We all know something has gone very wrong. The feeling runs rampant that we’re living in a screwy simulation, like in The Matrix, or that we somehow drew the worst possible card from the multiverse’s deck. The only question is when precisely we veered off the “normal” timeline. A recent essay in The New York Review of Books posited Joe Manchin’s pulling his support from the Build Back Better Act, in 2021, as “the moment when reality forked.” That might be a stretch, unless your reality also includes working at Axios.
More common answers include Joe Biden’s disastrous 2024 debate performance; the 2022 release of ChatGPT; the pandemic; Election Night, 2016 (even Donald Trump couldn’t believe he’d won); the financial crisis of 2008; the horror of 9/11; the prolonged debacle of the 2000 election. Personally, I know I felt the time-space continuum hiccup on the January morning in 1998 when I passed a newsstand—remember those?—and first saw Monica Lewinsky and her black beret on the cover of the New York Post.