The Afternoon Joe Eight days after the assassination of Donald Trump and in the midst of a year full of groundbreaking events, Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign. Then @DifficultPatty posted on X a question that desperately needed an answer: “What wine goes best with unprecedented times?”
“All of them,” one user replied.
“Apocalypse IPA,” said another. “It really exists.”
Equally real are the times we constantly find ourselves in. Everything is filled with devastation and unrest. That’s certainly the mood lately. With wild surprise, new historical milestones seem to be sprouting up on a weekly basis, and a collective sentiment has developed on social media that we live in a constant state of “unprecedented times.”
Now a staple of the zeitgeist, the phrase first entered pop discourse in 2015 during Trump’s first presidential campaign, a campaign that, you’ll recall, was fueled by a specifically American appetite for political agitprop. Since then, it has become shorthand for the continuous spiral of everyday reality. Not long afterward, as the spread of Covid-19 reshaped work and home life, the phrase nestled even deeper into our shared vocabulary, refashioned as a convenient description for an increasingly uncomfortable future.
A 2020 study by the New York Times and research firm Sentieo found that the phrase was used 70,830 percent more in corporate presentations compared to the previous year (outperforming common expressions like “new normal” and “you’re on muted”). In an article published by MIT titled “Surviving and Thriving in Unprecedented Times,” CEO and business school graduate Christa Babcock advised entrepreneurs to embrace the difficulties ahead: “Expect things not to go back to the way they were, and be happy about that.”
Only for the rest of us the constant, unpleasant change Was the problem.
The phrase gained traction offline and online. “The only difference between millennials and Gen Z is how many ‘unprecedented times’ you experience before climate change swallows your house,” tweeted @bocxtop 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 experienced record unemployment. In grocery stores across the country, food prices steadily rose as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Today, the phrase has been magnified beyond its original meaning and is a cheap emblem of our volatile cultural mood. It is used uniformly to describe pretty much every new hell that emerges, from the US election and the conflict in Gaza to the looming threat of climate catastrophe. On social media, we’ve become accustomed to experiencing “unprecedented times.”
Congestion pricing in New York City? “Unprecedented times, that’s all,” said Jared of @TransitTalks on TikTok. The same went for giant spiders, a canceled Tenacious D tour, relationship breakdowns, and the spreading social unrest in the UK. Unprecedented – all of it.
