 and when the calendar turns, just dial up 2011 again, to lift everyone's spirits and give everyone some hope for a year, allow for some prosperity, then maybe take some of the bad with the good. 2022 is now the 3rd year in a row we're going to be dealing with Covid-19 (2-year anniversary of it hitting the U.S. is coming up!) as we're now in the deepest recesses of the Omicron variant (M.J.'s hospital seems to be redirecting all its resources, including workers' labor, to dealing with Covid patients now, somewhat of a relapse of March 2020 emergency numbers), the blood donation agencies are so desperate for blood they've resorted to calling me directly every day since I'm a consistent donor (I don't have enough blood for all of them!), the heating and venting technician I scheduled today couldn't come because "he got sick" over the weekend, now the code for "tested positive for Covid." My fantasy football commmisioner put his signature line as, "Stay positive, test negative." Hard to stay positive in such dreary times that seems to be a persisent black cloud over everything for 2 years, like it's Seattle during the rainy season except it lasts for 2 years and has no signs of stopping. And it's not like one day there will be a miracle and Covid will just disappear (as former President Trump suggested was a possibility in 2020), it's going to be around with us forever, like an uninvited house guest who has hostilly and openly declared he's setting up camp in the living room.
Don't get me wrong, 2011 had its fair share of challenges too. The Arab Spring, Fukushima Daiichi incident in Japan coupled with the earthquake, the Anthony Weiner scandal, among others, come to mind, but 10 years later we've almost forgotten some of those: we will never forget the Covid pandemic, ever, and just like in 2001 where everyone remembers where we were when 9/11 happened, we're all know where we were in 2020-2022 when the pandemic happened: stuck at home, mulling over the bad news, for more than 2 years. 2011 never felt so far away.
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