While Worst Decade Ever sounds like a VH1 special with Michael Ian Black, I don’t think it was that terrible. America faced a number of challenges, and only time will tell if we made the right decisions.

This decade, which I never quite figured out what to call, had a lot of terrible things happen, but positives did emerge. I think that historians will define the Industrial Revolution ending and the Technological/Information Revolution beginning at some point.

The 2000s were the decade in which I became an adult and went through all of the proverbial twentysomething experiences. In 2000, I graduated from high school, moved away to college and voted in my first presidential election. 2000 could be seen as an omen for a decade of divisive politics. I’ll always remember the cheer that erupted at the Knox County GOP party when Al Gore lost his home state. I’m still proud of that vote.

Technology and terrorism are the two takeaways of this decade. In 2000, I was shocked to fill up my 1 gig Gateway computer with songs downloaded from Napster. Those were the days when file-sharing was still murky. I would sit in class, writing playlists in the margin of my notes, and go back to the T1 line in my dorm room to download anything I wanted. Now, I have a $10 USB drive that has twice the memory of that computer and is the size of a band aid. It also cost a fraction of the Gateway desktop. Are Gateways even around anymore?

I never thought that I’d buy my last CD in 2005 with Coldplay’s XY? Who anticipated that we’d need iPods with hundreds of gigs in order to carry around every song ever recorded? I wonder if 20 years from now the Surgeon General will release a report detailing how headphones are causing generations to prematurely lose their hearing. It can’t be healthy.

When I got my first cell phone in 1999, I never thought that it could one day double as a computer. My Sprint Quaalcom was only analog and had a battery life of 3 hours. I kept it off and only used it for emergencies since I had about 1 hour of minutes per month. It was huge and would never die. Since it could also double as a self-defense weapon, I named it Mr. Clunky.

Social media wasn’t even a concept, and only a few nerds were blogging. Crazy to think that the technologies that have changed our society weren’t around ten years ago. My career field didn’t even exist when I graduated from college in 2004 and was just emerging when I got my master’s in 2007. When I wrote my thesis on social media there weren’t any academic texts to use. My adviser looked at me and said, “You’re on your own here.”

It’s been 10 years of huge changes in culture, society, economic and technology. A new generation entered the workforce, and 9/11 forever changed our way of life. Yes, it was a decade of challenges, but I’m hopeful that we can face those as a nation and be better for it.