Hindsight is 2020. The Future is 2025.

It's not just a New Year. It's time for New Standards.

Five years ago, the World Health Organization Country Office in China was informed of several cases of a mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan. Symptoms included shortness of breath and fever. All cases seemed connected to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. A day later, on New Year’s, the market was closed. A little more than a week later, the WHO labeled the disease, “2019 Novel Coronavirus.”

Five years ago, Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna had just watched a Nets game in Brooklyn for their last public appearance. A Minnesotan man named George Floyd was working security at the Conga Latina Bistro club, along with being a delivery driver. Months later, he would lose both jobs due to the pandemic. Restaurants still issued paper menus, remote work was 1/5 of its scale, and we had a lot less hoodies in our closet.

It was a different world. And one I find myself thinking about often. I don’t long for 2019, as much as I use it as a barometer to compare my current life. I come across pre-pandemic family photos in my camera roll and imagine how my children’s lives would’ve materialized without lockdown. I remember what the retail landscape looked like before the market went entirely DTC. I miss Virgil and a streetwear era where Nike and Supreme ruled. At the time, older folks said that the global pandemic was our generation’s world war. In that sense, the virus split our timeline in two. And the B.C. (Before COVID) multiverse is sentimentalized as innocent, naïve, and pure.

For years now, we’ve gauged our well-being and progress by pre-COVID standards. The media’s been celebrating small victories around the restoration of pre-pandemic metrics. California’s population rebounds to pre-pandemic levels. Life expectancy has returned closer to pre-pandemic levels. Homicide and violent crimes have dropped to pre-pandemic levels. 2019 life is romanticized as this ideal state of the world, before we were defiled by a plague, social division, and a battered economy. But the truth is that we were already suffering then, and in many ways, descending on a downward spiral. Mass shootings were on the rise, Trump was rounding off his first term, and social justice movements like MeToo and BLM were in full swing.

Hindsight is truly 2020. If your life isn’t perfect today -- if you’re not where you want to be in your career, making the money you feel you deserve, or locked down in a relationship status to write home about -- it’s a lot easier to make sense of these shortcomings by pinpointing a culprit. Some people assign that fault to a President, some like to finger the “other.” But for all of us, the COVID-19 pandemic is the most obvious and justifiable source of our problems.

Business struggling? That’s because of the supply chain disruption.

Dating life sucks? People don’t go out anymore.

Should be in a bigger house? Inflation tanked real estate.

I’m not discounting that this is exactly what’s happened. I’m saying that it’s been five years since social distancing, the Great Resignation, and Zoom became a part of our daily lexicon. And we can continue to bemoan our lack of progress on the phantom menace or we can write a new set of rules that are 2025 and not 2019. The New Normal is established not once every New Year, every five years, or even every war or pandemic. The New Normal is enacted every single day.

Today, on this day, January 1, 2025, I propose a more honest reality for us. A reality that is sober, appreciated with eyes wide open, and prepared to tackle some hard truths. The world is weirder and wackier. In some ways, it’s gotten worse. In other ways, it’s gotten much better. Our children are grown now, our work has evolved, the wrinkles have set deeper, and the lacquer on your dreams may have faded. It’s time for a fresh coat of paint. I want to hear a new set of ideas.

We aren’t just post-pandemic anymore. We are post post-pandemic. Let’s wake up to a perspective that isn’t imprisoned in 2019 comparisons or 2020 blame. Let’s forge ahead into a 2025 future that is wide open and ready to be filled. Where anything goes. And while some it might be different and strange, may all of it be revolutionary. I will meet you there.

Photography from a family hike, Lake Arrowhead, Summer 2020